There’s a site called Reddit which is a user community of real geek news and articles. The people who populate it are dead smart, program computers and hate big commercial brands apart from Apple. So I was surprised to see an article from a Purina cat foods blog on the front page of Reddit.
The article on the Purina blog is essentially about how cats have learned the importance of meowing only to communicate with humans (they never use meowing in cat-to-cat comms).
The article was then submitted to Reddit with the description that got it voted up to the front page as:
“Cats only meow because they want us to be their slaves”.
Whoever spun this has done a quality bit of planning – re-framing an ordinary article to resonate with the geek culture on Reddit.
This brought me to the idea of sub-cultural themes – essentially a posh way of saying an audience insight. They’re a bit like the power chords I read ages ago on Russell Davies’s blog, but more about myths, beliefs and subtleties rather than the raw imagery of powerchords.
For example the powerchord here is “animals can talk!”, which is pretty universal, but the geeky subcultural theme, identified by the headline, is
That an unlikely sub-species or person is actually in control.
Geeks love this theme as it’s an amusing scenario which is flattering to quiet, overlooked, intelligent people.
I’d argue that identifying these cultural themes is crucial to making great ads which resonate. We’re doing it already – in the audience section of creative briefs we put “these are kind of people that believe…” and such like. But I’m going to try thinking about more of these themes for different audiences and putting one in each brief.
audience insight:
I’m know I’m clever, but shy and find it hard to influence people
leads to popular sub-cultural theme:
An unlikely but secretly intelligent subspecies is actually enslaving us
hook:
Intelligent cats have us enslaved
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