RYE BROOK, NY — Advertising executive Linda Kaplan Thaler encouraged insert media professionals to use her big-bang philosophy when coming up with ideas for clients.
“Why do you need a big bang?” asked Kaplan Thaler, CEO/chief creative officer at ad agency The Kaplan Thaler Group.
The answer provided by the luncheon speaker at yesterday's Insert Media Day: “People are inundated with advertising messages.”
She said the average person contends with 5,000 messages each day.
Kaplan Thaler offered attendees tips to differentiate their companies and ideas from the run of the mill. She said big-bang ideas are illogical, disruptive, polarizing and simple, and urged attendees to “lose the rules and lose the fear.”
Instead of striving to devise creative similar to what the competition does, Kaplan Thaler said, marketers should differentiate themselves even if it is just in the way the ideas are presented. As she termed it, the “theater of persuasion can distinguish your firm from other firms with similar ideas.”
She used the example of a pitch her firm did for a razor company. All the agencies pitching the business based their ideas on the premise that men hate to shave, but she was the only one who wrote and sang a song about it to clients. All the other concepts were the same, but Kaplan Thaler got the business.
Though she used no examples specific to insert media, the point of Kaplan Thaler's presentation was to be creative and take chances.
Kaplan Thaler founded her firm in 1997 and works with clients such as Procter & Gamble, Clairol Herbal Essences, Dawn, AFLAC, Continental Airlines, Pfizer, Panasonic and Pilot Pen.
