This baby caused a company to lose millions...

Hello, creative souls!

You’ve probably heard of the Wolf of Wall Street.

Say hello to the Wolf of Bawl Street—an unnamed baby that inflated a publishing company’s stock sitting in one place and eventually caused it to crash.

Now, you’ve obviously figured out this is fiction - but that’s what makes today’s ad so brilliant. Adobe Marketing Cloud used insane messaging to position their product.

Most ads show you what you might want and try selling their product to you.

This Adobe ad shows you what you definitely do not want and sells their product to you.

Ad summary: A brand manager gapes at his desk in shock, seeing an insane uptick in numbers for… an encyclopaedia. He takes it to the higher ups. The higher ups order the factory to print more. The printer orders more trucking, more shipping, more trees! They need the paper! This causes the stock of Wood Pulp to SOAR. Hedge Fund managers take note and go all in on Wood Pulp. The music escalates.

CUT TO: It’s a baby, on an iPad, clicking an ad for the encyclopaedia. He clearly loves it, as notes his mom. The cherry on top of the cake is the article that’s open on the iPad - “Kids getting more tech savvy by the day!”

They close with the messaging: “Want to know what your marketing is doing? We can help”

B2B marketing is almost notorious for being absolutely boring and jargon filled. Adobe broke this barrier with this ad with a very simple principle: exaggeration.

We’ve covered this in our previous editions, but there are so many ways to exaggerate. This exaggeration play is what you could call, the 180.

It starts off with something positive and moves it to negative, or vice versa.
It starts off serious, but ends in a silly, or playful way, or vice versa.

You get the idea. But what aspect do we exaggerate? Here is a short note on this specific ad. Here they have exaggerated the “problem”.

Snickers employs a similar tactic brilliantly. Their famous “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign hinges on this very principle - open with a celebrity going apeshit crazy, hand the celebrity a bar of snickers, celebrity is now a common man who was just hungry. Here hunger = the problem that snickers solves.

Adobe’s product, the marketing cloud, solves a simple problem: It gives you accurate, trackable information about your marketing campaigns. The average company loses 12% of it’s revenue every year due to bad marketing data.

Now, saying 12% just might not cut it. So what do you do? You exaggerate.

Beginning: You give your target audience the best case scenario - their absolute WANT.
Middle: You escalate that scenario where everything goes absolutely brilliantly.
End: You cut to the twist - the cause of this scenario: It’s absolutely everything that the target audience didn’t want.

Everything that preceded the twist will now seem anything but brilliant.

And then, you drop your messaging. The problem you solve. Ta-da!

Ideas corner:

A coffee brand: A boss enters the office. He’s all pleasant - very unlike him. His underlings are surprised, and happy. They gather around the coffee machine to discuss theories. They reach the wrong conclusion, that seems right. Cut to: he just had a nice, hot cup of coffee in the morning. The very coffee that the underlings just emptied. The boss enters. "[X] Coffee, you cannot do without it”

A telecom brand: A spy has successfully breached enemy lines after beating up all the enemies. He informs the headquarters. They are OVERJOYED. The only thing that’s remaining for the spy is for him to upload all the data and signal to his teammates to rescue him. But unfortunately - his internet connection is dead slow. And, he’s caught. BAM. RIP, James Bond. “Seamless connection, no matter where you are”.

So in Summary: Think of these points -

• Identifying all the problems that the product can solve

• Select the most insightful one from the list.

• Make sure the core of the problem is a truth, not a contrivance.

• Exaggerate and eccentricize the problem to its most outrageous form.

• Punch the predicament with your clever and impactful solution.

Figment is written by Abbhinav Kastura, a writer/producer who has spent a decade making impactful internet videos and Guru Nicketan, an advertising nerd, B2B Marketer, stand-up comedian, and a film buff.