Service, advice and the right price

Shaun,

Thanks for your letter. It was great to hear from you and great to hear that one of my best media graduates for many years has gotten a job so quickly.

You’re right in what you say, we don’t cover locally produced television ads in our course. That’s mostly because there’s not much you can do with them or about them. What follows is not official university teaching, just from my own experience.

The biggest problem you have is that there’s nothing really to differentiate one local business from another. Auto-parts shops are auto-parts shops and the ream of A4 is the same no matter who you buy it from. With a big national brand or a new product you can find a truth, an angle or a facet of the product to seed your campaign ideas. With local guys, you’ve only really got three things: service, advice and price. The fact that they rhyme is something you can work with and you can always stick an adjective in front of them to pad out the thirty second spot: “professional service”, “friendly service”, “the right price”, “the best price” etc etc.

The voice over can help break the monotony. “Service, advice and the right price” is a dreadful piece of primary school writing but put it into the mouth a female voiceover artist who puts the little laugh into “the right price” and you’ve improved it somewhat. Christ only knows what’s supposed to be funny in that phrase but it’s something no-one ever questions. Use a female voice-over too. For female services, like beauty treatments etc, they don’t want to hear it recommended by a man, and for manly things – when’s the last time a man wasn’t suggestible to something unlikely when the voice suggesting it is low pitched and female?

Visuals will also be a problem for you because you’ve got bugger all to work with. Frankly, it’s a two room shop with a fridge and a kettle out the back, and a showroom full of carpet samples out the front. There aren’t that many opportunities for the moving picture so necessary to television. The standard solution is to use the panning shot; if you’re filming the product range, pan the camera across the shelves. Vary the direction, left to right, top to bottom. You could film the staff serving a customer or two. Try to pick the better looking staff or get some attractive models in for the shoot. If the proprietor insists that you use real staff because one of them is his wife – and she’d be rejected as a camp follower to the armies or Mordor for being too ugly - make it a wide angle shot. If it’s a beauty parlour then you’re going to have to hire models. The customers and the staff are probably trolls but no-one wants to be the troll or be massaged by one. There are plenty of local wannabe models who would be happy to get a few bucks for posing with half a dozen rocks on their back.

There are some absolute no-nos that you need to be aware of:

Don’t let the proprietor appear in his own ads. Running a small business, being king of their own little fiefdom, gives some people a bloated sense of themselves and they become deluded that they are photogenic, funny or engaging. NEVER let them talk! There isn’t a proprietor anywhere that looks any good in ads, has any sense of timing, voice volume, speed or any of the other basics. In fact, it’s better to arrange for them to go away on a couple of weeks’ holiday while you do the shoot.

Don’t do funny! Local ads are never funny. Middle aged rug salesmen in boot polish and a turban, blokes who think they sound like John Cleese, Benny Hill scenes of incompetent off-siders or buxom women being chased through the showroom in video fast-forward mode. It makes the audience cringe to the point where they do themselves a mischief that requires surgical intervention. You could wind up getting sued.

Don’t do special effects. You don’t have the budget or the equipment. He won’t look like he’s riding a magic carpet or on his way to the moon or whatever other God-awful gimmick he’s come up with. Just triple the cost estimate on the computer work; that usually does the trick.

When all else fails, revert to those classics you learned in first year. “Full range of parts”, “Locally owned and operated”, “Proudly Australian owned”, “Part of the local community for 20 years”, “Staffed by qualified professionals” and, for the newbie, “Under new management”. That last one seems to suggest that anyone who liked the old management should treat the business with suspicion, which wipes your existing customer base, but it’s something they all seem to want to trumpet, so go with it. It’s their funeral.

Kind regards and best wishes

Professor Bob Griffith.

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