Bloody students

“I don’t like any of your ideas,” I told a roomful of advertising students on Monday.

“And I certainly wouldn’t show any of them to a client.”

Oh yes, I’m a tough macho no-nonsense badass from the planet Tellitlikeitis.

Didn’t manage to make any of them cry though. Just sulk. Which, since they were teenagers, was hardly much of an achievement.

Let me explain: agency founder Nick Thomas and I, in our role as creative gurus, help out with the local university’s advertising degree (him more than me).

And we’d given the new batch of students a charity brief to crack – a live brief we’re working on for an integrated campaign across TV, press and online.

It was a tough brief, in truth. And the students had made a good attempt at it, with some interesting, imaginative stuff that was nicely integrated, neatly scamped and very confidently presented (though often really badly spelled).

But I didn’t think any of their ideas were right because they’d all gone down the route of ‘borrowed interest’.

Which means that instead of work featuring human beings in need of support from the charity, I got storyboards featuring squirrels. Rugby players. Magic bottles of cure-all medicine. Coin-operated satnavs. Flocks of birds in synchronised flight. And Monopoly.

Not one of them had portrayed the world, the cause or the people as they really were.

Borrowed interest can work well, of course – when your audience has no idea what your product or service is, or its benefits, an analogy can be a useful way to show them "Our X which you don’t know is like this Y which you do know".

But clumsily done (as it so often is), borrowed interest suggests that, “We couldn’t find anything interesting to say about our own product / service, so we thought we’d show you this instead.”

For an example of borrowed interest in action, there’s the new Kronenbourg TV ad.

They’ve got ol’ Lemmy Motorhead at the bar singing The Ace of Spades in a slow, ballady re-imagining. With the endline ‘Slow the pace’.

Seems more like a concept for Guinness (who’ve made a virtue of the slowness it takes to pour their pint). Maybe Guinness turned the idea down, so they sold it to Kronenbourg instead.

Also seems like a strange shift in positioning for French fizzy lager. Are the French known for ‘slowing the pace’? Apart from when they’re on strike, obviously?

But, regardless of whether it’s good brand positioning, this kind of borrowed interest seems to work ok for a lager. There’s only so much you can go on about its ingredients after all. And very little else you can say, what with the alcohol advertising rules being what they are.

But generally, if someone shows you a concept that’s based on borrowed interest, ask yourself if that’s really the best way to bring the proposition to life. Or if actually, we should just dig a bit deeper and find what’s compelling in your actual product / service.

Anyway, students: not all of them are sulky of course. In fact, we’ve just taken on a graduate team from the university as trainee copywriter and art director. I’ll be giving them the ‘borrowed interest’ sermon on day one.

In my macho badass way, obviously.