I love clever marketing – I really do. Whenever I see a clever ad campaign, my heart starts beating faster, I can’t help but smile, and for the rest of the week it’s all that I think about. It’s love at first sight. That being said, please forgive me if I sound like a giddy schoolboy with a huge crush for the remainder of this post.

The obvious question stands: Why do you need clever marketing? There are hundreds of different studies and metrics available regarding the value of each commercial view, every radio jingle heard, and even each branded conversation. The underlying principle behind all of these studies is how effective each marketing medium is. Clever marketing increases the effectiveness of the campaign, and therefore there will result in better ROI.

Why is clever marketing more effective? Every campaign will make someone think about your product to some extent. It could be a split second of thought while they are being exposed to your campaign, or it could be hours of thought after they are exposed to it. The longer someone is thinking about your product or campaign, the more effective it is. Clever marketing does one thing: It stops and makes people think- the longer they stop and think, the more likely they are to remember.

What can you do to make a campaign clever? It could be a million things, but I’ve noticed that most clever campaigns have at least one of these attributes:

• Simplicity: The goal is to make people think about your campaign. By having too much information you aren’t leaving any room for imagination. There are tons of successful ad campaigns that have been run on just a few words, just having an image of the product, or even slightly altering the product – there is rarely a need to complicate things.

• Love the Unexpected: Whenever I am exposed to something unusual or something that I’m not expecting, it makes me think. Whether it’s an advertisement somewhere that I’m not expecting, somewhere that uses a space in a unique way, or by displaying the product attributes in an unique way.

• Humour: Ads that make me smile, laugh, or lose bladder control due to the extreme humour are all memorable ones. I will walk away thinking about it, and probably tell all my friends how funny it was. Using humour to make your campaign clever is tricky; if your target audience doesn’t recognize your wit (or, even worse, does but finds it lacking) they are both less likely to remember and more likely to mock. Is all word-of-mouth good word-of-mouth? Not so much.
  

The lesson? Don’t skimp on the creative. Having fewer great ads, is better than having a million terrible ones.

So how clever are you?