How do you decide whether to believe a message or not? As reviewed in Chapter Four of Overcome AD-versity, there are three basic components to judging a message to be credible. The receiver of the message assesses the source’s expertise, trustworthiness and motivation.
To do so, you have to read between the lines and read the cues, the hints of authenticity. You can determine the person’s credentials, why they are knowledgeable, their track record for being truthful and what they have to gain by telling you this story. Some of these are obvious. Some require some attention to the details.
Here is an example of the cues needed to be believed that was not in the book because it was particular to Venezuela when I was working with Ariel, a heavy duty detergent.
We ran an important radio campaign for Ariel. While TV penetration was extremely high in the large cities (95%), both urban and rural areas also relied on radio, particularly during the daytime where music and soap operas were the basic radio programming.
For our radio creative messages, we used testimonials. We would send a producer out to various areas of the country to candidly interview women about their experiences with Ariel and gather their little stories for our commercials. The women were users of the product and their expertise was in their daily use and their honest telling of their predicaments.
While we tend to think all countries are rather homogeneous within their borders, they are not. Venezuela, despite being a smaller country than some, had considerable regional cultural and linguistic differences. Each region of the country affected distinct accents: the people in the east spoke extremely rapidly while those in the Andes spoke slowly and had a slight hee-haw drawl sound and so on. Part of the charm of our candid commercials was the regional dialects, class differences, and idiosyncrasies captured in the candid stories. These made the commercials provocative and memorable. The dialects and individual testimonials in telling the stories made them unique.
The producer would bring back the tapes and our copywriter would go through and edit the comments to fit into a 60 second or 40 second story. Women recounted a special tablecloth that got stained before a family event that Ariel had cleaned; or a tennis playing son who scraped his knee and bled on his favourite T-shirt; or the dress a daughter spilled tomato sauce on just before a Quinceañera. The details of the story with the woman speaking in her local accent made the story believable.
I liked one with a woman who had a curious verbal tick. She would repeat each phrase forwards and backwards as she went, “I have five; five kids have I” and so on. It works easier in Spanish where the noun-verb placement is not so rigid as English. We could almost have turned the 60 second commercial into a 30 second one if we cut the repetition, but it would have lost all the charm and credibility created by the repetitive cadences.
We had been running these successfully for a few years when we received a letter from the government demanding we cease and desist. It seems that the only people who were allowed to do on air voices in a broadcast commercial had to be licensed announcers, not average people. The fear was that the integrity of the language would be undermined. The government gave us some time to remove the commercials from use.
We quickly put on a replacement campaign that made fun of the regular radio soap operas (novelas), but we were not happy with it. Then we had an idea. We took some of the scripts from our candid interviews in the field that we had not used yet. We cast a licensed woman announcer who had good acting ability, and we went into the studio.
We gave the actress a copy of the transcript and asked her to rehearse it as if she had one of the regional accents. She did a few rehearsals for us. They sounded stiff and too much like an announcer. We asked her if she thought she understood the story well enough. She said she did. So, we took the written script away from her and asked her to relate the story to us, in improvisation style, in character using the same particular regional accent.
We did a few takes until the story flowed out from her very naturally, like it had in the real candid commercials. It was as good or better than the original campaign. Voice quality was certainly clearer. It was not word for word, but the key ideas were there, with pauses, filler words, and the things that make speech sound natural.
Credibility is achieved when the listener believes they are getting the real story, not the advertiser’s story. Here is where the value of good acting delivers credibility in your commercials. It can make the story real and believable rather than a phoney pitch.
I think the key was removing the script so the actress, once she knew the story, had to just speak naturally in a street voice, not a studio one.
We now had a new operating procedure. We prepared a replacement pool of commercials. We used licensed actresses telling the stories of actual women from different areas of the country, often small towns, in accents meant to represent those areas. They got to read the script first, then had to improvise the story without the script.
The commercials went on the air, and we quickly got another letter from the government Ministry. We were able to respond with the actresses’ names and their announcer license information. The solution added a step but reduced the time required for audio editing and the brand continued to grow.
Ariel’s share of the laundry detergent market passed 50%, a dominating performance.
Removing the script was critical in getting a seemingly spontaneous, authentic, believable commercial.
It was a lesson I learned and used later. Whenever we would have someone sounding too “announcer-like” in a commercial, I removed the script and had them do it again. I think the message is more believable when it is not the voice of authority, but the voice of reason.
Having no written script to read means you are more likely to talk in the way you would talk normally, not how you think someone else wants you to. The naturalness of the delivery turns the information into the voice of a product user not the voice of the advertiser. The advertiser is motivated to sell you something, the user is not necessarily. That makes the user much more believable.
Believe me…