It’s the way I tell ‘em…

You remember Frank Carson right? Northern Irish comedian, star of Opportunity Knocks and uncle of Trevor Carson bright hope on the Northern Irish goalkeeping scene (currently under contract at Sunderland)? Of course you do. Then you’ll remember his catchphrase ‘It’s the way I tell ‘em’. And Frank was onto something there…

The way you receive a message is often just as important as the content of the message itself. Sometimes it’s more important.

If for example, you want to tell people you have a lawnmower for sale you could stick up a sign in the supermarket. But that isn’t very exciting.

You could dial it up a little then, by sticking your lawn mower on your front lawn with a nice hand painted sign. And that might turn a few heads.

Or you could hire a flock of sheep to crawl through the streets of London followed by a blimp with ‘You could have these sheep, or one lawnmower to keep your grass tidy – I know which one costs less in ongoing vet bills’ scrawled on the side. Same message, different methods.

Now, this is hardly startling stuff, marketers of all types are always looking for new ways to make their message to stand out. But what is often missing from the context, is any emotion. A sense of resonance that brings the content alive in a smart, and engaging way. Sure we can make the sign a different shape, or bigger, or project it on a building, or write it in the sky, or tattoo it on the knuckles of a bus driver, but unless that builds the message and becomes part of the interaction itself, we could be doing more.

A great example of this, is a neat little idea I picked up from Make Magazine…

When you leave a house, especially if you’ve lived there for a long time, it can be a little sad. Sometimes you might want to leave something behind, but not something too conspicuous. So how about a message hidden behind a light switch?

Imagine the moment: you’re doing a little DIY, it’s a lazy Sunday and it’s raining outside. You unscrew the light switch because you want to fit a new dimmer let’s say. As you take it off you see this text, and reading it, you discover the story of someone who lived there before you. Maybe recently, maybe many years ago. Now I don’t care what that message says, you’re going to read it. And you’re going to smile. And you’re going to talk about it.

In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with more and more messages in more and more invasive ways, the discovery of something unexpected becomes all the more precious.

Now, it’s unlikely that Mega Corporation Ltd are going to start putting things on the back of light swtiches, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look at the media we use to promote messages from a much more emotional angle. Discovery, disruption, secrecy, personalisation and wit all have their part to play and when they collide the connection between the message and reader can go even deeper.

Have you seen any great examples of messages resonating in new and unusual ways? Do share in the comments…

Brought into the world on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 and filed under 1000thoughts, Creative, Things we like.