The Most Brilliant Ad Campaign

I’m always super intrigued by ads, by anything, really, that tries to get somebody to do something.  When I was twelve, my mom and I went to this bookshop, where she said to pick out whatever I liked.  I found a book called “INFLUENCE: The Psychology of Persuasion,” and just had to have it.  Admittedly, I imagined myself, after reading the book, wielding intense powers over other people, a vision of myself which can only be related to others by having them imagine purple lighting coming from my outstretched fingertips, sort of like the emperor in Star Wars.  This is how scary I was into influence.

Manipulation is fascinating to me.  What leads us to one choice or another?  What catches our attention?

My girlfriend works in marketing, and sometimes we’ll discuss which ads are our favorites.  A billboard, just like the one pictured above, caught my attention once, while driving back home on the freeway.  There was a lot of traffic, and I had time to look at it.  It was in a prime location, just at the top of some major junction of freeways leading into San Francisco, and must have been seen by thousands of drivers every day.

All it had was a phone number.  That’s it.  All white, blank, with a phone number.  And I couldn’t figure it out.  My mind kept searching for symbolism, some kind of hidden message, the way advertisements for arthritis medication have thirty seconds of old people walking through the meadows and then some chipper title like “Youthera,” underlined with a friedly, hopeful blue swish of ink.

But this was just a phone number.  And then I thought, “Jesus, I must have spent like five minutes trying to figure out this ad.  I’ve gotta just call that number.  Oh MY god…that’s brilliant.’ To me, I was witnessing complete minimalist advertising.

They say the average person sees something something like ten-thousand ads a day, and we’re so used to them all, in our lives, all the time, that we just filter everything out.  Maybe one or two get in, like how there’s a million bacteria on your skin, and maybe one gets you sick.  But in a world of colors and fonts,-graphic motion and sex-appeal, this was simple, pure and baiting.  It was just a number.  It said, “Call me.  Go ahead, don’t worry so much.  What am I?  Forget about it, we’ll talk about it over drinks.  Just call the number and it’ll sort itself out.”

It was so simple.  I had to know what that number was for.  I punched it into my phone.  It was an answering service.  It was an answering service for the billboard company.  The billboard was selling itself.  If you want to advertise, that was that billboard’s number.  That’s all.  No great scheme.  So freaking obvious.

And so that’s my favorite advertising.  The kind which was so direct, it completely escaped me, and in that escape I was free to imagine all the greatness and possibility the world might have to offer me, if only I called to ask for it.

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