THE TREATMENT WRITER GUIDE TO BRANDING

As a treatment writer, I’m often asked how I treat brand values when I’m writing a treatment. Brands always been the mantra in advertising. But clients and advertising people have a very different view of bands to civilians… the people who are going to be watching the TV commercial. 

When you’re treatment writer, you need to describe the experience the advertising will elicit. I use the old JWT model of communication: stimulus/response. First, I think about the response that I want to get from the target audience. That it’s my job to create something, a stimulus that will create that response. I approach writing treatments the same way. 

THE BLANDING OF ADVERTISING

Clients want to see how their brand is relevant to their target. The reality is that brands are irrelevant to most people and rightly so. We have enough to think about it in our daily life then agonise over which shampoo to buy or car insurance to get. Agency and client brand teams don’t seem to understand that. They are surrounded by strategists who are actually sociologists. They are good at the business of understanding and forget that we’re in the business of selling. Our role is to make our target remember the name of what we sell so that you can actually ordinary people: blue collar workers, housewives, Uber drivers and your granny can remember the name of our product and buy it when it’s got zero importance in their life. 

Now… the advertising industry thinks it’s all about the insights that they’ve gleaned for some focus groups. It’s now de rigeur to add more mysticism about digital empowerment, storytelling, brandscapes or the age of connectivity. Then they all wonder why, all of a sudden, advertising doesn’t work. Brand messages are incomprehensible because nobody talks to anybody like human beings anymore.  My first employer, David Ogilvy once joked, “the way advertising people think consumers work is two housewives sitting on the top of a bus and one looks in the other one’s shopping basket and sees that she’s got OMO. She says, “Oh, you bought OMO, I thought you use TIDE. Then the other one says, “yeah, I used to use TIDE but they switched to Futura Condensed from Bodoni and I don’t find Futura Condensed supplies my brand needs”. Ridiculous but that’s how a lot of agencies think.

REWARD ATTENTION

Great granddaddy of British advertising, Dave Trott recalls when he first got into advertising, he asked his mother why she bought Cadburys and not other chocolate? And she said, “Oh, well, I don’t know. You see it around a lot, don’t you? It must be a good name. It must be reliable”. That’s how consumers still think. But as an industry, we make that as complicated as possible until the finished product dies from analysis paralysis, chronic over-thinking and marketing myxamatosis. That’s why you end up with people wanting to block out ads wherever we can because we need to get back to humans talking to humans.

That starts with the treatment writer. People think advertising is marketing. It isn’t. Marketing is marketing. Advertising is the voice of marketing. Marketing’s great up to a point. Then you give it to someone who’s a specialist, not in marketing, but in getting your brand message out there against all the noise out there and against all your competitors. If you’re a specialist in marketing and try to do advertising, you will fail because that’s not your speciality. As a treatment writer, you’ve got to take you’re the idea from the ad and explain why it will be heard against all the competition.

THE ADVERTISING WASTELAND

According to Advertising Authority, in 2018 out of the £18.3 billion pounds spent every year in the UK on advertising and marketing, 4% remember positively, 7% remember negatively, 89% is not noticed or remembered. Close to £17 billion is totally wasted because marketing people think advertising is a subset of marketing. They imagine that if they can do marketing, then advertising is just one of the things they do on the side. The reality is that now you’ve done your thinking, now you need someone to bring that to life.  And make sure that’s in the 4% that gets remembered positively or the 7% that gets you remember negatively. Today advertising professionals also think that the job of advertising is to be liked. That’s wrong. The job of advertising is to get remembered. There’s plenty of advertising that that you don’t necessarily like, but it works because it cuts through and you remember it. If it works, and it’s nice… that’s a bonus. It’s not the job to be liked.  Form follows function. The brief is to be noticed, heard, remembered. The brief is to deliver clarity. When you’re a treatment writer that’s your job… telling your story with precision, clarity and style. Your agency and client team are so over confused with doing and working on the details, they ignore in the big picture.

Don’t get confused with this nonsense about storytelling. Storytelling is just another stupid name for brand curation, heuristics, storyselling. It’s the latest jargon to make what you’re doing sound more interesting and complicated. All storytelling means is ‘make it interesting’. And why wouldn’t you do that? When does anybody ever not made it interesting? Before there was electricity people told stories that were interesting. Before there was printing, stories survived before because they were interesting. If you have to compete with anything else, you’ve got to make interesting, more interesting. Storytelling is the latest gimmick. Bill Bernbach, the original Mad Man said, “our proper area of study is simple, timeless human truths” Behavioral economics is described as, “human understanding for business advantage”.

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

The treatment writer has a mission to combine the two. Focus on simple timeless human truths to create business advantage. Marketing should solve business problems. Advertising should solve advertising problems. Don’t use advertising to solve a business problem. Focus… form follows function. Don’t write a treatment for advertising that looks like a mood boards run back to back on TV. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that advertising should be an intelligent conversation. But putting that into practice can make you seem like one… as Albert Einstein once said “creativity is intelligence having fun.”