Fuse Insights   •   February 26, 2021

As I was starting Fuse Digital, I brushed up on so much helpful content while getting my teams together. Facebook platform optimization, B2B tactics that include social B2C, YouTube direct response ads, customer experience, and marketing funnel strategies (not one out of five was the same).

While I was absorbing all of this, I came across Dave Trott’s blog, The Ten Condiments of Advertising. What a brilliant read. And all he did was describe our relationship with salad:

“Lettuce, tomato, cucumber.

On their own, they don’t have much taste.

So, we add some mayonnaise and pretty soon, we have a tasty salad.

But now we decide, since all the taste is in the condiment, we don’t need the boring part of the salad.

No boring lettuce or tomato or cucumber to get in the way.

All we really need is the tasty part that everyone loves — the condiment.

So, we get rid of the lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and just serve up a plate of delicious mayonnaise.

But would we really expect anyone to eat a plate of mayonnaise?

Well, we’ve just used exactly that logic to get advertising into the state it’s in.”

Trott goes on to explain that, like our salad, advertising started off with boring product claims about why one product was better than the other.

And no one liked that very much.

So, we added music, nice photography, and humor — the emotional condiments. And people started liking advertising a lot more.

But then we did the same thing with advertising as we did with our salads: We assumed that if people liked the emotional condiments so much, why waste time with any of that boring stuff, like logos or information about what makes the product different.

We tossed together advertising with little more than retouched photography, VFX, sound design, and tasty music.

It reminded me that advertising is more likeable (and successful) when you combine an emotional experience with a rational message. This engages both sides of the brain and creates a path for storytelling that’s not just entertaining, but smart and engaging.

In our Daikin Fit video I wrote and directed, the message is completely rational — space-saving design with whisper-quiet inverter technology. That’s the what we were told to say in the creative brief. But the way we said it — the how — was emotional, playing up the connection we all share when listening to the soothing sound of crickets chirping.

For me, that’s a good example of an emotional ad with a rational message. It has all the ingredients of a proper salad.

Anything else would be a plateful of nothing but mayonnaise.