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.Morphingcan change the expression of people s faces or distort them for effect.Arms can be lengthened to scoreamazing slam-dunks.Much of the humor we see is a form of exaggeration.Slapstick from silent film More on Ads and PSAs 91days continues to work in ads, such as dogs running away with toilet paper or physical struggles withequipment or materials.Dogs may behave like human beings or speak their thoughts, such as the dogrequesting bacon want bacon for Begging Strips.A pampered dog rides in a chauffeured Rolls Roycefor Cottonelle toilet paper.An ad for Enzyte, a male enhancement product, shows an always grinningdufus, Bob, who is the envy of other men for the attention that he gets from women, his prowess atgolf, and you name it.In the Santa Claus scene, he has women lining up to sit on his lap to ask fortheir Christmas present the gift that keeps on giving.This approach contrasts with the self-consciousViagra, Cialis, and other ads.Cialis is particularly confusing because it shows a pair of matching hisand hers bathtubs on a rock overlooking the ocean.They are holding hands.As a visual metaphor,it is very confusing.Is this pill to get you to have baths in separate tubs? You would have thought get-ting in the same tub would be the beginning of successful sex.So much mocking comment grew uparound this ad on the internet including satirical take-offs on YouTube that Cialis now tries to addressthis misleading image by a rationalization in more recent ads about the couple being able to choosewhen to get out of the twin tubs.Using humor in an ad carries a risk.The risk is not being funny enough for your audience.Bad jokescan be a turn-off.Many corporate clients are nervous about humor as a device because they worrythat their company or their product might not be taken seriously.Nevertheless, humor is an effectiveway to disarm hostility and skepticism in a target audience.It appeals to both emotion and logic.Capital One has a campaign built around the punch line, What s in your wallet? Improbable situa-tions involve a gang of Vikings acting like gangbusters in department stores and gas stations, smash-ing things and behaving like, well, marauding Vikings who can t get to you because you have theCapital One credit card in your wallet.Sprint has a crowd of network users, all available on yourSprint network, that follows you around.The abstract idea of a network is made concrete and funnyby seeing all the people on it.The come-on to look and listen is the humor.Fun relieves tedium.Jokes or gags often work on a logical principle by challenging that same logic.If you can get the audi-ence to smile, they will probably listen to your message.Mac and PC face off as two competing operating systems represented by two styles of nerd, cool anduncool.Geico has adopted a tiny green lizard as a presenter for its auto insurance products.The voiceof the lizard is a London cockney who even uses English colloquialisms such as free pie and chips, obscure to most Americans who do not know what this means (a greasy meat pie with French fries)or understand the accent or the other quirky phrases.There are even obscure references to the Englishtelevision naturalist Sir David Attenborough, who plays cat and mouse trying to observe the gecko.The Geico gecko has become viral.In effect, the talking lizard is also a kind of shock device.Youdon t expect lizards to talk, and you particularly don t expect them to talk cockney.ShockShocking an audience is a way of getting its attention.Shock can take many forms.It can be violent,such as explosions.It can be funny like talking geckos, or talking dogs, or the E-trade baby in the highchair who talks finance with the voice and knowledge of an adult dubbed over baby body language.Whatever you do to shock, you have to follow your own act.You have to use the attention you get togood effect.Many people are good at getting attention but not so good at holding it.Consider streakers 92 CHAPTER 5: Ads and PSAs: Copywriting for Visual Mediaat games.Taking your clothes off and running out into the middle of the field pursued by police offi-cers and officials will get the attention of the whole stadium, but then what? You can be outrageous,surprise the audience, or do something unexpected, but if all the audience remembers is the device andnot the message, you have failed.It is easy to shock but hard to fold it into an effective message.SuspenseSuspense offers a different way of getting an audience s attention.Shocking images often lead intosuspense.What s going to happen to the truck attached to the bungee cord falling off a bridge?Comic suspense works as well as a balancing act, juggling or a character in a predicament.Suspensemeans that the device makes the audience hold its breath until it knows the outcome.Suspense, likeshock, is easy to start and hard to finish.The revelation at the end must justify the wait.We all experi-ence feeling cheated by this plot device in certain movies of suspense that short-change the audiencein the outcome.AT&T has a pair of lovers exchanging pictures on a cell phone.His final picture is ofhim in the same place she is, and he has found her on a park bench.There is a bit of suspense aboutwhere we are going with these characters; there is also some humor or witty exploitation of the pic-ture-capturing and messaging capability of cell phones.Suspense often involves drama.DramaCan you tell a story in 20 seconds? Television commercials have got it down to an art.Quick cuts mini-mize the visual information and allow minidramas, mini love stories, and miniplots to unfold.Adsfor Brink s Home Security show a woman at home alone who gets off the phone as we see two burglarspeeping through the window.She puts on her ear phones to listen to music while working out on thetreadmill.The burglars break in; the alarm goes off; the woman is frightened; the phone rings becauseBrink s is monitoring the alarm.She picks up the phone and gets the reassurance that a Brink s agentis radioed to go to her aid even though the burglars fled, scared off by the alarm.So this is a storytold in the form of a minidrama that illustrates the role and value of the product.These dramas canbecome little miniseries so that audiences become intrigued about the next episode.The Geico com-mercials, both of the lizard and the cavemen, create serial dimensions that the audience understands.Meanwhile, their message gets exposure.A credit card gets a character out of a scrape, like in an IndianaJones adventure.Someone has a splitting headache or a migraine.An important life event, such as akey assignment at work, or a wedding, or a date is barely manageable.A friend urges the person to takethe brand name painkiller.The crisis is averted, and it s smiles all round
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