#49 Fundamentals of Ads and how Ryan Reynolds does marketing
A quick read to help you develop an understanding of advertisements & non-conventional sales
Hey folks, today for the first time in Knowledge Shots we are going to talk about sales and marketing. This essay is linked to the Open Sales Club initiative that aims at exploring non-conventional sales strategies. What do I mean by non-conventional? Well, by the literal meaning something that isn’t implemented in a widespread manner. Or something that you don't repeat daily (like 100 emails a day to random folks). Or something where sales happen due to the creativity in the creation, and not just via distribution (aka the brand sells itself). Or something where distribution is natural and organic, or simply put distribution is resultant of the quality of creation (aka recipe of virality). No worries if you are still confused about what I mean, just keep reading on, this essay explores how Ryan Reynolds does non-conventional marketing.
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Ryan Reynolds the actor? Yes, Ryan Reynolds owns two more brands apart from himself and his films — Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile. What makes him different is that he markets everything himself with his team at Maximum Effort. Before we discuss why marketing at MaximumEffort is different/non-conventional, you got to see their ads yourself and note the top three qualities you like: here’re the playlists (won’t take time, most videos are under a minute, given you can stop yourself from watching multiple times).
Comment the top three qualities you observed:
And now let’s do some boiler-plate fundamentals and then hop onto my perspectives about the ads:
Fundamentals of advertising:
First of all, how shall we define advertisements? what are advertisements? Here’s my definition — advertisements are the mechanisms that initially allow the ‘discovery’ of a product or a service and later create enough energy to allow users to take action. It’s a process that doesn’t sell directly but brings individuals to destinations where they can make a buy (a website, an app, or a physical outlet). There’s an exception of livestream e-commerce that’s popular in China. Virtual Reality can also be one of the exceptions in the future that can make users directly buy without re-direction. But other than that every other advertisement I know has a call-to-action (CTA) that in turn leads to the actual buy button.
What does this mean? It means that advertisements need to create enough energy in their customers to navigate the CTA or do some work in reference to the CTA. More the price of the product or less significant the problem you are solving — the more energy we need to impart via the ad. In contrast, lesser the price and more significant the problem we solve — the less energy we need to impart via the ad.
How to impart this energy? From my perspective, there are two ways to impart energy. First, make their brain think (connect with the audience’s culture/history/experienced events/behavior/known characters). Second, make their body think (trigger the right hormones). Now, these two types aren’t as different, they are related, specific events, history, experiences can trigger hormones. I separated them to make understanding a bit easier. So the endgame aka our aim as an advertiser is, to develop the right amount of energy via hormones that then trigger the emotions that drive actions.
What are the types of emotions we can induce? To name a few: courage, confidence, contentment, curiosity, ecstasy, euphoria, excitement, gratitude, happiness, hope, hurt, hysteria, interest, jealousy, joy, love, lust, panic, passion, pleasure, pride, relief, sadness, satisfaction, surprise, trust, wonder, worry, zeal, and zest. Now note that these are just a few among many and not all of them are a viable option for our use case. For instance, we don’t want to impart ‘hurt‘ in an advertisement, do we? No. What about lust? Not in most cases, but then there are things we call ‘clickbaits‘. In most cases, choosing one of these or max two and doing it well (maximum effort) might be worth it.
Is inducing emotions easy? Not at all! This is why advertisement is a difficult business. Emotions are risky business, there’s a lot of things that go wrong that can give you almost opposite results to what you expected. We will take an example here: So Ryan Reynolds’ MaximumEffort launched the following ad for Peloton bikes in 2019 (give it a look).
Here, the team might have expected to impart ‘confidence‘ in the folks watching this. But in reality, it went total sideways, such that even Peloton stock dropped. Viewers took something else from it:
See, the ad business is difficult. Many perspectives are drawn from the same content plus the internet treats everything like wildfire. Even if you manage to not-figure the interpretation of one small viewer-personality, you can still get buried deeper and deeper due to the natural cancel culture of the internet.
The conclusion to draw from this instance might be to — target one emotion, be aware of the general culture/events and the environment around that time, understand the business and its multiple viewer personalities, keep the story simple.
Here’s what MaximumEffort did after the Peloton ad didn’t go well, got the same actress onboard. And shot the following ad for Aviation Gin:
Watched it? It’s just 40 seconds long but conveys more information than any ad from scratch. Why? Because there’s already an event that happened in this scenario, the first few seconds are enough to generate ‘excitement’ and later trigger ‘happiness‘. The placement was brilliant and well-received. Behind the scenes, it also depicts ‘gratitude‘ towards the actresses, as in ‘she’s just an actress doing her job‘.
40 seconds and so many emotions can be triggered, no-brainer, that’s reading the cultural landscape and some good timing.
Top three qualities in the Aviation Gin ads:
Witty scriptwriting: Being witty is the hallmark and the most observable quality of all the Aviation Gin videos. They seem to have targeted one emotion — generate ‘amusement’. What’s good about choosing humor is that it’s much easier to depict and universal than many other emotions. In fact, if we look at the time constraints of an advertisement, there’s no scope for character development. Hence inducing feelings other than humor might be a difficult task (not impossible) unless you bring in an established character or an event into the frame. Even after that, you might have to test the interpretations among many different viewer personalities. This constraint doesn't mean there aren’t deep-sensible advertisements, I went through a YouTube rabbit hole and came across some very good ads that construct surprise, contentment, gratitude, wonder, and satisfaction. For instance, this ad of an insurance company — depicts how small investments lead to big outcomes, also notice how it’s a 3-min long ad.
The type of emotion opted also depends upon the medium the advertisement is made for, in the case of televisions, OTT, and YouTube — smaller durations are preferred, hence amusement, surprise, or joy might be a better emotion to target. In the case of social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, Youtube channel, Facebook — longer durations might work and hence can focus on creating trust, confidence, pride, and satisfaction. Though let’s keep this perspective a bit flexible here, I will recommend you guys going on an ad hunt and note the variety of emotions they target, the mediums they are meant for, their duration, and their target market. Comment your findings so we can discuss:
Understanding the cultural landscape and timeline stitching: By timeline stitching, I mean linking two or more advertisements into each other and borrowing something or other from each of them. This helps develop an identity for that particular group of ads — in this case, CRED ads are also a good example. Any additional ad in this group will be well perceived because the group already has an identity of establishing curiosity and surprise.
Also, understanding the cultural landscape in the context of events happening around the target-viewer, the general broad perspectives around that time, might turn out to be very helpful. If you wanna dive deep, here’s another homework task for you: comment on the current events/culture and mention the target emotion for each of them. An example — frequent travel restrictions have developed anxiety in the viewers between the ages of 15 to 35, an advertisement depicting freedom can provide a good feeling in this scenario. Might be a good idea for companies in the travel industry or VR or open-world gaming to develop such an ad.
The process is the content, and pure-gold ideas: Ideas are pure-gold, they compound our brand. The best thing is that ideas can be in the process of developing a brand. For instance, consider this video where Ryan tries different company slogans in front of the camera. Another example is this video where the ad turns out to be an ad within an ad within an ad. Adception!
We are going to limit to the top three qualities today, but if you wanna dive deeper into Ryan Reynolds’ thoughts on marketing. Read this article by Entrepreneur. Not enough? Here’s the WSJ video worth watching (Ryan explains his belief in non-traditional marketing).
Conclusion:
If I have to define non-conventional sales again in respect to all the above discussions and examples we have seen, it would go something like this:
Being non-conventional in sales is about understanding the philosophy behind any process (like we discussed here for advertising), mastering the skill of storytelling, converting unique ideas into content, distributing content to develop a personal brand, use the brand as leverage for the more unique experiments, building relationships by helping others do the same.
If you are a marketing or sales enthusiast or a founder who wants to explore this perspective and join the discussions on similar topics — then I would recommend you to join the Open Sales Club Slack community through our website.
Thanks for reading! Shares are appreciated.