Okay – I just bought a new frying pan. The brand itself, though well-known, didn’t mean much to me, but I liked the look and feel of the product. The entertainment started when I got it home, however, and read the little brochure that came with it.

But first, a little backgrounder. There’s an ad agency in Copenhagen which is known for its very simple formula, consisting of two basic words: “freedom” and “sense”. For a long list of clients, the agency has come up with the slightly altered versions of the same idea. It goes kind of like this:

“Free yourself”
“Free your senses”
“Sense your freedom”
“Free your creativity”
“Sense your creativity”
“Sense your delight”
“Delight your senses – for free”

I could go on with this mindless drivel, but you get the idea. It seems that, by seeking the deeper meaning in things as elementary as a frying pan or an ironing board, and presenting this to the advertiser in beautiful images and words like “freedom” and “sense”, the poor client can’t help but fall in love with this stunning new angle to what they had previously (and rightly) considered quite everyday. The result is text like that appearing in the frying pan brochure:

“Sense…Combination, Material, Form. We receive the information that enables us to make choices through our senses. When we cook we use all our senses – we taste, we use our sense of smell, we feel, hear and see – and we choose our utensils. The choice of utensils is part of the experience of cooking and serving food. Chosen with common sense and a reliance on our senses, this can become a great experience.”

Who orders text like this to be written – who approves it? Only people who can’t see past their own ego. Now, I am just guessing that this text was written while the fyring pan manufacturer was a client of the aforementioned agency.

Here’s another of their gems:

I can’t remember the exact wording, unfortunately, but the company was a famous Danish household hardware manufacturer. The product was an ironing board. A lavish two-page, full-color ad in a leading lifestyle magazine showed the ironing board suspended across a deep abyss. The basic idea read something like: “An ironing board is a bridge between your shirts and your personality”. It then raved on about personal style, taste, whatever. People, it’s a friggin’ ironing board. Get a grip. If anyone’s interested, I’ll go back and try to find that ad, because it’s a legend, at least in my own mind.

Luckily, it seems the hardware manufacturer has recovered from its senseless drift into La La Land. And they no longer appear on the agency’s client list. Today, they focus on, and strongly communicate, a single and very clear positioning: developing “solid household products that retain their beauty and performance for up to 20 years”. This simple statement has become the central thread for almost everything they communicate. And that’s a fantastic example for many other advertisers to follow.

A final example of the agency’s propensity for lavish flights of fancy: I saw a pitch the company did to a US-based company that manufactures the green foam stuff you push flower stems down into when you are arranging flowers. That’s all – just a holding device for the stems. The concept for the pitch? “Free yourself”. Apparently, this humble material made it possible for the purchaser to realize their true creative potential.

And that’s how to make a ton of money on the perpetual readiness of many advertisers to fall madly in love – with themselves.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 9:47 am by Jonathan Winch and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.