Page 187 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

178 SELLING CREATIVE IDEAS REQUIRES ITS OWN CREATIVITY

agency worked for Lotus Development Corporation, and we were
presenting an idea for what they called a “document processor.”
Lotus was late to get into word processing, so the company tried to
leapfrog word processing with a concept for a “document processor,”
designed for lengthy, complex technical documents. At that time, the
top-selling word processors, Microsoft Word and WordPerfect, were
built primarily for business letters. With our niche being long docu-
ments, we had an idea for a print ad that was long. In fact, it was a dou-
ble-gate, 16-page advertisement to run in Time magazine, nearly 70
inches long. To my knowledge it was the longest ad ever in Time, the
longest from the standpoint of length when it was folded out, and
probably the most expensive single, one-time insertion at the time in
that magazine—about a million dollars, I believe.
To sell the concept of long document processing, and to sell the con-
cept of a long ad, we created a tangible selling device. Our theater was a
runner on the floor that looked like a massive, oversized long docu-
ment. When people got out of the elevator, our runner led them 100
yards to the conference room down the hall. They were forced to actu-
ally walk on this very long document. What we did was to take five
pages, have them blown up and silk-screened onto some 15-foot-long
canvas pieces, and then we repeated it and stitched it all together. It was
a production nightmare, but it was theater. It was event marketing
designed to sell an idea. And I must tell you that the clients walked into
the room already liking an ad they hadn’t even seen yet.

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Can I Show You Our Suit, Sir?
Give people choice. When you’re selling an idea, give people some
selection. Don’t just show them one idea. Nobody ever walked into a
haberdashery that had only one suit. Nobody ever walked into an
automobile showroom that had only one car. Nobody ever walked into
a computer showroom that had only one computer. People want
choice. Give it to them.
When I first started in the ad business, a senior writer told me that
if you show people one idea, one of two things will happen. If they like
you, they’ll say they like it. If they don’t like you, they’ll say they don’t
like it. But if you show them three ideas and ask them which is best,
they’ll probably tell you the truth, and if they don’t like you and tell you
they like A, you’ll know it’s B or C that’s best.
Of course, to give people choice forces you to have more than one
idea. And, I’m not saying have one good idea and five bad ones; they all