Every category has an uncomfortable truth hiding in plain sight. The flaw in the product. The absurdity of the industry. The behaviour the brand relies on but refuses to acknowledge.
Be Brutally Honest takes self-deprecating advertising further: go straight at the flaw, uncomfortable truth or industry secret everyone else would rather avoid. When a brand says the thing audiences already know but have never heard a brand admit, cynicism has no foothold. The brand has already said the worst thing about itself. Here are five tactics from the Dumb Thinking Engine that leave nothing left to distrust.
- Make death funny
- Admit you're deadly
- Own the sellout
- Blow the whistle on your own industry
- Drop the polish and show what it actually looks like
1. Make death funny
Take the subject your category tiptoes around — name it directly, wrap it in charm, and watch people pay attention.
Dumb Ways to Die — Metro Trains Melbourne, McCann Melbourne, 2013
Melbourne's Metro Trains had a problem most public safety organisations share: nobody was paying attention. Platform behaviour remained dangerous. The standard executions — stern warnings, dramatic reconstructions, fear-based messaging — had become wallpaper. The dumb answer: make a music video featuring disarmingly cute animated characters dying in spectacularly absurd ways — standing too close to the platform edge, crossing when the lights are flashing, getting between the doors. The contrast was the point. It's worth pointing out that the creative execution of this idea was hall-of-famer good, but the core idea was an honest message that was impossible to dismiss.
