In-situ or, What I Learned When I Was Being A Weasel
Last year, I spent my Easter holiday hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. A phenomenal experience. If you’re ever in New Zealand, and only do one thing that’s naturery, make it that.
The day my friend, Abby and I completed the hike, we went to steak house near our lodge. We shared a table with a boisterous couple who were going to do the hike the next day.
We got talking, and it turned out that the woman was an executive for DB Breweries. A dream client.
Now, at the time there was a small rumour going around at the time that DB was putting themselves up for pitch following an enormous change at Saatchi & Saatchi Auckland with the CEO and the ECD leaving the agency thus undergoing a significant leadership change.
So I figured I’d dig.
I commented on a billboard I had seen for Heineken in downtown Auckland. It was executed on a particular ad space that covered two sides of a shopping mall. The headline ran along and around the corner of the building, making it only readable from a very particular angle. Most of the time, you only saw half of the headline from where you were on the surrounding streets.
She agreed. It wasn’t one of their billboards she was most proud of.
She said to me,
“When they showed us the layout, it was one, long strip. And looking at it like that, it looked great. What we should’ve asked for, was to see it in-situ.”
Totally.
A lot of advertising looks great on the screen of the designer’s Mac, or on your Creative Director’s desk, or on the boardroom table. But the question you have to ask is how does the work look in the real world?
As creatives, we are always being reminded that the work we do is not principally for us, but for them, the consumers.
And one important element to consider rather thoroughly is the context the ad is in.
Where is the billboard? What magazine is it in? What website? What are the people likely to be doing when they view it?
When all these questions (and many, many more) are considered and creatively answered, you get something closer to effective and cool.
In a previous post about portfolio advice, I quoted Bob Barrie, ECD for BDM*. The one thing he asks when looking at a portfolio is, are the ideas real-world applicable? It’s one thing to have creative ideas, but something else entirely if you have creative ideas that work.
Looking at your work they way your audience will see it will, quite simply, help pick out all the grit you only tend to notice after the ad has run, otherwise referred to as when it’s far, far too late.
*My god, the ad industry is alphabetical, isn’t it?
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