6 examples of insane honesty in content marketing

You’ve read the Insane Honesty slideshare.

(If you haven’t, here it is:)

Now here are the examples.

Six fantastic examples of Insane Honesty – some legendary, some unsung-to-date-but-now-oh-so-sung.

[Now with NEW and improved examples, below — most of which, to be insanely honest,  aren’t as good as the Big Six but some of which are right up there.]

I hope they prove to you the power of this underused tactic and that you find ways to use it.

1) Avis advertises its second-place market share.

So you’re a car rental company being soundly beaten by a bigger, better-known car rental company.

Marketing 101 said:

“Ignore your market share and just act like the leader — like the dreams of any (every) Disney princess, one day it may come true.”

What Avis did:

They didn’t just admit their second-tier market share, they advertised it.

In fact, they didn’t just advertise it, they made it the center of one of the most successful campaigns ever run :

“We’re number two. We try harder.”

This is the original ad, written by Paula Green of Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1962:

Subsequent ads tied their number two status to specific benefits:

The campaign (preserved as a Project Re:brief here) turned into a strategy for the whole business – and took Avis from 18% market share to 34% in a very short time.
Fifty years later, it’s still their line. (That in itself is insane: how many ad lines last for fifty years?)

2) Volkswagen Beetle embraces the obvious.

In a world where all cars looked like this:

How do you introduce a car that looked like this?:

Well, what you don’t do is pretend it’s beautiful.

They could have ignored the design but, let’s face it, how the Beetle LOOKED would always be the elephant in the room.

So instead of ignoring it, they made it the hero of the entire campaign. And the rest is advertising history:

Google “Classic VW Beetle ads” and you’ll see dozens and dozens of these terrific, insanely honest ads (also done by DDB in their heyday).

Another favourite is an early example of news-jacking:

What VW and DDB did here is not just re-invent car advertising and create one of the most successful car brands in history. They also sowed the seeds of a distinctive brand that would pay dividends for decades (and is still paying them today). VW is a likeable, fun, self-effacing car brand — and attained that without sacrificing brand values like quality and integrity.

3. A real estate agent gets real.

The rose-tinted property descriptions of comically optimistic real estate agents have become a cultural cliché. So it’s surprising and refreshing to see an honest ad for a crappy little flat.

In this example of Insane Honesty, posted on Zoopla by Harvey Residential, a Hoxton flat is described as:

“Not a very nice one bedroom flat but like the budgie it’s cheap; open plan, has a well used kitchen, and if you can call it this – a small lounge.”

That ‘not very nice’ has just entered my Copywriting Hall of Fame right alongside ‘Buy More Beef You Bastards’.

The accompanying photos support the copy:

The ad got lots of press coverage and the flat got a lot of attention – from the right people: people who wanted to live in Hoxton but couldn’t afford a nice flat there.  As Warren George, the director of Harvey Residential put it, “There is no point giving people the wrong message.”

Amen.

4. A budget hotel celebrates its dirty linen.

I LOVE this one.

When the Hans Brinker, a not-very-nice budget hotel in Amsterdam, added lots of beds (not rooms, beds) and raised prices, they knew they needed a special kind of marketing. Fortunately, they chose a special kind of ad agency, Kessels Kramer.

The hotel looked like this:

And the rooms looked like this:

The campaign is a terrific example of the first principle of Insane Honesty: take your weakest points and put them in the spotlight.

There are lots and lots of great executions to choose from (here’s a Google-trove) but here are a few favourites:

And just to show that the campaign attracts ideal prospects (young, stoned people who don’t care about hotel frills and aren’t likely to be actually sleeping in the room anyway), here’s a fairly typical Trip Advisor review:

Just goes to show you the power of managing expectations (so you can slightly exceed them). And I love their response.

5. An ugly building tells it like it is.

So you’ve bought a big office building in a nice-enough neighbourhood (Wood Green) but it looks like this:

Maybe you only have enough money to do up the lobby but not enough to slap on that skin-deep, glass cladding developers seem to love.

Well, you could ignore the look of the building and market its location, price and amenities. Or you could go the insanely honest route:

They actually called the building Ugli — and slapped it on the outside in 20-foot high letters.

In short: they had FUN attracting their best prospects without worrying about alienating their worst (companies that want their building to say who they are).

Nice website too (by JP Creative):

6. Three, no four, more examples

I don’t know why, but I wanted the number 6 in the headline of this post, so I’m smuggling three , no four, more examples here, with a bit less discussion (you get the idea anyway):

[UPDATE: even MORE BONUS examples at the same low price…]

Thomson Holidays tells it like it is

Back in 1996, Richard Bowden-Doyle (then Deputy MD of Thomson Tours, now Velocity Chairman), decided to be insanely honest in every hotel description in Thomson’s brochures.

As part of their ‘Tell It Like It Is’ initiative, they printed the bad reviews and ratings, along with negative comments about specific properties. No one had ever done that before.

The result: massive publicity; a leap to 30% market share; a major uplift in customer satisfaction scores (we talk about this effect in our Managing Expectations post) — oh, and a big, fat promotion for Richard.

Hyposwiss skips the bullshit

Bank ads are notoriously slimy – full of unctious, sycophantic drooling that disguises an utter disdain for actual customer service.

So this insanely honest campaign by Hyposwiss is refreshing as hell:

My favourite headline of the campaign is, “If you want to double the money in your account, please put twice as much in it.”  See more of the ads here.

TransferWise goes all transparent

Transferwise publishes real reviews on their home page — even when there are negative things in them. Here’s one:

See how compelling that is? If you really, really want to transfer money right away, TransferWise may not be your best option. If you don’t mind waiting, they’ll save you a lot of money. So they say so, winning your trust immediately. That’s how Insane Honesty works.

Ricky Gervais does a celebrity endorsement for Optus & Netflix

Great script. Great performance.

Strictly speaking (and why speak if not strictly?), this isn’t really Insane Honesty — it’s comedy. But it touches on the truth behind every celebrity endorsement in a way that hits so close to the bone, it’s kind of insane.  And I like it.

[Thanks for this one, Harry Kapur]:

Pizza Hut in Australia launches a Vegemite Crust pizza:

If you haven’t tasted Vegemite (or Marmite), their faces say it all:
[Damn: the Pizza Hut PR team removed the video and squashed all online trace of it. Bummer. Well, what it showed was people taking their first bites of the new pizza with the, let’s say ‘polarizing’ ingredient (a brown, salty, yeast-extract… you don’t want to know), then grimacing with disgust. Funny. Honest. Surprising. And now dead.]

Nordnet breaks the fourth wall:

(Thanks to Jo Burkhart for this:)

Three reasons you don’t want to adopt Eddie the Terrible.

The Humane Society of Silicon Valley wrote this hilariously honest ad to find a home for Eddie the Terrible.

Thanks to Ann Handley for this — and read her post on why she loves it so much.

A typical chunk of copy:

“Like to go for walks in dog infested areas? Enjoy the dog park? Keep walking….

While Eddie The Terrible has never actually attacked another dog, he’s made it abundantly clear that he hasn’t ruled out the possibility. He goes from zero to Cujo in .05 seconds when he sees another dog on leash. Well, sayeth you, lots of small dogs bark at other dogs on leash. True. But we know people expect a lot from dogs in this day and age and when it comes to leash theatrics, Eddie’s at the top of his game. Also true: he’s made some progress. But lest his adorable little blond-ness let you think this is going to be a plug-and-play dog, think again.”

What have we learned here?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned that:

Insane Honesty is surprising

Because marketing is so rarely completely honest.

Insane Honesty is charming.

We like people who make fun of themselves more than we like braggarts.

Insane Honesty alienates the people you want to alienate.

Face it: they were never going to buy no matter what your marketing said.

Insane Honesty attracts your ideal prospects.

The ones who are 9-17 times more likely to buy.

Insane Honesty builds trust.

And that’s maybe the single hardest thing to build in a marketing context.

Insane Honesty signals confidence.

Without a doubt, the most important signal you can send.

Insane Honesty focuses you on battles you can win.

Not a bad place to focus if you’ve got limited resources (and who doesn’t?).

Got any great examples to share?

I’d love to hear about them.