Your brand doesn't need an ad, it needs a character

Every brand brief begins with the same question: what do we want to say? Then a lot of money is spent making thirty seconds of saying it. Music, colour grade, a line at the end that took four weeks of internal debate. And the audience taps past it in under a second, because nobody comes to their phone to be told anything. The better question is: who does the audience actually want to spend time with?

Nobody remembers a message

Ask someone to name an advert they remember, then listen to what they describe. It's almost never the claim. It's a person. A face, a voice, someone doing something recognisable. The proposition was in there, technically, in the last four seconds. It isn't what stuck. That's not a failure of advertising craft. It's just how attention works. People attach to people who want things. Nobody attaches to a statement about product benefits, however well lit.

"But we’re a bank"

This is an objection that deserves to be taken seriously, because it usually comes from someone who has spent a decade doing good work in a category that doesn't feel like it has stories in it. We're a bank. We're an insurer. We sell fibre, or paint, or medical aid, or building supplies. Drama needs exactly two ingredients. Someone who wants something, and something standing in the way. That's all. It's also a description of why the business exists in the first place. Every company in this country was built because a person wanted something and something was in the way. That is the story. The habit of the industry is to talk about the second half, the solution, the offering, the differentiator, and skip past the person who needed it. Non-entertainment brands aren't story-poor. They're story-blind. Take funeral cover. On paper, one of the least romantic products in South Africa. A premium, a payout, a waiting period. Now put a person in front of it: a woman in her thirties in Mthatha, eldest of four, who has just been handed the arrangements for a father she was still angry with. Cousins arriving. A grandmother who expects things done properly. Nine days to find money that doesn’t exist. Nobody skips that. And nobody had to be told anything about premiums.

Where the character comes from

Three places to look, and in our experience one of them is always sitting right there: - The customer at their worst moment. Not the satisfied customer at the end. The one at the point of need, before anything was solved. - The person inside the business. The teller, the nurse, the site foreman, the driver, the call-centre agent on hour six. Staff live inside stakes that customers never see. - The person who doesn't have the brand yet. The outsider who needs what the business does and doesn't know it exists, which, conveniently, is the same person the campaign is trying to reach. And two places not to look. Not the mascot. And, with respect, not the founder.

The rule that makes it work

There's one non-negotiable, and it's the point where a brand series either works or doesn't. The brand is not the hero. The character is the hero. The brand is the world they move through, or the thing that finally lets them win. That’s a supporting role, and it’s a powerful one, but it is a supporting role. The moment a character exists to compliment the product, the audience is gone. They can smell it instantly, and a series budget has just been spent on an advert. Every branded series that has died, died on this. We hold ourselves to the same rule. After the Bell isn’t about a school. It’s about specific people at school, and the school is simply where their lives are inconveniently located.

An ad runs. A character returns.

This is why the answer is a series and not a spot. A commercial happens to someone. A character is someone they come back for. Episode after episode, at arm's length, in their hand, in their language. Ten episodes in, a viewer doesn't need the setup anymore. They know her. They have opinions about her decisions. That familiarity is the most valuable thing a brand can own on a phone, and there is no budget at which a thirty-second spot can buy it. The trade is worth being clear-eyed about: a character is a longer commitment than an advert. More episodes, more months, more patience. That isn't a drawback. It's the entire reason it works.

The brief, rewritten

So the first line of the brief changes. Instead of here’s our message, please make it engaging, it becomes: Here's who the audience is, and here's what's standing in their way. That’s a brief a series can be built from.