6 classic advertising creative templates

Advertisements have two basic attributes:

First, it is to serve the corporate marketing strategy, not just your personal pleasure; second, ordinary people basically don’t like to watch advertisements.

Creativity can make a boring world interesting, make advertisements more interesting, and achieve the purpose of advertising communication.

Everyone wants their ads to be more creative and attract more users' attention, but creativity is always:

The more you think about it, the more it runs away!

However, when you rack your brains to come up with no creative ideas, many people can continuously output creative ideas, and even model their ideas to get many interesting ideas.

In addition to a lot of accumulation and amazing talent, the generation of good ideas actually has traces to follow.

Jacob Goldenberg, a professor of international marketing, once conducted a study and found that among 200 winning works of international creative competitions, 89% of the advertisements could be incorporated into 6 creative templates. Of the bad ads, only 2.5% followed one of these templates.

The six templates are: 1) Visual analogy; 2) Extreme situation; 3) Presenting consequences; 4) Creating competition; 5) Interactive experiment; 6) Changing dimension.

Many phenomenal advertising cases and many advertisements with excellent creativity and amazing effects have applied these templates.

Today, I will talk about these 6 creative templates based on some of Durex’s past advertising cases. We can make good use of each of them. (Some parts are for your own understanding)

01 Visual analogy

American scholars Kahneman and Tversky once proposed the "availability bias", which means that due to the limitations of memory or knowledge, when we make judgments, we always use information that we are familiar with or can easily imagine.

A figurative analogy is to use something familiar to express the characteristics of your own product.

That is to say, find objects that users are familiar with and establish a mental and cognitive association between the product and this object. The closer this association is to consumer experience, the safer it is, and the easier it is to arouse consumer cognition, allowing them to quickly understand, establish cognition, and gain usage associations.

For example, Durex had an advertisement called "Let me use my extra parts to fill your flaws."

Once the picture appears, there is no need for much explanation. Well, I won’t explain it anymore.

For example, Durex wanted to highlight that its condoms were very thin. How did it do it?

If the concept of "thin" is just spoken out, it will be very abstract and difficult to establish user cognition.

What is that thin thing? The bubbles we usually see are very thin!

So what is the connection between condoms and bubbles? If the condom becomes like a bubble, it means it is very thin.

So there is this Durex advertisement:

It allows people to see intuitively that Durex is as thin as bubbles. And the understanding established is very impressive.

02 Extreme Situations

Extreme scenarios are about using advertisements to showcase an extreme usage/service scenario, and using your imagination to make your product work amazingly in this scenario.

That is to find various scenarios in which users use the product, and then amplify this situation, or use exaggerated techniques to show the product effect and highlight the core selling point of the product. Or in this extreme situation, what would happen without our product.

For example, this classic Durex advertisement created an extreme scenario that is basically impossible to happen after using the product, in order to highlight the product's effect.

There is another advertisement, Durex is really amazing. Everyone should remember Duracell's Crazy Bunny series of commercials. The pink rabbit with a battery installed seemed to have turned on a cheat code, with amazing fighting power and lasting endurance.

Guess what? Durex directly borrowed two pink bunnies, and unspeakable things happened.

The little rabbit, which everyone thought had long-lasting fighting power, couldn't hold on any longer after using the Durex endurance suit and was already smoking. This is much better than the Durex & HEYTEA ad that went wrong.

Another example is this Durex advertisement for the Double 11 Shopping Festival: forward it casually and actively help yourself. It also creates an extreme situation and humorously throws out a powerful product, which can be prevented! !

03 Presentation of consequences

This is actually quite easy to understand. It means allowing users to intuitively see the changes brought about by using your product.

That is, by comparing the changes after using the product with the previous status, and adding impactful pictures, the information can be presented to users in a more direct way. Stimulate users visually and express product features in content, so that users can understand product information at a glance, arouse their interest, and ultimately make consumers "heart-beaten".

For example, in order to highlight the good contraceptive effect of its own condoms, Durex directly gave a shocking consequence of using the product - everyone used Durex, and as a result, human civilization declined.

No one is here~

On Father’s Day, Durex threw out a poster: To all those who use our competitor’s products – Happy Father’s Day!

This is the consequence, it’s your fault for not using us!

For example, there is another advertisement - drink water after sex. The consequence of using Durex is that you have to drink so much water, eh~~

04 Create competition

Creating competition means highlighting the advantages of your own products through different categories of things.

The simple understanding is actually comparison and reference.

Compare the product with things that users are familiar with in terms of function, form, price, appeal, characteristics, use, scenarios, etc. to highlight the product's advantages.

A good reference can continuously strengthen the key target items you want to highlight, allowing users to quickly become interested in the product and achieve the ultimate goal.

For example, if you compare the prices of a condom and a bunch of baby products one by one, how would you choose?

For example, on Children’s Day, Durex released an advertising poster with the words “Children’s Day for 3 People” and “Children’s Day for 2 People”. Meaning:

"If you use Durex, it only costs 49 yuan for two people to stay overnight on Children's Day. If you don't use it, just wait! After Children's Day, don't even think about having a private time together. The most important thing is to spend money! Spend money!"

There is also this set of Durex advertisements during Christmas, which uses standard reference and comparison techniques and is not only interesting but also practical.

05 Interactive Experiment

An interactive experiment is a process that allows users to interact with ads through advertising settings. The ads can be more than just for users to see, but can also allow users to do an action together, play together, or make the ads a part of the user's completion of an action.

This kind of interactive advertising is very common abroad, and most of them are offline advertising.

For example, Durex presented various floating-point and spiral-shaped products on the road where people walk, taking into account the ground conditions. The road is good, but the advertisement is not decent.

In this way, people coming and going every day are "interacting" with the product.

There is also this Durex advertisement in the toilet, with constant urination and endless interaction.

06 Changing Dimensions

Changing dimensions means transforming the product in time or space, or splitting it or duplicating and superimposing it, so as to create new relationships to highlight the product from these dimensions.

For example, after 30 years, this product will still be great when used again.

When "Transformers 5" was released, Durex used countless condoms to form Transformers, and added the words: Get bigger! Set off!

This is the changing dimension of form.

Another example is China's first gold medal at the Rio Olympics, when Durex launched: Good Shot. It turned condoms into gold medals!

There are also ways to put products in the past and change the time dimension: The emperor didn’t attend court again this morning…

Well, if you were the planner behind the Durex advertisement, what creative ideas would you come up with using the above methods?

With these 6 templates, you might as well think about advertising creativity from these perspectives.

Geniuses are rare, and only deliberate practice can activate the strongest fighting power.

The more you think about it, the more it runs away! Then let it not run away!

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