…emphasis on clear.
I love it when a message takes you by surprise. There is an ad being circulated widely on the internet that has me thinking about how to better frame messages. It is a reminder that your high-quality points make your highest-quality impact.
A friend sent me an ad for a cell phone from the Docomo Corporation. I am not a consumer of their products (nor of their ads). So naturally, my assumption was that I would be bombarded with the typical neon messaging exhorting me to be faster and hipper and techno-quicker. Not at all. Docomo took me (and more than a million people who are watching and sharing this ad) by offering a product that uses and emphasizes the natural in an otherwise totally synthetic world of telephony.
The ad is beautiful because it is simple and concentrates on a few key, high-quality ingredients. The beauty of nature, the beauty of music, and lets us into the process of creating something beautiful that attempts to replicate, or at least leverage, both these elements.
So after watching the video, I am now going back to the high-quality aspects of the messages I am trying to communicate. What are the equivalents of moving musical moments or tranquil forests in the busy policy or programmatic agendas we are trying to move? It at first seems like a stretch, but the ad has me thinking. I have some spokespeople and some powerful universal truths in the set of issues that I manage that I think rise to that category. Check out the video and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The message may not be loud, but it comes across loud and clear.