OPINION: Seeking the lost art of the advertising proposition

Alarming numbers of them don't. The proposition is not a slogan or a headline (although it could become one, later).

The proposition is the single most important thing you want to communicate in the ad. By definition, it is often the single most compelling reason you would buy the product.

Once the marketer, the account service team and the planners have nailed the proposition - either in one sentence, or one word - the creativity flows to communicate it.

Well, that's the theory. Sadly, when I sat down and wrote a list of famous brands, I couldn't remember their propositions. I mean, what is Sony's proposition? Or Sanyo's or Aiwa's or Kenwood's for that matter?

I know that Mercedes-Benz's proposition is "engineering". I know that BMW's proposition is "driveability". I know that Volvo's proposition is "safety". And I know that in Bill Bernbach's day, Volkswagen's proposition was "It's ugly but it works". These days many advertisers and agencies try to skip the proposition stage and go straight to execution: "Let's have lots of nice images, and nice music, and end with a nice shot of the product, and people will say, 'isn't that brand nice'."

Nice bollocks, more likely. Being "nice" isn't a proposition. Nor is it a strategy. Nice equals oblivion.

Nobody said that finding a proposition was easy. Sometimes they leap out at you. Other times, they only emerge after weeks of research and hours of discussion and planning. But isn't that our job?

You should be able to look at an ad and see the proposition staring you in the face. I'm reminded of Neil French's Kaminomoto campaign. It promoted a hair restorer so potent it could grow hairs on a billiard ball. The proposition was "dangerous". Neil's line was: "Be careful with the Kaminomoto".

The proposition and the advertising idea were inseparable.

Which, of course, is the way it should be. Nobody said the Kaminomoto proposition was "a hair restorer that works efficiently, offers new confidence to bald people, at a sensible price, and is available in a convenient bottle that looks warm and friendly." Fortunately, the client and account service team went in a lot deeper than that!

So, how do you find these elusive propositions?

It helps if you know the product intimately, if you "interrogate it until it confesses its strengths". Sometimes you get the proposition as the result of sheer desperation. I once walked up to an account director in an agency corridor and said, "Look, I haven't time to read the brief (it was for some high-end computer brand and ran 20 convoluted pages). Just tell me, in one sentence, why I should buy the product."

And she did. And it became the ad. And the client loved it.

Here are some rather more professional ways to isolate a proposition and you're welcome to try them:

Invite the client marketing team and agency suits to sit down together and write a poster. "If all you had was a poster on the side of the bus, what is the one single thing you'd want people to know about the product?"

At Australia's Campaign Palace, the suits did not actually fill out a traditional briefing form for the creative department. They were given a layout. They were asked to write the proposition where the headline would usually go. In the body copy area they had to write the support points, then list all the mandatories (the logo, address, phone number, website, etc) in the bottom right hand corner. Result: very disciplined briefs with everything in perspective.

Cracking propositions shouldn't be a lost art.

Frankly, if we can't articulate the one single most compelling reason why a consumer should buy a product, we might just be in the wrong job.