How paying attention to advertising can help you get your creative juices flowing
Paying attention to advertising and how the inspire people can help inspire your creativity. Ads exist because they do work, and many of the best attention grabbing ads are works of art in their own right. Many successful authors first started honing their writing skills in advertising before taking their wrting to the next level. Paying attention to ads can help you develop better characters and tell better attention grabbing tales.
Ad it to your creative arsenal
Ads are as ubiquitous as security cameras in the Olympic Village. Everywhere you look, you are inundated with advertising. Television, magazines, newspapers, even search engines all depend upon advertising to pay the bills. From billboards to sign holders, advertising is there to confront you, to encourage to buy something or to go somewhere. If advertisers can find some way to sponsor your nightly dreams, they would. In fact, advertising should be added to that list of things people cannot avoid alongside death and taxes.
As unavoidable as ads are, the reason they exist in the first place is that they actually do work. How many times have you found yourself ordering the new configuration of beans, meat and cheese at Taco bell because of the ads on television or the shiny new placards on the restaurant’s door tell you to? Think of all the great ads out there and how they get you to remember a product. Maybe they use a funny catch line like “Where’s the beef,” or an annoying yet seductive jingle that refuses to quite bouncing around in your cerebellum (meow, meow, meow, meow). Great ads have the ability to become part of the pop culture, sometimes even outliving the product they were selling.
Next time you are looking to find your muse, think about how the most successful ad campaigns work at getting your attention by either tickling your funny bone or tugging at your heartstrings. Forget for a moment that they are there to sell you something and think about the various techniques that their creators have use in order to grab your attention and inspire you to act.
How paying attention to advertising can make you a better writer
Examining advertising and understanding how advertisers succeed in grabbing people’s attention and creating lasting impressions can help you become a better writer. Many of this past century’s most successful authors know a thing or two about advertising and how to use various creative tricks within their works to attract readers. Many prolific authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Salman Rushdie actually started out in advertising before moving on to fiction.
Advertising and character creation
One thing that most successful ad campaigns have in common is the development of recognizable characters that many times end up transcending the brand which they were created to sell in the first place. Next time you are struggling to find inspiration for character creation why not try to think about all of the successful characters that have been developed as spokesfigures for different companies…
- The Green Giant
- The Dominoes Pizza Noid
- The Taco bell Chihuahua
- The Geico Gecko
- The Budweiser Frogs
- Snap, Crackle, and Pop
Now, think about why each of these different characters was successful and why they wound up grabbing people’s attention and taking on a life of their own. It also important to remember how each of these characters all started out as mere ideas within the head of a writer before breaking out and becoming part of our pop culture consciousness. Now ask yourself how you can use these traits to make your own characters stand out.
