Masters of confusion

Anyone on the speaker circuit for marketing events knows it’s a good technique to embed a commercial somewhere in the talk. If the tech is reliable and the ad is good, it gives the audience a lift and the person up there alone on the stage a break.

And it’s a reminder that for all our endeavour as marketers down in the details of research, positioning, targeting and competitive analysis, the most grabbable public manifestation of our brand is usually its advertising.

The technique was liberally deployed at last month’s massive ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando, which drew an in-person audience of 2,600, with a couple of thousand more joining online.

At a Masters event the tech is always awesome – huge screens, booming sound and flawless cue timing, so you don’t get that awkward wait for the video to kick in. As for the ads, well, ANA stands for Association of National Advertisers, so you’d expect the speakers to have plenty of good work to choose from.

Over the years the event has been used to showcase some standout spots: ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’, from Snickers (above); the so-watchable ‘Mayhem’ campaign from Allstate Insurance; the laconic ‘We have the meats’ from Arby’s; and the hilarious and super-effective long-form video that persuaded hard-to-reach young men to sign up for donating their organs in the event of their sudden death: ‘The world’s biggest asshole’ (see bottom of article).

This year’s crop wasn’t vintage, but neither was it bad. Elf Cosmetics (below) showed how it mined TikTok user commentary to learn that stickiness was the most noted feature of its primer, and executed a nice spot with Jennifer Coolidge sticking to just about everything in her bathroom and walking off stuck fast to the door to dramatise it.

Challenger telecoms brand Mint Mobile featured a dead simple spot with actor and part owner Ryan Reynolds intoning the brand’s ‘Premium wireless for $15 a month’ value message over and over, but like a soliloquy, with theatrical highs, lows, queries and exclamations, so that it was a lot funnier and more engaging than it sounds.

And further down the programme there were catchy ads for Instacart – ‘I’m at the football game, I’m at the grocery store’ – and a longer-form spot for KitKat, which showed that AI platforms give more accurate results when you ask exactly the same question preceded by ‘Have a break, then answer…’.

The last thing we need

Then came a session that pulled the rug from under it all. In sober, clipped, British tones, Simon Cook, chief executive of Cannes Lions, showed where all these advertising efforts – and the ones before, down the years – were going wrong. Funny, engaging, surprising they might have been, but they all, at the end of the day, made sense. And that, it now seems, is an error.

What the winners at Cannes this year had in common, we learned, was that they were confusing. ‘Embrace confusion’ is the new mantra that creative teams up and down the industry are taking to heart, inspired by former creative director and Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario’s proclamation in a Cannes video interview, shared at this event, that “if you can confuse people, you can stop them”.
Confusion reigns.

What bothers me about this new dogma is not simply that gullible marketers will take it on board, indulge creative teams to follow fashion and be intentionally nonsensical, irritate consumers and undermine hitherto carefully nurtured brands. Some will do that, and will learn the fast way that what might work for Liquid Death might just be literal death for, say, Gillette or Dunkin’ Donuts.

What bothers me more is that marketers were doing a good job of confusing already – with too many mandatories and contradictions in their brand guidelines documents – and that the discipline of summing up everything in a 30-second spot was the point where clarity was forced to kick in.

What we admired about the creative spirit was the searing honesty it brought, and the ruthless reduction of everything in our hopeful, over-freighted briefs to the essentials. That, and the dramatisation – whether emotional, humorous, rational or irresistibly charming – of the single, unique role the brand could claim in people’s lives, distinct from all others in a swirling, foaming sea of competitive activity.

Advertising, or a least the best of it, is where big sprawling entities we know as brands, with their endless lists of claims, their multi-box positioning models, their portfolios of codes and cues, and their pretensions to storytelling, get reduced to an instant of beautiful, spare, uncompromising clarity.

Yes, deliberately confusing people might get their attention, in the same way that poking a hive will earn you the attention of bees. It just might not be the kind of attention you wish for or know what to do with once the hostility settles down. If it does.

Confusion is something to fight. If Elf had employed it, this brilliant brand would have alienated its loyal customer base. If Mint Mobile had run with it, there would today be no Mint Mobile. And if Donate Life – the charity behind ‘The world’s biggest asshole’ video – had embraced it, there would be people dying today because too few healthy young males were willingly signing up to be organ donors.

Confusion is a fashion. And a bad one. You don’t have to be a master of anything to be crystal clear about that.