Observation: Lets Confuse / Tease People More Often - They'll love it, honest.

I found myself wasting time on youtube again today... laughing out loud as usual at some great MTV (Finland?!) footage from decades past...

The song, and dance choreography is a marvel in itself of course. (And I highly recommend it)

But what made me think was the guy you see oh-so briefly at the start and end...

Captivating as the video it's self is, I want to know HIS story. He is the most interesting thing about the clip and I wish they'd left more of him in.... Or do I?

Perhaps that would have been a let down compared to what my own imagination fills in about his commentary, his mannerisms, his whole career and background....

And this is my slightly random point. This is an issue we often face in marketing... how clear and complete do we have to be? Most of the time caution on the part of either agency, client or face-value consumer research makes us clear things up to be brain-damagingly clear.... Make it obvious, make it simple, leave no room for ambiguity.

Now one might concede that this is possibly a good idea for most TV advertising. Although I would point to marvels like Dunlop's classic "Tested for the unexpected" (referenced below) as counter-argument to that.

However as we increasingly start to create things beyond TV for our clients, I think we could do much worse than to copy "What/who/why the hell??!?!" principle from fiction.

I don't mean dot.com style salience ads, but something more like Lost or the X-Files secrets of success... never really giving the whole game away and playing fast and loose with reason and follow-through.

So, sure it could be a mess if done badly (erm..check out a prime time ad break as it is!), but lets give it a go more often in marketing. Lets leave things untold, leave random hooks and questions. Let's have more weird head-banded MTV hosts in our work, and lets fire researchers who want consumers to understand everything first pass.

If for no other reason than simply to get people saying "What the fuck?!" and coming back for more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cTP9tvvqAE