Ha, this is the sort of bloke ad that warms the heart. Faced with a super generic product like Tequila, how do you separate it’s sameness and say something different? Do you tell its potential drinkers that its brewed differently, has better worms in it, is lovingly curated by Mexican virgins? Or do you just get on with it and tell a great story about blokes who choose to drink Tequila. What if they *gasp* didn’t care which drink they chose!?
I’m sure it’s been done before this type of thing where a bad first decision culminates in lots of other poor decisions, but this has a nice story, and is well executed. Sure they could’ve ended up going completely outrageous and blowing themselves up or amputating limbs but in this ad the story is kept refreshingly true to almost real life. Funnily enough, these are the sorts of things that you’re going to end up doing if you drink enough of the stuff – tattoo, book a boys trip, mental haircut (right? nobody goes to a bar and orders Tequila unless they want all the craziness to happen). If you’re going to be doing mad stuff, then at least have the good taste to do it properly.
They make no claims about the product quality in the ad, it’s all implied. It could well be made of petrol (although it would be difficult then to claim it was Tequila). And yet, when we go on the journey with the four guys, we laugh at their pain at not making discerning decisions.
What insight did the advertisers use when they were creating this ad? I’d guess almost none. They have a product and they’ve been told to sell it. Their target? people who drink Tequila. Why not get them to choose what Tequila they drink when its time to order at the bar…and then they ran with that.
There’s a great article by Ad Contrarian on Insights and how and what they are used for in marketing. Conclusion – the great leap that advertising has attempted to make from salesmen to sociologists hasn’t really worked. Generation X-ers are such and such, Millenials are this.
Instead of spending our time looking for imaginative advertising concepts about products, we spend our time developing dubious “insights” about consumers. Our sociological cliches form both the basis of these “insights” and the justification for them.
Of course, if these insights actually helped us create more effective advertising and sell more stuff, we’d all agree that progress has been made.
Nope, what it boils down to is this, most ‘insights’ on consumers are useless. Consumers don’t care about your insight, everybody considers themselves unique anyway. You can make your product differentiated if you try hard enough and actually figure out what you’re selling. It might look like any old Tequila but this one is different. The comments on that article are worth reading, particularly Tim Orr and Scamp.
