7 Deadly Sins: How TV Adverts and Marketing Work

Posted by Pete - 23/10/08 at 08:10:00 pm

I thought we’d take a minute today to look at something slightly off our normal tack… What it is that makes a great TV ad campaign. What are the greatest examples of adverts, marketing products, as voted by the people, and why is it those that we go for?

First, we need a list. For the purposes of this, we’ll be using the top 40 from the Sunday Times and Channel 4 Top 100 Adverts list. That breaks down as follows:

Rank	Company	Advert
1	Guinness	Horses and surfers
2	Smash	Martians
3	Tango	Orange man
4	Electric Central Heating	Creature Comforts
5	Boddingtons	Melanie Sykes - ice cream
6	Levis	Launderette/Nick Kamen
7	R-Whites	Secret Lemonade Drinker
8	Hamlet	Baldy man in photo booth
9	Walkers	Gary Lineker
10	Impulse	Acting on…first gay ad
11	Cinzano	Leonard Rossiter/Joan Collins
12	Renault Clio	Papa/Nicole
13	Yellow Pages	JR Hartley
14	BT	Maureen Lipman ‘Ology’
15	Nike	Park Life, Cantona, Seaman, etc
16	Coca-Cola	Teach the World to Sing
17	Carling Black Label	Dambusters
18	Shake ‘n’ Vac	Dancing Woman
19	Andrex	Puppies
20	Real Coal Fires	Dog, cat and mouse
21	Ferrero Rocher	Ambassador’s Party
22	OXO	Family/Katie
23	Cornetto	Just One Cornetto
24	PG Tips	Mr Shifter
25	Castlemaine	A xxxx one - sherry
25	Flake	Girl
27	Milky Bar	Milky Bar Kid
28	Hovis	Boy on Bike
29	Heineken	Refreshes (Water in Majorca)
30	Kit Kat	Pandas
31	Gold Blend	Couple
32	Duracell	Rabbit
33	John Smith’s Bitter	Dog tricks
34	Pepsi	lipsmackinthirstquenchin
35	Martini	Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere
36	Fruit and Nut	Frank Muir
37	Turkish Delight	Eastern Promise
38	Apple Computers	1984
39	Fosters	Paul Hogan/ballet
40	Tetley	Teafolk

It’s a basic rule that any advert goes after one or more of the seven deadly sins, so let’s have a look at what we’ve got.

Lust

Pretty much every ad has something to do with sex. It’s just a fact of life. In this list, we’ve got half naked surfers, Melanie Sykes (and everyone else in the Boddingtons ad), a guy stripping, a man having an afair (with a drink), and the first example of overt homosexualism in an advert. That covers using sex to sell to men and women, both straight and gay.

And that’s just in the top ten.

Looking further down the list, out of the 40 we’ve got here, about a quarter have overt or subtle sexual references. So yeah, as the old adage says, sex sells.

Or to put it into terms all you Digg readers will understand:

…is good.

Gluttony

Welcome to deadly sin number two. This forms the bulk of our advert list, with almost three quarters of the companies here being in the food and/or drinks industry, both alcoholic and non. All of which aim to make you feel one of four emotions: lust, humour, pride/power or “the olden days”. As examples of each, you’ve got the imfamous flake ads, evil Gary Lineker Walker ads, Ferrero Rocher and the Ambassador’s Party, and Hovis “young boy on a bike”.

Each of these ads is trying to make you link a feeling with their product. A more modern example of this done brilliantly is the Magners “Time” series of ads, which single handedly not only launched Magners as a brand globally, but massively boosted sales of cider in general.

If you can make someone look at your product and equate feeling good with owning it, that’s gold.

Greed

Which brings us nicely to greed. Almost all advertising is designed to satisfy our greed in some form or another, so in a way, every advert on this list falls into this criteria. Be it us wanting to look good (so people will want to have sex with us), feel good (because food/drink/alcohol is awesome, and makes us look/feel great) or just get something sorted (so we can get back to looking good and eating/drinking), adverts sell us the idea of better life.

Sadly it’s true of pretty much every ad. We want things because they’ll make us feel better in some way. And in that sense, every advert appeals to our sense of greed, in differing levels.

Sloth

We do like to be lazy. Every technology we’ve ever invented has been designed to make our lives just that little bit easier, so we have to work less and can live more. To this day, none of them have actually done it, but that won’t stop us from trying, or from companies telling us that their products have the answer.

Again, pretty much every advert falls into this category. “If you have our product, good things will flock to you without you having to lift a finger,” is the message. Be it women, men, good feelings, instant meals with no cooking, or just having to change the batteries less, we want things without effort. And a good advert sells that message.

Wrath

Here’s one you don’t see often. And yet it’s the source of some of the funniest ads around. Look at the Tango Orange Man adverts - banned for the violence that ensued as a result of them. Or the Snickers Get Nuts campaign. Or the very recent Cadburys Cream Egg suicide ads.

As Takeshi’s Castle has proved countless times, pain can be amusing, when it’s happening to other people, and humour is a great way to sell a ton of product.

Envy

This ties in nicely with greed based advertising. We instinctivly want what the people in the adverts have. The perfect wife, the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect dinner time… Whatever it might be, adverts all sell us the idea that our lives aren’t good enough, but if we have this product, then our lives will be like these people, who do have perfect lives.

You’d have thought we’d have learned, but apparently not, as it still works. Envy and greed combine to make up the basic thrust behind every advert that ever worked.

Pride

And finally, pride. We all want to feel like the envy that the advert we just watched wasn’t there, so we’re sold in the final part, the idea of pride once we’ve bought that product. It’s ours and we can be proud, because our lives are now complete.

Again, every advert on this list appeals to this emotion.

So What Makes a Great Marketing Message/Ad?

There’s three basic things: Greed, Envy and Pride. A great ad makes you see how your life could be, then makes you want it, and tells you if you buy the product, you’ll feel happy about it.

The other parts, lust, gluttony, wrath and sloth are more generally used to push the product itself or create a secondary emotion to re-enforce the message. They’re also the bits that make us love the advert, but it’s the first three that make the sales.

N.B. Interestly, the best loved ad on this list, Guinness Surfers, generated very few sales at all, as do all Guinness adverts. They get the mix wrong, creating great ads that people love, but not selling the product.

7 Deadly Sins: How TV Adverts and Marketing Work