Look! Up on the Screen!
It's a brand! It's a word! It's Super-Strategy!

Picture this: The Grand Canyon in black and white. A car hurtles along a computer-generated road. It corners. It careens. It flies like a Roman candle on tracks.

Words appear on screen:
Drive thru restaurants.
Drive thru dry cleaners.
Drive thru weddings.
God Bless America.
BMW.

For the past five years, BMW has done all the things any nameplate has to do. They’ve introduced new models, gone toe-to-toe against the competition and heavied up when the chips were down. And every spot they’ve run has had the same one-word strategy. Joy!

The lesson here, is that the one-word Super-Strategy is the ultimate test of a successful campaign. If you can boil your sell down to a single word, and never, never veer from that course, you can project an image that will shine in the dark and last for years.

Too many small-minded advertisers make the mistake of thinking that the more sales points they put into a spot, the more powerful it is. Wrong. It’s exactly the other way round. If you can synthesize your strategy in a word, you have something. If you can’t, you don’t.

Look at Nike and you think of names like Jordan, Woods, McGwire, and Sampras. But none of them is an endorser. None of them says a word about shoes. What these guys are, are the most driven competitors in sports. The ultimate champions. The unbeatable super-stars, If you distill all those names and lines like “Just do it”, you come away with a single idea. Winning!

That’s Nike. Winning! Every spot says it.

And so it goes. Ace Paint? Colors! McDonalds? Happy! Pizza Hut? Newfangled! Heinz Ketchup? Thick! Norelco? Close! Scott’s lawn products? Pride! Volkswagen Beetle? Again!

They all generate great campaigns, and every spot or ad along the way enacts the same, one-word Super Strategy.

Take Jeep. One of the hottest brands in the world today. And no matter how ingenious, no matter how different, no matter what time of the model year, every Jeep spot says the same thing. Freedom! There are no soccer moms. No weddings. No dogs in the rain. No antiques carted home. Just freedom! With mountains, deserts, streams, bears, the sun and the stars. The Jeep and you, with no responsibilities.

All the great brands pass the test One word can represent the whole idea. Tylenol? Hospitals! Central Baptist? Babies! State Farm? Neighbors! Yahoo? Irreverence! Maybelline? Gawjus!

What about your brand? Are you putting more in your ads than people want to take out? Have you asked people what your advertising really means? Have you tried to find out what your brand stands for? Have you developed the habit of removing extraneous thoughts from your copy like so many weeds?

That’s what you’ve got to do, if you’re going to project an image instead of a laundry list.

Look at Neutrogena. Every spot has beautiful, young, fresh faces. Every spot has healthy, vibrant hair. And every spot has a splash. Without someone splashing her face with strobe-lit handfuls of water, it wouldn’t be a Neutrogena spot. And the result is an image that’s so clean, so scintillating, so natural, so brimming with energy that as the towel pats the glorious complexion dry, the only residual image in our minds is that wonderful, refreshing, cleansing splash. Neutrogena? Splash!

Dennis Altman is an advertising consultant and a UK Professor of Advertising and Public Relations

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