9.3: Art of Clarity - Pro-social ad campaign with audio script

This section covers planning a pro-social advertising campaign. It includes an assignment to develop a creative brief and also calls on students to write an audio ad to gain practice writing for the ear as well as writing for the purpose of persuading an audience.

The purpose of creative briefs 

Before they begin the process of designing, writing and producing advertisements, advertising professionals work on explaining and outlining their strategy in a creative brief. This is a document for the creative team, the advertising director and the client that gives a clear objective for the campaign. Subsequent ad copy would then be expected to adhere to concepts covered in the brief. The creative brief is like a game plan. Without it, specific ads and the campaign on the whole may not be successful. Using correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and a concise writing style are essential in a creative brief. Clients, creative team leaders, account managers, and account planners might all have access to the brief. Professionalism in writing is essential. There are several broad categories to consider when completing a creative brief.  

For the purposes of the related assignment, students should consider these to be a checklist.

• Key consumer insight(s) - The key consumer insight(s) statement demonstrates a clear understanding of the consumer’s general behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as they relate to the message topic. It also considers general opinions and thoughts about the subject matter. Imagine you are developing a creative brief for a cookie brand. Market research and careful audience analysis can reveal key insights into consumer behaviors, such as the fact that many consumers believe that so-called healthy cookies do not taste as good as their high-calorie, sugar-filled counterparts. This knowledge will help you as you design your advertisement.
• Advertising problem - The term “advertising problem” does not refer to a problem with the advertisement itself or challenges in delivering advertising to the key audience. Advertising problem refers to the product’s biggest consumer-related obstacle. In the cookie example above, the advertising problem is that consumers face a choice between buying great-tasting cookies that are loaded with calories and sugar and buying ones that are low in sugar and calories that don’t often taste as good. From the perspective of the advertising agency and the copywriter, advertising problems are good things. These are challenges in the form of consumer perceptions that brands will pay advertisers to help overcome. Consumer insights can inform your advertising team what some potential advertising problems might be. An advertising strategy should address this problem, which sometimes is framed as a need. Without a problem to address, the ad will appear pointless; however, advertisers must ask themselves if they are identifying important concerns consumers actually face, or if they as advertisers are creating problems to fuel a compelling narrative. It is much more ethical to help brands identify real issues consumers face and to help address those concerns than to create uncertainty or anxiety in the general public to sell products.
• Advertising objective - The advertising objective should explain the promotion's intended effects on the target audience and clearly articulate the campaign's overall goal. The goal is not simply to persuade the audience. Think about how your writing might lead to measurable changes in audience feelings or beliefs in surveys. Think about what you want audience members to do in response to reading, hearing and/or seeing the ad. An example of the objective for the cookie advertisement might be to convince cookie lovers that the featured product is a healthy option that does not compromise substantially on taste.
• Target consumer - Target consumers are imagined types of people with whom you specifically want to communicate. They are often described in detail in the form of a persona as though they were real people to aid in crafting campaigns and specific messages. For example, a fashion brand might create the persona of Kiah from Nashville, a woman, a college graduate in her late 20s, who is mixed race, living on her own in an apartment with a great full-time job in music promotion who dresses for success but also to look her best when she goes out after work from time to time. To fully understand the audience, consider their demographic characteristics, including age, income level, ethnicity, gender, etc., as well as their psychographic characteristics, which include aspects of their lifestyles, values, and interests. Be able to answer the following questions about the persona:
  • Why would these people be attracted to the featured product or service? 
  • What are the benefits of targeting this particular group?
  • What tones and terms are most appropriate for appealing to but not appropriating from this audience
• Competition - In this section of the creative brief, perform a detailed assessment of the competition that considers strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, examine the competitor’s history, products, services, brand, and target audiences. Analyzing key competitors will help you articulate your company’s or product’s market niche. You need to establish how your product or company stands out from similar products or companies.
• Key consumer benefit - The key consumer benefit describes what the consumer gains from using the advertised product or service. This section also discusses how the product or service solves the established problem. Narratives, testimonials, and relevant data may be used in actual advertisements to help enhance persuasiveness.
• Support - The support section explains the validity of the proposed advertising plan. It makes a case for why the campaign will motivate the audience or make them believe that the claims are true. This is particularly important because a creative brief serves as a pitch to a brand meant to secure their business. If your agency is to secure the advertising account, you must convince your client, which might be an individual or high-level executives representing a corporate brand, that your plan will work best. When drafting a creative brief, a team usually expects several other advertising agencies to be drafting similar briefs at the same time. You will often wish to include evidence from third-party sources such as external research reports or polls that bolster your approach. Also include feedback from focus groups to persuade the client that the advertising plan will be effective.
• Other categories to consider - Some creative briefs might include a section called "tonality." This explains the desired feel or attitude of the campaign, such as classy, fun, modern, youthful, extravagant, conscientious, etc. You may also wish to include a description of the advertisement’s visual elements, or the creative mandatories, which are elements that the brand requires to be included in the pitch. This section should provide a detailed explanation of the images, slogans, logo(s), and other visuals that you intend to employ so that clients can imagine how the advertisements will look.

The creative team usually presents one or more sample advertisements to the client in a pitch presentation. Pitching is typically covered in campaigns courses and other advanced advertising classes.

Copywriting 

After completing the creative brief and receiving approval from the client, your next step may be to throw a small party because you just earned the right to keep your jobs. It is now time to develop the advertising campaign. A large part of this process involves copywriting. Copywriting puts together the headlines, sub-headlines, body text, images, captions, and scripts for audio and visual elements included in the campaign. Not all campaigns include all of these elements, but in a media environment where social media grows more and more powerful every day, it is not unusual to see multi-platform or multimedia campaigns.

Copywriters use persuasive communication to influence target audiences. They also create the advertisement’s call to action and slogan, and they may have input on logos and other visual elements that include text. Here is a brief list of some of the types of ads copywriters consistently create: 

• Text-only print or online display ads

• Text + photo print and online display ads 

Note that these are usually static. They must be appealing based on typeface selection, type color (where applicable), word choice, photography (where applicable), and layout alone. 

• Billboards 

• Direct mail print ads, which can appear in newsprint, in magazines, pamphlets, or in the form of letters 

Note that the text in these ads must be triple checked because once an ad is printed to be mailed or put on a billboard it can be difficult or impossible to alter. 

• Scripts for radio and TV commercials as well as audio and video ads appearing on online video platforms such as YouTube 

Note that these types of ads require pre-planning because the shooting and editing of multimedia content may take days or weeks to complete, depending on the complexity of the ad or the campaign. Advertising scripts must be written for the ear, which is to say they must make sense to the listener or viewer the first time they are heard. Often viewers, and, of course listeners, will not see the speaker’s lips as they enunciate spoken texts. Listeners and viewers generally will not rewind audiovisual content to review what they have missed. This is particularly true of ads. Thus, the writing style must be clear and simple for the sake of audience comprehension and enjoyment. 

• Branded social media posts and threads for all manner of platforms 

Note that copywriters in these situations need to think about the most common phrases and types of slang that might appear on each platform. A comment that is meaningful on one platform might not make sense in another context. Note which platforms are heavily into photography and thus demand high quality images. Note that the tone for a message on one platform might not be appropriate for another.  

• Scripts for social media influencers when they collaborate with brands and ad agencies 

Advertisers may wish to use product placement to enhance the reach and image of the product being promoted.

Definition: Product placement

Product placement refers to the presentation of a brand's products or services within the content of another medium. Examples of product placement include characters in a movie or TV show eating at a specific restaurant or driving a specific brand of car. Influencers are often called on for product placement opportunities as they can sometimes seamlessly mention brands in the course of their regular discussions about fashion, relationships, sports, cooking, sex, news, politics, history, raising children, etc.

Product placements must be planned and related copy written with care so that they are integrated into the context of the content as seamlessly as possible. In most cases, content authors, influencers, and others will collaborate only to a limited extent with copywriters. Copywriters must do their best to convey the essence of core messages clearly because the intricacies of conveying problems and solutions, presenting a certain tone, and balancing product vs consumer focus may be lost in translation from ad copy to product placement context. 

Advertising assignment I - Brief²

Craft an abbreviated creative brief to demonstrate your understanding of the key elements of this type of document. Do not feel the need to conduct in-depth research or to write a complete brief. Instead, think of a brand with a problem that you could help solve through advertising. Put the name of the brand at the top of a Word document. Then, address each of the following topics in about one paragraph each: key consumer insights, advertising problem, advertising objective, target consumer persona, primary competition information, key consumer benefit, support for this strategy, and tonality. You should be able to complete this with careful web searching. Using AI to help generate responses should be encouraged for this particular assignment.

Be sure to frame the benefit to the consumer both in terms of the advertising problem and solution and in terms of a social benefit that may be realized.

Audio advertisement template and breakdown

The template breakdown provided here matches the blank template linked in the Advertising assignment II box below.
Students should review the labels and descriptions that define and describe key parts of the template.

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Audio advertisement template and template breakdown graphic. 
(Copyright CC BY NC; Mark Poepsel)

 

Advertising assignment II - Audio ad

Thinking about the creative brief you just completed, write a script for a 30-second audio ad that would be a suitable contribution to a campaign pitch. Imagine it might run on a streaming service or on a radio broadcast. It should address the problem and solution indicated in the brief. You may use this template for an audio ad if no other template is provided for you. 

Refer to the example template and breakdown depicted above, which indicates the key elements of an audio script.

Make sure to use at least one music cue, at least one sound effects cue and two different voices in your script. If you use an announcer, that may count as one of the two voices.

Professors/Instructors: Various mass communication programs and courses have their own script templates. Please use whichever template suits your students best. The purpose of including this template and associated breakdown document is to be able to provide a complete set of open educational course materials.

The template breakdown indicates key header information, descriptions of each speaker, indicators for music and sound effects, and a means of differentiating between effects and dialog.