Raise your hand if you like Mondays.
Now raise your hand if you like Monday.com
Squint at your screen if you have no idea what Monday.com is.
I didn't, either. That is, until I saw this short little ad. You can stop squinting now, and take a look at this:
When I was in the first year of my program in college, I worked on an assignment for a brand of alcohol. The brief indicated that our target audience was a man's-man-steel-toed-boots-wearing tough guy, of other things. Long story short, the concept that my group and I went with can be summed up by our headline: "Tastes like this feels." In our campaign, our print ads used imagery of the manliest of activities that feel freakin' awesome, and our radio ad describes the drink as though it were a voice ("...smooth, deep, with a hint of spice...like...mine"). The use of vivid imagery to show people how something feels all comes down to a simple line that most writers know like the backs of their hands: Show, Don't Tell.
What is Show, Don't Tell? Author Jerry Jenkins explains it this way: "When you tell rather than show, you simply inform your reader of information rather than allowing him to deduce anything.
You’re supplying information by simply stating it. You might report that a character is 'tall,' or 'angry,' or 'cold,' or 'tired.'
That’s telling.
Showing would paint a picture the reader could see in her mind’s eye" (Jenkins, 2018).
Sounds a bit obvious, right? Why tell someone about something when you could just show them?
That's where visuals come in. Advertising is largely storytelling, and everybody loves a good picture book where they can see what's going on. Advertising often has visuals to accompany the copy, because it enables people to see what's going on. The visuals do the showing for you, so you don't even have to worry about Show, Don't Tell in the writing.
But let's pretend for a second that the Monday.com ad had been done differently. What if they had just said that it feels like peeling that plastic off of your phone, or the glide of the scissors along wrapping paper, or plugging in your phone just in time when it's at 1%? I feel like it would have been much less effective, because it would have been telling us of the feelings rather than letting us experience them visually.
In writing, you don't have the visual accompaniments. That's what makes Show, Don't Tell so much harder in writing than it is in advertising: it's only up to you and your words to show what's going on in writing, whereas advertising can visually show things and is not limited by vocabulary. You can show, show, show all you want in writing, but it still isn't as visually precise as a good old visual representation of what you are trying to get at. So if this ad had just told us that Monday.com feels like those things, yeah, we'd get it, but it's like when a writer is telling, not showing. It almost feels flat, doesn't it? "Feels like scissors gliding on wrapping paper without a snag." Yeah, that's a terrific feeling that we all love. But it's so much better to see that glide, and hear that swoosh. Show us how it feels. Telling us how it feels, no matter how awesome, has the potential to get a shrug of I-see-your-point-itude. That's the meh response, and no one wants a meh response.
Something else that I really like in this ad is how we don't see the faces of the people performing the acts that are like how Monday.com feels, apart from the initial mouse-clicking-task-completing person. I like that because it makes it feel as though we are the person performing those acts; we the audience are the ones who have just twisted the perfect sandwich cookie (come on; we all know it's an Oreo) perfectly, popped that bubble wrap, and got that piece of paper in the garbage bin. It's showing us that that could be us, if we got Monday.com
Another thing that I thought was pretty clever in this ad was how they lit "PM" (for Project Management) on fire at the beginning, seemingly to act as an analogy for burning the old ways of project management to start fresh.
And it did all of that, as well as telling us exactly how it works, in 33 seconds.
33 seconds. And it didn't feel rushed once.
If all of my Mondays are as good as this ad, I may never hate a Monday again.
Bibliography
Jenkins, J. (2018, June 05). Show, Don't Tell: The Simple Guide for Writers. Retrieved July 4, 2018, from https://jerryjenkins.com/show-dont-tell/
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