November 10, 2024

Stitching it together

A post about where creative consistency comes from in advertising.

What’s the point of creative consistency?

I’m of an age where I’m happy to ask apparently naive questions. The reward of realising something profound far outweighs the risk of appearing stupid.

The point of creative consistency in advertising is that it’s impossible to have a campaign without it. Creative consistency is the difference between, on the one hand, a coherent campaign of ads whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and, on the other, a hotch-potch of standalone executions.

Creative consistency is the root of compounding campaign effects.

The vital aspect of effective creative consistency - that you take for granted at your peril - is that it has to be uniquely attributable creative consistency. It has to be readily identifiable as your very own brand of creative consistency.

With that in mind…

Three of a kind?

Take a look at these classic ads for Levi’s 501 jeans. Apart from being for the same brand, what do they have in common?

Launderette

Creek

Drugstore

(There’s a better quality version of the Drugstore ad on the production company website.) It’s worth it. It’s a masterpiece.

Superficial consistency

The 501 campaign would be considered by most as a shining example of long-term creative consistency. However, at face value, these commercials have just a few things in common (in no particular order):

• The protagonist (wearer of the jeans) is an attractive, young, white male.

• Each ad is set in the past.

• There is no dialogue.

• The soundtrack is a piece of music.

• Each story is contrived to highlight a single product feature.

Neither individually nor collectively do these details add up to a campaign that is consistent in a way that makes it uniquely attributable to one advertiser. There are ads for brands in other sectors that have exactly the same attributes.

The main, in fact the only, consistent executional detail that at least locates the ads in a single category is the product itself: the jeans. But featuring your product in your ads is not an act of creative consistency.

Glaring inconsistency

Often - not always but often - the first place clients (and some ad people) look for campaign consistency is tone of voice.

Most creative brief templates have a box dedicated to tone of voice. If the brief is for a new ad in an ongoing campaign, the tone of voice box will contain an approximate description of the tone of the existing ads, directing the creative team to repeat this tone in the new ad.

I say “approximate description” because it’s nigh on impossible to precisely describe a tone of voice in words that mean the same thing to everyone. Tone of voice is a low resolution concept when it’s expressed verbally.

You and I, dear reader, will use different words to describe the tone of voice of these three Levi’s ads.

What we’ll agree on, however, is that the tone of each ad is different; wildly different.

Launderette: flirtatious, slightly steamy.

Creek: (starts) sublime, ethereal, serene; (ends) raunchy.

Drugstore: claustrophobic, foreboding, illicit.

I’d say that one of the defining characteristics of the Levi’s 501 campaign is the inconsistency of its tone of voice. It’s all over the place.

And yet…

Deep consistency

We’ve established that the executional consistency of these three ads is superficial and not uniquely attributable to the brand. There are some consistent attributes but not enough to make these executions feel like a campaign.

We’ve established that the tone of voice of the films is conspicuously inconsistent.

These ads have no “front-end” creative consistency.

And yet they feel consistent.

There’s a deeper, visceral, sixth-sense kind of consistency happening here.

This kind of deep and meaningful consistency comes from ideas. It comes from ideology.

The Levi’s 501 campaign has both. These three ads share a consistent narrative idea. And the campaign is infused with a consistent brand ideology.

The irresistible truth

I never worked on Levi’s. But I did work at BBH while the 501 campaign was being created. So I know the background. I know the lore.

Denim jeans were created as blue collar workwear. They were part of the uniform for refuse collectors, stevedores, and the like. They were worn for this purpose only. There was no aspiration to wearing them on any other occasion. Quite the opposite. It would have been frowned upon.

So when James Dean and his generation adopted jeans as part of its look, it was a brazen act of rebellion.

Jeans = rebellion.

The advertising strategy for Levi’s was to own this historical category truth. As “the original jean,” Levi’s had more natural right than any other brand to do so.

If I were to sum up the deeply consistent idea that links not just these three ads, but the entire 501 campaign, it would be SEXY REBELLION.

Every ad in the campaign tells a story of sexy rebellion. And that’s the irresistible truth that made the brand famous. It’s the storytelling consistency that our gut responds to; that triggers the brand recognition.

Because the narrative idea is consistent, the character archetype of the protagonists is consistent too. They’re all rebels. There’s a lot of the classic Outlaw archetype in all of them, tempered by some Hero attributes too.

The Creek ad involves a slight twist in that its the girls who are the rebels, not the guy shrinking his jeans. But the spiritual integrity of the idea, and the deep consistency of the campaign, remain intact.

Although the tone of each ad is very different, the sexiness is always there. It just comes in different flavours: flirtatious & steamy, raunchy, illicit. The ads are tonally inconsistent at the same time as being tonally coherent and harmonious.

Back-end consistency

A consistent brand idea provides deep, “back-end” creative consistency to a campaign. Every ad is running on the same narrative code, which allows the front-end presentation to vary without undermining campaign integrity.

The spiritual, storytelling consistency that comes from a brand idea, from an irresistible truth, like sexy rebellion is deeper and stronger than the superficial consistency of executional detail or a uniform tone of voice.

Stitching it together

In the 501 campaign, product features like stone washing (Launderette), shrink to fit (Creek), or the watch pocket (Drugstore) are dramatised to sexy, rebellious effect.

Before the 501 campaign, product features were the story for Levi’s. I remember sitting in the cinema in the early 80s (back in the days when the ads before the feature film were an event in their own right) watching epic, heroic ads about Levi’s rivets and, yes, Levi’s stitching.

Rivets

Stitching

The Rivets and Stitching ads are more obviously cut from the same cloth (sorry) in terms of front-end executional and tonal consistency. But the irresistible truth of sexy rebellion stitches the 501 campaign together at a much stronger, more elemental level.

There’s consistency. And there’s deep, irresistible, narrative consistency.

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Maybe try this too: Irreverence Justified - the irresistible truths of Nike and the Sex Pistols.