Creating Clarity in a Crowded Market
Say the specific thing
Categories converge on the same vocabulary within about eighteen months, and after that nobody’s claims mean anything. The way out is not a better adjective, it is a smaller and more specific claim — one your competitors would have to change their product to copy.
Cut until it hurts
Every brief we run goes through one pass whose only job is removal. If two benefits are listed, one goes. If a sentence explains the sentence before it, both are wrong. What survives is usually shorter than the team is comfortable with and performs about twice as well.
Testing clarity in the wild
Show a stranger the first frame for two seconds and ask what it is for. If they hesitate, the problem is not the media plan. This costs nothing, takes an afternoon, and has killed more bad campaigns for our clients than any analytics tool we run.
“We cut the deck from six benefits to one. It was the most uncomfortable meeting of the year and the best quarter we have had.”
