Creativity In Advertising

I was listening to the radio the other morning, as I do most mornings and "The Osgood File" came on. Dave Ross was filling in and and talking about "Figuring Out Ways To Force Viewers To Watch TV Ads."

Now with so many of us using TiVo and DVRs, fewer and fewer of us are watching commercials. (I, myself, love my DVR. I can watch Hereos and The Closer in a fraction of the time.)

But Dave wonders if the point of watching TV is to be entertained, "If the commercials are entertaining enough, conceivably, Super Bowl rules might kick in - where you skip the programming so you can watch the commercials."

It was a very amusing segment and I chuckled, but then I got to thinking...is YOUR advertising clever and engaging? Is it entertaining? Does your audience want to watch/read it?

Too often we get into a comfort zone and stop being creative. We start providing answers before we even know the questions.

So...stop phoning it in. That doesn't mean you need to be silly or flip. But you should come up with a new way of looking at things. A fresh perspective can yield new means of communicating with your target audience and answer the real questions. Not the ones that you have pat answers for already.