Advertising defaults to the winner. The fastest, the most successful, the most aspirational version of whoever uses the product. The audience already has a picture in their head of who belongs in this kind of ad. Putting someone else there — shot identically, treated with the same seriousness — creates a gap the audience has to resolve. That resolution is the persuasion.
Here are six tactics from the Shift Perception Engine that put someone else in the frame.
- Point the Camera at Who the Category Ignores
- Make the Overlooked Group the Proof
- Swap the Protagonist to Expose an Invisible Truth
- Invert the Celebrity's Status
- Cast the Anti-Hero as the Argument
- Cast Who the Category Actively Excludes
1. Point the Camera at Who the Category Ignores
Identify who the category has always photographed — then photograph someone else the same way.
Final Finishers — CLIF Bar, Ogilvy UK, 2026
Photographer Flynn Duggan shot the slowest TCS London Marathon finishers — many over eight hours in — in a high-editorial style that mirrored premium sports advertising: glossy, composed, unambiguously aspirational. The taglines made the equivalence arithmetic: "First place took 1:59. Last place took everything." Endurance Brand CLIF Bar didn't argue that these athletes deserved recognition. It photographed them as if they already had it, and let the contrast between that image and sports marketing's usual editorial choices do the rest.
Stadium Heroes (Heinz Ketchup, Dude, 2024) took the same logic to a retiring stadium sandwich vendor who had spent a career fuelling fans from the sidelines — and gave him the moment the sport had withheld: walking the players out to the pitch. The unsung figure, given the elite treatment. The category's camera had always pointed the other way.
