The Top Most Useful Analogies Or Possibly Metaphors For Advertising
Advertising is like dating.
If you spend all your time talking about yourself no one’s going to want to take you home.
And if all you do is focus on “closing the deal” sex, and keep pushing for the sex to happen and offering lots of funneling to sex-related outcomes, only the very sex-motivated will take you home, or more likely, to a cheap motel. Once.
But if you listen, and seem interested (as much as sincerely plausible without being creepy) then you’re generally much more appealing.
AND if you make your date laugh and enjoy the time they spent with you, you will probably be invited to spend more time together, some of it having sex, possibly regularly.
Advertising is like a gold mine.
There are good ideas somewhere in that yonder mountain o' yonder. You just need to hire up some folks who know how to dig and find some good ideas. It might take an hour or a couple of weeks, so the more time you can give them, the more gold they'll find for you
Advertising is like fishing.
You might plan to fish for trout. But if you catch a salmon you should probably consider keeping the salmon, even though it wasn’t the trout you were looking for.
Advertising is not like a factory.
A factory is an assembly machine, where there is a very specific predetermined outcome, that is the result of putting together standardized parts in a standardized order. There is nothing creative about a factory process. But since the manufacturing process is the closest model to “consistently making something“ most business people understand, they often get confused and assume that ideas come from a process of assembly and are flabbergasted to discover that very little that is interesting or inventive comes from a rigorously standardized process.
Advertising is not like seal clubbing.
I can't tell you how many times I’ve had to insist that we move away from this analogy.
Advertising is kind of like jazz.
You have a basic structure, and you have themes but you’re also supposed to make up parts of it collaboratively. The problem with this analogy is that no one likes jazz.
Advertising is like running with the lemmings. No one is quite sure what we are running from or what we are running to. But we need to do it very quickly or someone will be very angry with us and take the big pile of gold they never wanted to give to us anyway. No wait, that's leprechauns.
Advertising is also not like:
A box of chocolates
A spiral-cut honey ham
Two old men at a urinal
A church youth retreat in the woods
Brazilian Jujitsu
Buying socks at a street fair
Fighting a kangaroo
A deflating bouncy house that is also on fire and filled with sharks.
I hope this post clears up any lingering confusion.