The Dangers of "Urgency"

by David Croomes

In a creative working process, it's not always easy to remain objective. Being able to take a step back and look at your work, whether it's a TV spot or masterpiece painting, and imagine how the average audience member will react can go a long way towards making your work achieve maximum effectiveness.

People on the working end have a tremendous fear of their audience becoming bored. No one likes to sit through a TV spot without being stimulated, challenged, or intrigued. However, often times this fear propels many advertisers into a problem just as dangerous as boring their audience.

Advertisers get so worried about losing an audience's interest that they resort to bombarding them with as much information as possible. Cramming too much text onto the screen, unnecessary repetitiveness, overbearingly loud voiceovers… all common mistakes that are made out of the fear of the ad becoming boring. The typical excuse (pitfall) is that the ad, for whatever reason, needs to feel "urgent".

Try to remain objective. When you've written your script, take a step back and envision your finished ad: the tone, pacing, volume, and feel that it will have. Do you think that the average housewife or soccer mom that your ad is supposed to be targeting will respond positively to it? If this is your target audience, odds are that they are watching channels like Food Network, HGTV, E!, Style, Bravo -- and if your ad sounds like it might as well be trying to sell monster truck tickets, odds are that they're going to tune you out.

Urgency is necessary, especially for seasonal sales, but don't use it as a crutch. Take a step back and look at the big picture. With a little more balance and understanding, you'll be seeing dollar signs in no time.