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WaMu's WTF Advertising

Sometimes, when seeing an ad whizz by you on a bus, or hearing a spot on the radio, you can reach straight through the ad to the creative brief -- and in a good way. A creative solution to a well-defined business problem can have a sort of elegance that practically sparkles when you see it, brimming with energy.

This isn't one of those ad campaigns. I unveil to you: Whoo hoo! (See the TV ads on their microsite here.)

Hello, Washington Mutual -- or should I call you WaMu? Let's spend millions of dollars on TV, in-store, direct, print, out-of-home, radio, and Web site communications on a large-scale advertising and branding campaign associated with a word without any defined meaning to our audience (other than calling to mind Homer on The Simpsons and "Song 2" by Blur). We can then imbue said exclamation with the following meaning: that it is related to the experience that people have when they come in and bank with us -- specifically, as they discover the great set of benefits we provide them for free, and enjoy not being smacked with fees as they do their day-to-day banking.

Great idea in theory. But this creative approach is what I call WTF Advertising. You look at these ad executions in and out of home and go, "What the heck is this supposed to mean?" Then you connect the dots when you happened to collide with a radio spot or TV ad. I didn't for many weeks. And when I did see the ads, I was very disappointed. This is it? This is "Whoo Hoo?" Big whoop.

Here are three lessons I learned from enjoying these ads.

1. Don't do an integrated campaign with a print execution that relies on a sound.

The term "Whoo hoo" totally flops in the out-of-home executions because it has no tangible meaning outside the TV and radio spots.

The key insight and hook of your campaign isn't working if it can't be transmitted across all media in a cohesive manner using words and images that convey a solid, consistent meaning. You should never expect that someone will see more than one execution in a campaign, no matter how much money you're spending on media. Unless you embed sound chips in all your print materials, and when you pass by the billboards, it beams the words "Whoo hoo!" at your car and pipes them through your stereo speakers.

2. The entire hook of the campaign isn't supported across the customer experience after purchase.

All of the ad executions in TV and radio rely on invoking the emotional experience of starting a relationship with WaMu, and imagining how your day-to-day life and dreams become real as a result.

Dreams, meet responsibilities. "Whoo hoo!" isn't supported in the actual experience of being a WaMu customer in a consistent way after you've initiated a relationship. "Whoo hoo" becomes marketing fluff after purchase.

Since the campaign has come out, a few people who are long-term WaMu customers have mentioned to me how they have never felt "Whoo Hoo" about their banking relationship. In fact, they're looking to get out, and were prompted by the ads to make a faster exit. Was this an intended byproduct of the ads? Can't you make more money from making your current customer base happy, instead of going out and trying to land new ones? Talk about alienating your core constituency.

Plus, you know it's bad advertising when people start sending phone messages regarding said ads to your wife, asking her if said blogger feel embarrassed to be in the same profession as the people who created them. Or when people start blogging in such an eloquent manner to bring down the two-handed hammer.

3. Don't cultivate a rebel personality when you're really just pretending.

Do you sign up for banking services on a whim? Because of a feeling?

Being this unbanklike isn't necessarily good for a bank brand. Especially when banks make money off late fees, interest, etc. "Whoo huh?"

I'm a big fan of disruptive, polarizing ads -- if that's what they're intended to do. There are a number of brands, such as Axe in America, or Pot Noodle in Britain, who do a great job of being brash to the point of inspiring real brand hatred, inspiring a closed circle of ever more loyal product users.

In this case, what polarized me was recognizing the audience WaMu was really aiming at. Perhaps they have always been aiming at them, but it's just so baldly explicit in the ads, I can't help but take notice.

The people who float through dreamy interludes where they frolic and dance from the feeling of a bank that truly "gets them" -- those people are not doing so hot when it comes to finances. I can just hear the creatives presenting the concept: "The target audience -- those people 25-45 who are scrambling for money to make rent or their mortgage, that are dancing on the razor's edge with their finances to open their business or save for their children's college tuition -- will respond well to these ads. Because we've 'got their back' and a suite of great rewards for signing up with us, they'll switch to WaMu."

Gawd, that's bold. And exploitative. And insincere.

You're a bank. You hold people's money to make more money. You'd better "have my back." The last thing I want a bank to do is tell me that I'll feel good signing up for a bank account, because that feeling will fade. What I really care about is having money in my bank account and my bank not going under.

I have nothing wrong with the business strategy that is behind WaMu's staple Free Checking package. They've been hammering on it for years, positioning it in a number of different ways. It's the weak marketing strategy here that makes me cringe. WaMu isn't Umpqua Bank. Now they know how to be sincere.

You blew it, WaMu. Now go merge with Citigroup. You can join good company, as pundits have been tearing apart their ads for years.

Plotting the Impact of Creative Ideas

The wall has twenty or thirty sketches pinned to it, and you're in a big group of designers, account managers, project managers, and other creative types trying to determine which ideas make the cut and get executed for the big client meeting. The creative director turns to the group and says, "So, which of these ideas do you like the best?"

Always a loaded question.

Does it boil down to how I feel about it -- the gut level reaction?

To me, a great concept will always inspire some sort of emotion, twanging the heartstrings, so to speak. It also has some kind of poetry or sizzle that takes it to a place that demands some form of attention.

But is that what the client wants? Is that what the creative brief demands? And is that what the audience needs to hear?

All valid questions, which lead to great concepts being spiked before they reach the light of a Web site or a billboard -- and if unasked, allow the wrong kinds of concepts to slip through to the client.

After going through a few hundred of these concept evaluation meetings, I decided to get smart about forging a process to focus my concepts before they're evaluated.

Before I concept, I look at the chart above and determine in my head where my design work should land based on the business case. Different marketing needs call for different kinds of ideas. Before I go off into dreamland, I have an idea of where I need to steer to fulfill the client's objective.

Then, after I've got a few awful sketches and well-refined umbrella concept rationales and headlines, I'll pin them up on the wall and I'll ask myself the following three questions, keeping in mind the baseline strategy I've staked for the project:

1) What kind of emotion is evoked through the communication?

If I'm creating a product brochure with dry descriptions of enterprise-level accounting software, the kinds of emotion I'm seeking to express may be quite different from a global campaign selling soap. Understand where you need to land on the scale between logic and emotion ensures that the audience receives the right effect from the communication. Ideally, you're using the right blend of the two to address an audience's need or "pain point."

We always groan when we see the mother making the Prego spaghetti sauce, but it does evoke the right emotion and I remember the ad enough to write about it here. Plus, it addresses a real pain point: do I really have the time to go spend two hours in the kitchen making slow-cooked tomato sauce?

2) How tangible are the benefits in the messaging?

How many commercials have you seen where you remember the gimmick, but not the product? Usually the gimmick is only tangentially related to the tangible product.

At some agencies I've worked at, the art directors have said, "Be sure to make the product as small as possible in the corner." That umbrella solution sure doesn't work in the long run if you need to show tangibility, which in the long run points to sales, not awareness.

Remember that Infiniti car commercial campaign where they never showed the cars, just natural forms like leaves floating on the wind? The press positively glowed about it. Quite a good idea, but the lack of tangibility proved to be the ads' Achilles heel. The ads were found to be ineffective when it came to selling cars.

3) Is it evocative or just an echo of the mundane?

If you don't create something expressive to market your product or service, you aren't going to keep audience interest -- your work will veer from the poetic to the mundane. It's hard to create poetry with a tangible expression of a product like, say, toilet-bowl cleaners.

This is where real understanding how your audience approaches your product makes such a big impact on the quality of a creative idea. If it's evocative, you've reflected the audience's mindset and tapped into their impressions and emotions. And by evocative, I mean that it ceases to function in the realm of the literal and becomes figurative, metaphorical, or expressive in a way that transcends our notions of our day-to-day lives.

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I think it's easy to play on the axes between logic/emotion and tangibility/intangibility. Where we really show our stripes as creative thinkers is where our ideas land on the axis between the mundane and the poetic. This is why many designers struggle when they can't create a communication that has a measure of poetry in it.

In my estimation, if you've come up with a really poetic idea and it creates the right emotional reaction in your target audience, and the tangibility of your product's benefits are visible in some way, you've found the "sweet spot" for your concept. From our recent bevy of Super Bowl spots, ones that caught my interest were the Monster ad with the two guys on bikes at the center of the Earth and the Tide commercial with the talking stain. Both of them expressed these three criteria in a measure that worked.

If the client just wants a rational comparison between three types of software, then you know your concepts need to speak to rational decision-makers. It's not going to veer into the poetic.

If you're selling a politician, you may veer into pure emotion and poetry and for a time, forgo all those things like, say, facts.

If your client sells security systems, you'll likely have an ad that implies that someone tried to break into your house, inspiring fear and playing on the literal risk of being hurt by a burglar, then it isn't likely you're going to shoehorn some kind of poetry into it. I can imagine it now... Security Alarms: The Musical.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this model holds up beyond advertising and also can help designers determine their best work in areas like branding, identity development, and designing compelling environmental graphics. Thanks!