Tiptoeing Toward a Big Idea

Those of you who are old enough and fortunate enough will recall that wonderful Danish pianist/humorist Victor Borge. He combined mischievous tricks at the keyboard with offbeat, humorous gags and bits of monologue.

Even today, every time you see someone pantomiming quotation marks with their fingers, that's an invention of Victor Borge — except that he provided sound effects with his acted-out punctuation.

One of his best-known throw-away lines concerned his grandfather, a near-great inventor who'd concocted and marketed a soft drink he called 4-Up. When it wasn't successful, he brought out an improved version — 5-Up, followed by 6-Up. Still no luck. He gave up, and died of a broken heart. “He never knew how close he came.”

I thought of that joke when I saw this Bounce ad. Unless the people at Bounce read this column and care enough to take its advice to heart (both highly unlikely), they'll never know how close they came to a really big marketing idea.

Greatly expanding an established product's customer base isn't easy, no matter how brilliant the advertising. And it can be prohibitively expensive.

But what if you can get existing customers to increase their use of your product? That's almost as good as winning new customers.

It's the possibility Bounce is nibbling at with this ad. Buried in a wildly over-designed layout is an idea for a different way to use Bounce fabric softener and an invitation to readers to contribute more of them. But the ad does a poor job of telling the story and inviting click response, and does nothing to develop the big idea and carry it a step or two further.

At first glance we see a pastel script headline, “Dawn's story,” and some kind of illustration. I checked out the latter with someone who's had a lot of experience with child car seats, and he finally recognized it as a child car seat, but not right away. Not a major sin, but initially it could be mistaken for a little green creature from outer space. Beneath the picture is a script subhead, “Suspicious smells from below…” followed by an unreadable block of 5-point sans-serif too-wide-measure type and a picture of the product.

Dawn's story, if you have a magnifying glass handy, turns out to be charming, human and persuasive:

I have four children. That means I also have one minivan, two booster seats, three sing-along driving songs for kids albums in rotation, and four juice cartons rolling around under the car seats at any one time. So imagine my surprise when I got into the car recently expecting the smell of soggy soccer shoes, but discovered it smelled surprisingly fresh. Following a full-scale investigation we found a box of Bounce dryer sheets that had fallen out of a grocery bag. It was the nicest smelling thing I'd ever found underneath one of our car seats. Now I always stash a few Bounce sheets under there to add at least one pleasant thing to the ride.

Share your story online at BounceEverywhere.com and it could become one of the next Bounce print ads.

Behind every good idea lies an even better story.

Great product story, and well worth telling. With a clearer illustration and readable typography, this could have been quite an effective appeal to a major marketing niche.

So what should have been done to take it to the next level? Well, what if the ad had promoted more different uses of the product, attracted more visitors to the advertiser's Web site, and stimulated even more involvement by readers? All that would seem definitely worthwhile.