The Tendo View

Warning – this article features a number of linked images and campaigns that are, as the title implies, shocking and NSFW. Click through to the links accordingly.

Shock campaigns, including the use of gory, disturbing, and unsettling images and scenarios, work as an attention grabber. Whether it’s Volkswagen’s “safe happens” campaign of a few years back or the U.K’s “texting while driving” PSA, shock and awe messaging have been an institution in connecting with motorists since the “Red Asphalt” driver education films debuted in 1964.

Outside of the automotive realm of selling us safer cars and preventing us from taking driving too lightly, shock marketing has been put into action to keep us off drugs (Faces of Meth and the more recent Montana Meth project come to mind), as well as encouraging us to buy condoms and practice safe sex (see recent French and German ad campaigns depicting sex with disturbing partners ranging from giant scorpions to Hitler).

When the shock wears off

So what’s the point of these campaigns? If it’s to start a Facebook conversation on a topic, and your topic involves sex, drugs, or automotive gore, then the path to success arguably begins and ends with capitalizing on that innate human fascination with all things morbid and taboo. Rubbernecking by ad proxy, as it were.

But if you were to expand the shock message to include the patently absurd, thereby pulling in just about every viral and subversive campaign fit to be highlighted on industry sites (like Adrants) that cover this beat, as marketers, we are left with this question: “You have our attention, but so what?”

For sex, drugs, and cars, maybe the attention is enough. But how can you take the attraction to powerful images and concepts and translate that into more meaningful impressions around a consumer brand? How do you engage and retain the audience’s attention long after the initial shock has worn off?

The boldness of Benetton

For guidance, we can look to one of the pioneers of the genre, Luciano Benetton, and his eponymous clothing brand. His ad campaigns in the early 1980s with then-creative director Oliviero Toscani depicted disturbing but beautifully rendered images of race, poverty, religion, refugees, AIDs, capital punishment, war, and corruption.

His critics scoffed, citing Benetton and Toscani’s work as a shallow and sensational ploy for the sole purpose of raising eyebrows and causing a stir, but Benetton saw it differently. “The purpose of advertising is not to sell more,” he said. “It’s to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company’s values…” In this statement, Benetton made a striking observation that today’s marketers would be wise to heed. In essence, he points out that it’s obvious to the world that Benetton makes clothes, so if the purpose of advertising is to educate people about what a company has to offer, then telling them that you make clothing isn’t revealing much. On the other hand, using edgy and colorful images to show consumers that Benetton makes edgy and colorful clothes does more to communicate Benetton’s differentiated attribute—the core essence of its brand—than an ad laboriously detailing the breadth of its garments or their (assumedly) impeccable craftsmanship and quality.

Benetton described engaging his audience in an evolving exercise of painting the Benetton brand as one that thumbs its nose at the status quo, one that is self-aware and self-actualized in a turbulent and troubling world. In short, he clothed his brand in a character and gave it personality. In so doing, he pushed one-way media to its absolute limits in the pre-Internet age, creating dinner table and water-cooler conversations from glossy posters in a way that few of today’s YouTube and Facebook virals could ever hope to muster.

His ads were not mere billboards for hawking wares, but a mirror back into his company’s core values, designed to facilitate communication of those values with its intended audience. As Benetton summed up himself, “Communication should never be commissioned from outside the company, but conceived from within its heart.”

Nearly 30 years later, the Benetton brand still conjures up bright colors for a bright and worldly clientele. VW, by contrast, got its 15 minutes out of “safe happens,” but a few years later we’re already wondering this: Did VW’s campaign and the tremendous subsequent viral pickup reach within the heart of what VW stands for? Is VW perceived as any more or less safe than any other car brand today? Benetton took shock and owned it. He launched his brand with it and embraced it as an enduring and representative attribute of Benetton’s core values. Unlike VW and the preachy PSAs, Benetton grabbed us by our starched white collars, forced us to look, and then kept us looking and thinking about his company through that colorful and disturbing lens for decades.