Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads

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3 Sentence Summary

This guide is chock-full of examples and how-to advice for anyone venturing into the world of advertising. You may not be going to work for Ogilvy & Mather, but everybody is involved with marketing in some capacity. Whether you’re selling a product, an idea, or yourself, knowing how to communicate persuasively using text, images, video and digital media is what this book is all about.

5 Key Takeaways

1. People want authenticity.
2. Writing is a process. You need to first write down all of your bad ideas before you’ll arrive at the good ideas.
3. Simple is better. It breaks through the clutter and is easier to remember.
4. Conflict is what makes things interesting. Tension makes us lean in to see what’s going on.
5. Add value and be relevant. Start by putting customers’ needs, passions, and interests first.

Hey Whipple, Squeeze This Summary

A Brief History of Why Everybody Hates Advertising

• Until you’ve got a better answer, you copy.

The Creative Process

• Eventually, you get to an idea that dramatizes the benefit of your client’s product or service. Dramatizes is the key word.
• At the center of this thing you come up with must be a promise. The customer must always get something out of the deal.
• Simple = Good
• How do we cut through the clutter? The only possible antidote to clutter is draconian simplicity.
• The adjective you choose is key to pair with your brand is key.
• If all the good adjectives are taken, don’t settle for second best. Second best won’t be different enough. Instead, try the polar opposite.

Ready Fire! Aim

• Find a weakness in the leader’s strength and attack at that point.
  • Example: #2 Avis took on #1 Hertz by saying that “the line at our counter is shorter.”
• Every chance you get to hear what customers are saying, take it.
• Ask yourself what would make you want the product.
• Ask yourself, “What would a generous brand do to get out and meet its customers?” Generous brands are empathetic and tend to make gestures that are not just commercially motivated; they pay less attention to their own marketing schedules and more to the calendars of their customers.
• What people look for today, and what they believe in and are persuaded by, is authenticity.
• Underpromising and overdelivering is another way to disarm distrust.
• Even self-deprecation can help establish authenticity.
• Admitting any kind of weakness may be a counterintuitive way to establish trust, but it is effective.

The Sudden Cessation of Stupidity

• Write down the truest thing you can say about your product or brand.
• You don’t own the brand and you don’t own the truth; customers do.
• To get the words flowing, sometimes it helps to simply write out what you want to say. Make it memorable, different, or new later. First, just say it.
• Go for art later. Start with clarity.
• The interesting part of an ad shouldn’t be a device that points to the sales message; it should be the sales message.
• Write down the bad ideas. Flush them out of your system.
• Write. Keep writing. Don’t stop.
• Don’t settle for -er. Go for -est. Quietest, fastest, cleanest; that’s all people will remember anyway. All the rest of the claims in the middle are forgettable.
• From the book A Smile in the Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design, authors Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart write, “When wit is involved, the designer never travels 100 percent of the way [toward the audience] … The audience may need to travel only 5 percent or as much as 40 percent towards the designer in order to unlock the puzzle and get the idea.”
• Don’t set out to be funny. Set out to be interesting.

Write When You Get Work

• Don’t just start writing headlines willy-nilly. Break it down. Methodically explore different attributes and benefits of your product as you write.
• Remember, the idea isn’t just to come up with as many headlines as possible, but rather how many different doors can you go through? How many different ways can we look at the same problem?
• Disciplined writing is not willy-nilly; it’s a process.
• If the idea needs a headline, write 100. All of them have to range from decent, to hey not bad, to whoa that rocks. All of them have to be pretty good.
• Save the operative part of the headline for the very end. End with the punch; the surprise.
• Write like you talk.
• Write with a smooth, easy rhythm that sounds natural.
• Obey the rules of grammar and go easy on the adjectives.
• Short sentences are best, especially online. One-word sentences? Fine.
• Just be clear.
• Pretend you’re writing a letter. The best copy feels like a conversation, not a speech.
• Get to the point. Put your most interesting, surprising, or persuasive point in the first line if you can.
• Use transitions to flow seamlessly from one idea to the next.
• Wallace Stegner once wrote, “Hard writing makes for easy reading.” So true.
• Break your copy into as many short paragraphs as you can.
• This isn’t an argument for dumbing down your work. Be as smart as you can be.
• When you’re done writing the copy, read it aloud.
• When you’re done writing your body copy, go back and cut it by a third.
• You must own something visual. A color, a shape, a font. Something that is unique about your brand.

5 Rules for Effective Speechwriting

1. Begin strongly.
2. Have one theme.
3. Use simple language.
4. Leave a picture in the listener’s mind.
5. End dramatically.

The Virtues of Simplicity

• Simpler is almost always better.
• Simple doesn’t figure it all out for you. Sometimes it asks the reader to finish it. The less you put in the ad, the better.
• Simple is big.
• Simple breaks through the clutter.
• Simple is easier to remember.
• Reduce until you get to the essence. Every element you add to a layout reduces the importance of all the other elements.

Stupid, Rong, Naughty, and Viral

• Quit trying to come up with “advertising ideas” and work instead on coming up with ideas worth advertising.

Why Is the Bad Guy Always More Interesting?

• Conflict is what makes things interesting. Tension makes us lean in to see what’s going on.
• Without is usually more interesting than with. Creativity happens in response to a problem.
• To spark story, start with this-vs-that.
• Truth + Conflict = Platform
  1. Start with truest thing you can say about the brand.
  2. Then start looking for conflicts/tensions that happen as a result of that truth.

Zen and the Art of Tastee-Puft

• There is no such thing as “multitasking”
• Quit wasting time on email and Facebook, wandering around, coming in late.
• Ignore the little voice that says, “I’m just a hack on crack from Hackensack.” We all have this voice that tells us we suck. Ignore it. Or use it to spur you on to do better.

Start from where you are.

Anne Lamott

• When the task feels overwhelming, just reach in and grab the first piece that interests you the most. Start there.
• Identify your most productive working hours and use them for nothing but idea generation.
• Cluster similar activities.

Be orderly in your normal life so you can be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

• When you’re stuck, remember, the only way out is through.
• When you’re coming up with ideas, don’t do it sitting in front of your computer. Let all your early thinking happen with a pencil and paper. You engage a different part of your brain when you handwrite things.

Digital Isn’t a Medium, It’s a Way of Life

• Algorithms will never replace the value of a good idea or a compelling story. In fact, the more content there is the more valuable good content becomes.
• Not every idea must be digital. But it must understand digital.

Change the Mindset, Change the Brief, Change the Team

• The modern advertising brief emphasizes doing something for the user rather than saying something to them.
  • What problem are we trying to solve?
  • Who is having the problem?
  • What is the best way we can help them solve it?
  • What could we do or make?
  • What would make people share it?
  • How can they participate in the experience?
  • What is the context (where and when) for engaging?
• Never let the team get larger than two pizzas. If you can’t feed them with two pizzas, the team is too big.
• Take the head of the table away and everyone’s ideas stand a chance.

Why Pay for Attention When You Can Earn It?

• Brands should connect what they’re good at with what’s relevant to each community.
  • E.g. Oreo’s famous “You can still dunk in the dark” ad. They tapped into the topic dominating Super Bowl XLVII – when the lights went out – and tied their product to the conversation.
• Anyone creating content these days should spend 50 percent of their creative energies on the idea and 50 percent on its distribution.
• Being creative in real-time calls for changes in both mindset and process. Instead of the strategy dictating the content, sometimes the content dictates the strategy.
• Do > Invite > Document > Share
• Instead of saying something, do something.
• Instead of controlling the content, invite people to creat it with you.
• Instead of producing some message-based interruption, document the participation and the creation of the content.
• Instead of relying exclusively on paid media, share the story via owned and earned media.
• IDEO begins all of its projects with the question, “How might we?”

Ideas That Win The New Marketplace

• Ideas that start with something people are already interested in
• Ideas that invite participation from users
• Ideas that connect people to each other
• Ideas that deliver useful content and experiences
• Ideas that are able to migrate across different media, across the web
• Ideas that embrace the warp speed of the internet

Social Media Is the New Creative Playground

• Start by listening. Find out what people care about. What are they sharing? What problems do they want solved that relate to your category and brand?
• Talk like a person, not a corporation.
• Be transparent. Make sure everyone knows who you are and what you represent.
• Exercise restraint. Don’t flood people’s stream.
• Carefully think through where your brand should be. What social media channel should you use for each type of post? Consider why people use different media.
• Let your ideas be driven by the medium, by the ways that people use it.

How Customers Become Customers in the Digital Age

• Create different content for each medium with an understanding of what the customers are doing there.
• Remember, it’s no longer about delivering messages. It’s about adding value, being relevant, and understanding how to best use each particular platform.
• So where do we start? Simple. By putting customers’ needs, passions, and interests first.
• Collaboration > Interruption
• Create brand-owned publications that will provide value for years to come.
• Think like a publisher. Have a plan; an editorial calendar. Determine what you can create that has lasting value as well as what should be fast, simple and temporary.
• Stock content = Enduring and lasts for months, if not years. Lives on your website, blog, or Youtube channel.
• Flow content = Daily content shared on social channels.

Surviving the Digital Tsunami

What impresses me most is the ability to make things. More and more these days, young people are coming into the business able to shoot their own commercials, create websites, program games, take photos, make animations, build Facebook apps, and generally act as one-person ad agencies. This makes CDs salivate because getting ideas off of the page is at least as hard as getting them on paper in the first place … if you can make things and make them well, you will never unemployed.

Valdean Klump

In the Future, Everyone Will Be Famous for 30 Seconds

• Tips for making a commercial…
• Can you make the picture do all the work?
• Make the concept so powerful, that the audience would understand the message with the sound turned off.
• Think in terms of story.
• Think simple. Find one great image and build story into or out of it.
• Write sparely. Don’t crowd the space with too many words.
• Don’t show what you’re saying, or say what you’re showing.
• If you can make the first two seconds of your spot visually unusual, do so.
• Solve the last five seconds. They’re the most important. They must be great.

Radio is Hell, But It’s a Dry Heat

• Funny isn’t enough. You must have an idea.
• Make it important, scary, funny, or interesting within the first five seconds.
• Don’t do jingles.
• Don’t waste time explaining things.

How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple (the language you use)
4. Have the guts to cut (edit out sentences that do not move the story forward)
5. Sound like yourself (write like you talk)
6. Say what you mean to say
7. Pity the readers

Pecked to Death by Ducks

• The first 90 seconds of any presentation are crucial (read: I Can See You Naked by Ron Hoff)
• Don’t hand out materials before you present. Do it only after you’ve finished. Remain in control of the room’s attention.
• Don’t present your idea as “risk-taking.” Clients don’t want risk. They want certainty.
• Listen, even when you don’t want to. It doesn’t cost you anything to listen to. It’s polite. And even if you think you disagree, by listening you may gather information you can later use to put together a more persuasive argument.
• Don’t win every battle, and lose the war.
• The best people in the business use research to generate ideas, not to judge them.

We are so busy measuring public opinion, we forget we can mold it.

Bill Bernbach

• Customers have specific needs. It stands to reason that ads addressing specific needs are more effective. You can’t sell more than one product or benefit at a time.
• Conflict = drama = interest. Without it, you have no story to tell. And consequently, no interest.
• As long as your client’s product is ultimately portrayed in a positive light or is seen to solve a customer problem, the net takeaway is positive.
• A short deadline also has remarkable motivating properties. Someone once told me the best amphetamine is a ticking clock.

A Good Book … Or a Crowbar

• Recruiters and CDs want more than cool ads … What’ll impress them is to see how you solve business problems.
• If you want your cover letter to be read, say something very interesting about yourself in the first sentence. Make it provocative. Make it memorable.
• You have to position yourself as a unique talent and a really interesting person.
• Whatever you do, don’t write in “business speak” – the overly courteous, formal voice.
• Just write the way you talk and let your personality show.
• Bring a notepad to the interview. It says you’re there to listen.
• Don’t just sell your work. Sell them on you. Get them excited about working with you.
• Remember even though you’re young and on the street, you have options. You don’t have to take this job, even if it’s offered. You have choices.

In my experience, talent is a bit overrated. Talent is human. Talent gets lazy and distracted. But intense work ethic is beyond mortal beings. Work ethic will add years of experience to your life while everyone else is posting selfies on Facebook. I’ll hire work ethic over talent any day. Lazy talent will not get the job done.

Frank Anselmo

• Take the responsibility of knowing about money. Don’t leave it up to the agency.

Take charge of your own financial destiny, do your homework, stay informed, and learn to negotiate fairly.

Dany Lennon

• It may seem you can’t outthink those senior creatives right now, but you can definitely outwork them. Make hard work your secret weapon.
• Don’t underestimate yourself. Don’t overestimate yourself.

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