The Official AdLand Advertising Tutorial: Part Seven - Case Studies

Today we bring you Part Seven of the ongoing Official AdLand Advertising Tutorial. This time, we thought we'd share some helpful (and not so helpful) advice on creating The Case Study.

Professors teaching class today: Kidsleepy and yours truly Åsk Dabitch Wäppling.

Chapter One: Sincere advice for those unfamiliar with sarcasm.

• The longer the better. Five minutes is your minimum amount. Think of it as a logo: The bigger, the better.
• Always choose a song that is either a) Indie b) Was a huge hit last year c) Is something that starts quietly, and builds to a rousing finish. When in doubt, use Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over," Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" or anything by Coldplay or Band of Horses.
• There are three types of lies. Lies. Damned lies. Statistics. And a return on investment is over 100%.
  (Learning how to count isn't that important, everyone in advertising thinks 2+2=5. )
• Feel free to exaggerate. ROI of 300% is only the beginning. Remember, you didn't just make an ad. You started a revolution. Or stopped one.
• Like Paul Arden says: "Find out what is right with your clients products and dramatise it, like a cartoonist dramatises an action.", ie: Go KONY2012 on our ass. Or as Luke Sullivan said: be sure to destroy a cockroach with an atom bomb. (Okay, I'm paraphrasing here.)
• Be sure to pull every last article as possible to show the scope of your reach. if your mom has a blog and mentioned your spot, it's fair game. if your mom doesn't have a blog it's also okay if she mentioned it to a friend of hers in passing on the phone.
• Have five of your friends stand around gawking at your amazing stunt/event/demonstration, and film them from twenty different camera angles ensuring a feel of hectic action, crowds, while removing the need for carrying around a bunch of "model release" forms.

Chapter 2: An example of the perfect case study.

Just like a good high school essay, all case study scripts have a beginning, middle and end. feel free to use this as a template:

Sans Sheets, the paperless toilet paper, had a problem. How to convince people to buy Sans Sheets paperless toilet paper when they're used to wiping their ass with paper?

We started with a simple idea: Only Asses use toilet paper.

And in the process, we didn't just start a revolution the world has never seen before. No, we started a revolution the universe has never seen before. And changed our own world, and the way we think about wiping our asses in the process.

We seeded our Only Asses Use Toilet Paper message on social media for a decade before we launched any communication. We bought the rights to the word "paper," and "ass" and "asses." Whenever someone used our keywords to search on Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, or Altavista, Dogstar or Lycos, we recorded it. For. Ten. Years.

Finally, we launched or first communication on television. (Insert ten seconds of commercial. Fifty seconds would be better, especially if it's an irrelevant part) followed by radio, print, digital, bobby pins, talking stuffed animals, sky writing, and ass tattooing.

In the first two months our campaign got eleventy billion downloads, a quarter million impressions, four hundred and ninety eight million likes, and three phone calls from world leaders. One porn star even bleached her asshole with our logo on it. Not because she was paid to do so, but because she wanted to.

The results were an astounding 2000% growth, per minute, for 800 weeks.

And the press: Forbes, USA Today, New York Times, Pravda and Der Spiegel wrote about us. We were voted best product of the entire world since the invention of fire by Fire Prevention magazine.

Our message was carried throughout the web in milliseconds and continues to spread. "Only asses use toilet paper" went so far out in space via the asseribo message, it caused us, happily, to create a satellite office on Uranus, just so we could serve the needs of an alien population hungry for Sans Sheets toilet paper.

And when the original broadcasts return back to earth? The revolution movement will start all over again.

Stay tuned...

Chapter three: Case studies (and one revolution). Here are some interesting (good and bad) examples of case studies.

• when it comes to lying, go hard or go home.


The Lullaland goodnight hashtag

• Like Just For Laughs Gags. Only it's even more unfunny.


Frooti Juicy Mango Surprise

• Cause revolutions. Like the Vodafone case study says it did.

Chapter Four: If you made it this far here's some actual good advice.

Don't make a case study longer than 60 seconds.

Unless you can actually prove it, you were not the first to do something on Pinterest, or the moon for that matter. So don't claim it.

Don't waste the judges time with too much wankery.

Don't insult the judges' intelligence with made up numbers and facts. Remember: They've reached a lot higher than you in advertising, since they're judges. And they're smarter than you are. They're not idiots.

Borrowing interest from a hipster song makes your idea feel cliché. Also, it's illegal unless you've paid for the rights.

The word "revolution," only applies to actual revolutions. "Movement," is also a stretch.
You created an ad. It's hard enough to make a good one without bringing in visions of marching people in the streets.