Getting to an idea worth fighting for rarely begins from an obvious starting point. Inspired by former Wieden+Kennedy Creative Director Jason Bagley, this series uses provocative questions to mine the Big Ideas That Work Engines for repeatable creative tactics that can help answer them.
This time, we're asking:
What if we show the reality that the category hides?
Here are six campaigns that probably weren’t thought of by asking this question, but they could have been...
- Replace the Sanitised Substitute
- Crash Reality Into the Perfect Picture
- Put the Edited-Out Body Back In
- Show What the Fantasy Leaves Out
- Reveal the Feeling the Role Suppresses
- Make the Ugly Truth the Selling Point
1. Replace the Sanitised Substitute
Replace the category's euphemism with the ordinary reality everyone already knows.
Bloodnormal — Bodyform / Libresse · AMV BBDO · 2017
Period-product advertising spent decades pouring blue liquid onto sanitary pads while avoiding the thing the product actually exists to deal with. Bloodnormal replaced the euphemism with red blood and put periods back into recognisable life: stained sheets, blood running down a leg, pain, intimacy and men buying period products. The shock wasn't really the blood. It was suddenly noticing how strange the category's elaborate avoidance of it had always been.
2. Crash Reality Into the Perfect Picture
Start with the category fantasy, then let ordinary life destroy it.
Life Is Not an IKEA Catalogue — IKEA · TRY Oslo · 2023
Furniture advertising prefers immaculate rooms populated by suspiciously well-behaved humans. IKEA started there too — then let reality intrude. A dog urinates on a rug. A mother vomits while her child plays nearby. A teenager confronts the wreckage of an afterparty. The line admits what the images prove: life isn't an IKEA catalogue. Instead of protecting its furniture from ugliness, IKEA used the mess to show its products were designed to survive real homes.
