System1 & Advertising Association’s October Ads of the Month
Successful sustainability messaging isn’t just about the message. How it’s delivered is just as important – often more important. This month’s line-up of good ads use different strategies to put a message across: making it personal, stressing the optimistic, and using metaphor. All three of them are great ways a brand with a sustainability message can stand out and win over an audience.
Etsy – “Firsts: Nicky”
We’ll start with Etsy, and a 15-second ad in their campaign spotlighting their individual sellers. In this case it’s Nicky, a ceramicist and painter who makes decorative pieces. The ad shows a quick montage of some of the special moments in other people’s lives that Nicky’s art has decorated, from weddings to christenings to moving in. “I have the best job in the world” says Nicky as the ad ends.
The ad scores 4.0-Stars on Test Your Ad, putting it into the top 10% of all retail ads. It also gets an exceptional 95% Brand Fluency, so people come away from the ad knowing exactly who it’s for. The secret to its success is combining strong branding at the beginning and end with a personal focus.
Rather than talk about the brand in general or what it can do for sellers, Etsy’s ad just shows us one person and the lives she and Etsy helped make more magical. That personal focus is a fantastic tool for sustainability measures too – showing the impact of behaviour change or initiatives on one person or business can be a lot more vivid and meaningful than talking in the abstract.
Guide Dogs – “Unleashed”
Next up it’s an ad for Guide Dogs. The charity sector is an unusual one for advertising, with a lot of similarities and crossover to sustainability-focused organisations. Both have to find ways of talking about sometimes difficult or unpalatable topics without alienating viewers. This ad focuses on “life-changing firsts” that Guide Dogs can provide for people with sight loss, from a child’s first steps to enabling first meetings and first-time activities.
The Test Your Ad ratings tell you how successful the ad is but also how unusual the charity sector is for ads. The ad gets an exceptional Spike Rating – our predictor of short-term impact – but that’s still only a little above the Charity average. The 5.4-Star long term Star Rating though is hugely above the sector norm, in the top 1% of charity ads. In other words, the typical charity ad does a great job at motivating people in the short term but sacrifices long-term brand building. Guide Dogs show that you can do both.
The reason this ad works better is that its outlook is so optimistic. Rather than focusing on the problems a person with sight loss faces, Guide Dogs emphasise the solutions and the opportunities they bring. Their tagline “Life Unleashed” sums that up. For a sustainability-focused brand the lesson is clear – emphasise positive outcomes and you encourage long-term effectiveness as the steps people need to take becomes easier.
BT – “Protecting Brilliant Things”
Finally, there’s a lovely ad from BT which not only spotlights actual sustainable behaviour – a group of beekeepers who work hard to protect their bees from invasive pests – but uses it as a metaphor. Broadband providers do not generally score well on Test Your Ad, as most do not bother with an emotional route, so BT’s 3.3-Star Rating isn’t just good, it’s in the top 12% of all the ads in its category.
The way it achieves this is simple – it uses the beekeepers as a metaphor for the protection BT gives its broadband customers from the invasive internet threats of malware, viruses and fraud. The metaphor makes for a more visually interesting ad but also one that engages the viewer’s mind better than a simple feature-focused ad would. Metaphor is a powerful tool for sustainability themed ads because a lot of sustainability issues seem big or complex, and a metaphor can help bring them back to human scale so they’re less daunting.
Whether it’s taking the personal touch, focusing on the positive, or using metaphor to make behaviour more real, how you say something is often more important than what you’re saying. In our The Greenprint study there are dozens more examples and strategies like this for sustainability messages that can actually work.
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