How to and Should We Kill the Cliché in Copywriting?
The bane of every writer’s existence are clichés - especially those writers that think highly of themselves and their ideas. At LBB, we try our best to stray away from them as much as possible, but sometimes, they’re inevitable. After all, there’s a reason clichés came about. As Rick Morrison at SS+K reminds us, those little, all-encompassing phrases became such sticky parts of our speech because they were genius in the first place.
Just imagine for a second the first time somebody said that ‘every cloud has a silver lining’? The phrase’s origin is traced back to 1634, when John Milton in his poem ‘A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle’, asked, “Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud/ Turn forth her silver lining on the night?” He was so right for that one.
So anyway, all I’m saying is, clichés are there for a reason. When your friend is coming to you with the most unsolvable issue on earth, you can always dip your hand in your own bag of clichés and hit them with a classic go-to phrase. Or maybe you’re looking for a way to fluff up your email. There’s just so many uses to them.
But is there a time and place, and it’s important to ask ourselves - do they have space in advertising? While there is a good portion of TV and print advertising that does rely on clichés, how effective are they really when it comes to selling us things? Are they just annoying, lazy writing or do they act as effective shortcuts that perhaps spark memories in our minds?
We can’t forget AI too - currently, the most reliable cliché generator out there.
All of this led me to speak to creative directors and copywriters from across the advertising industry to find out if clichés are worth something, and if they’re not, why is advertising still being bogged down by such low-hanging fruit? Sorry.
Danielle Melia
Creative director at Dentsu Creative
Are clichés lazy? Yes, they are.
If we focussed as much attention on craft as we do on our fear of AI - we’d put our own minds at ease. Not one bit of copy, tag line or script that has ever featured a cliché has been noticed. It’s the grass of adland. Plenty of it. Everywhere. And one day it will just get snaffled up by a cow and pooped out. My analogy worked till that point… basically, clichés are shit.
I could bang on about classic copy. Intriguing old ads like Volswagen’s ‘Think Small’. The rallying cry of HSBC’s ‘We Are Not An Island’ or how the speech of ‘Be a lady they said’ still echoes in my mind years later.
The words hold meaning because they were crafted.
One brand that’s nailing great copy and doing it with a huge wink is Surreal. I’ve been following their antics for a couple of years.
They’ve written ads like ‘Don’t tell Tony’ for their frosted cereal. They’ve claimed they’re ‘Great for spooning’ and proudly announced that ‘Michael Jordan loves our cereal. *He’s just a normal bloke who lives in St Alban’s but he does really like it.’
The whole brand. From Surreal’s social, to their posters, to their packs with weird facts about bananas sharing human DNA, all bring a bit of joy.
We need to take a leaf out of their book and try harder. Because otherwise we might as well let AI write the clichés for us.
Over to you Chat GPT…
Prompt: write me ‘an advert for a tasty cereal’.
"Introducing Crunchy Bliss Cereal – the ultimate breakfast sensation! Dive into a bowl bursting with crispy whole grains, sweetened with just the right touch of honey and infused with real fruit pieces. Each bite is a journey of flavour and crunch, delivering a nutritious start to your day. Try Crunchy Bliss Cereal today and turn your mornings into a delicious adventure!"
Mind blowing.
Kristin Mizushima
Creative director at Founders
Clichés and AI.
AI is like a junior writer, the most attentive of juniors. It’s a junior who dreads no all-nighter, meets deadlines before they’re set, and never, and I mean never, complains.
Much like a junior, AI approaches a task with fervour (not a bad thing), prattling off a list of 50 unusable headlines (a bit of a bad thing). Quantity is prioritised over quality. And clichés come from inexperience and a lack of filter.
However, unlike a junior writer with a beating heart, AI lacks spirit and the ability to improve that comes from individual life experience. Feedback is a key component in improvement and much of that feedback cannot be expressed in the cold clicks of a keyboard.
You can’t blame the junior or AI junior for using clichés, you should blame the creative director for not giving the right feedback or having the discretion to edit out the BS.
Users of AI, whether they’re in our industry or not, need to see themselves as creative directors who can discern a good line from one that needs to be improved, an idea that is weak and one that is strong.
AI is just another tool in that cliché toolbox. Human writing will endure.
Lynne Deason
head of creative excellence at Kantar
Clichés act as mental shortcuts and that can be both a blessing and a curse for creatives. On the one hand, they’re great at helping consumers grasp what a campaign is trying to say quickly, by drawing on shared ideas that we all know and understand. But that familiarity can also make the content bland and boring – and therefore highly unlikely that people will even notice it. That’s a sure-fire way of wasting hard-earned media budget.
The best ads make it obvious which brand they are for and do so in a way that makes us sit up and pay attention. If you’re going to use clichés, you need to harness their familiarity, but avoid that gut reaction from people that content isn’t worth their attention because they’ve seen it all before. Pampers ‘Poo Face’ and ‘Poonami’ ads get this balance just right. Their humorous take on the unglamorous, sometimes stinky truth of caring for a baby makes an instantly meaningful and powerful connection with the audience, leading to ads that are eye-catching, entertaining and memorable. Pampers’ ads also leave the consumer in no doubt about the brand and product they’re promoting.
The use of clichés can depend on the audience – they might work really well for one group of people but completely turn another off. That’s where audience insights and consumer research are vital to explore what resonates with the people you want to influence and why. Tourism for Australia’s ‘Come and say G’day’ campaign featuring kangaroos and unicorns is a case in point. While not well received by Aussies, for potential visitors it captured what makes Australia unique and attractive in their minds in an entertaining and distinctive way.
By injecting clichés with originality, creativity, and often humour, ads can really benefit from the connection to something that’s instantly familiar. They can be made into something that’s engaging, memorable and most importantly, effective!
Eoin Conlon
Creative director at TBWA\Dublin
There are only two known substances that can kill an advertising cliché: dragonglass and valyrian steel. Neither of which are easy to obtain, but if we journey to…oh, hold on, I’m thinking of White Walkers. Clichés. Yes. We’re talking about advertising clichés, and there’s only one way to kill an advertising cliché – don’t be a bore. That’s pretty much it.
Yeah, I know, clichés can feel right. They’re cosy and safe and warm. And they never offend. They’re like a boiled potato. Sure, a boiled potato does a job and fills a hole – but nobody has ever got excited over a boiled potato. Who the fuck ever burst into a room to tell everyone about a boiled potato?
And that’s our job. Not the boiled potato bit, but the getting people excited part. We’re supposed to create work that gets talked about. Gets noticed. Gets quoted. Gets debated. Disrupts.
So, write real. Write raw. Write wrong. Twist language so it sticks out, and lives on. And above all else, kill the clichés; nobody remembers a boiled spud.
Grant Hunter
Chief creative officer at Iris
Clichés are all around us. “The new CMO firing the incumbent or ripping up successful campaigns because it just wasn’t ‘created here’” is one I’d love to see disappear. But the truth is clichés can be powerful. The public likes ‘familiar’. As humans we need repetition to build long lasting memory structures. Creatively we are often obsessed with the new. With what’s ‘never been done before. Too often we throw out powerful constructs because we have grown bored of them long before the people out there have. That’s because the public aren’t obsessing over brands like we do. They only have slivers of time when a brand is in their consciousness. But in those moments, we have an opportunity to entertain them and give them something to play with.
When a cliché is subverted or used ironically it can really connect with people. Take Old Spice’s classic: ‘The man your man could smell like’. It played with the absurdity of the alpha male and then broke the fourth wall to talk directly to the female gatekeeper. It then played to the advertising conceit of amazing locations and an aspirational lifestyle to suggest a world of success awaits if you spray your man in Old Spice - all with tongue firmly planted in cheek. More recently, in the 2023 Squarespace spot, Adam Driver plays to the original proposition of a ‘website that creates websites’. It repeats the phrase again and again, creating an earworm that hooks into your grey matter. It plays to the stereotype of Driver’s brooding character and to the sci-fi ‘Singularity’ cliché. And it does it all with a knowing self-awareness. We know it’s selling to us, but it entertains us as it’s culturally astute.
Take the humble jingle – a relic of advertising past, some might say, and often scoffed at. But jingles are only clichéd if they lose their effect. And in today’s meme-verse a repeatable, shareable mnemonic can be at the heart of an idea that travels. They can encourage participation. My 9-year-old spontaneously started singing the Domino’s yodel the other day – the earworm had wedged itself into his brain and he was taking delight in regurgitating it. In a world that is increasing fragmented but hyper connected, the battle for memorability is fiercer than ever. Just Eat deploys huge music stars to embed its “Did Somebody Say Just Eat” into our collective psyches. These mnemonics are designed to be remixed and reshared.
An animal as your brand mascot could also be called an advertising cliché, but talking animals are only clichéd if they lack imagination. Just look at the Duolingo Owl and its antics on social. The animal mascot rises in the wild West of TikTok and people lose their shit over it. It’s a modern-day mascot that revels in its kitsch-ness.
Mnemonics, jingles and mascots of course can be called clichéd but when reimagined as ideas that mobilise, they can encourage participation and connect into communities in a way that’s still hyper relevant today.
Vanessa Robinson
Creative director at Recipe
It goes without saying, clichés should be avoided like the plague.
They are the low-hanging fruit that’s existed in our industry since the dawn of time.
And with AI on the rise, it’s time we start thinking outside of the box.
Right now we’re living on borrowed time, creatively we need to be showing our worth and honing our craft in unique and cliché-free ways.
There really is no time like the present.
At the end of the day, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
It’s a no-brainer.
David Prideaux
Executive creative director at Five by Five
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
In this day and age, it goes without saying, me old muckers, that originality is an uphill battle. If you want the ‘mot juste’ you’ve got to avoid the low hanging fruit, think outside the box, burn the midnight oil and leave no stone unturned until you’ve found that diamond in the rough.
The brand you’re working on may not be the best thing since sliced bread and you probably think it would be easier to sell ice to an eskimo. But that kind of thinking is as useful as tits on a bull. Keep your chin up, remember smart cookies don’t crumble and if you want to push the envelope it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. When they want the moon on a stick, go back to the drawing board, read between the lines, sweat the small stuff and you’ll end up with the dog’s bollocks. Let’s face it, it’s all about the hard yards, especially when you’ve bent over backwards for someone.
Of course it’s not all words, words, words. Your art director will probably tell you a picture speaks a thousand words but unless the visual is as fresh as a daisy then frankly that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.
So, there you have it. Just put your back into it, grab the bull by the horns and if you play your cards right the client will be happy as a clam. But if they’re one sandwich short of a picnic and it goes down like a lead balloon, then the writing’s on the wall. Just buy them a cleansing ale and tell yourself at the end of the day, time heals all wounds. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
Jack Smail
Interim CEO at by The Network
As writer Ed McCabe once said, 'Disciplined creativity is often the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over the competition'.
Clichés and repetition persist in advertising, however, for their instant recognition and perceived efficiency in conveying messages. While they can tap into some form of shared cultural knowledge, overuse is indeed lazy writing and will only achieve mediocre results. AI can generate content quickly, but it also lacks human creativity, mimicking patterns and generating texts based on existing examples, feeding an ever-enlarging pool of repetitive ad clutter that consumers are exposed to. While AI might have some utility, brands can kill old clichés, beat the competition, and drive culture so long as they have the confidence to invest in strong, original or subversive ideas. Fear is the biggest threat we face. Bravery and resilience will be rewarded.
Marc Allenby
Co-Founder and CCO at Hijinks
Does anyone like a cliché? I mean as a gay man I find them to be pretty offensive. No one wants to be a cliché, and we certainly never want the brands we influence to be one, so why are they still used? Some may argue that clichés work because they are a shorthand way to communicate a message, but to me they feel like they belong in yesteryear and don’t help brands cut through; in fact, they make most of us cringe!
Clichés are just as often visual as verbal – and wholeheartedly unrelatable for most of us and the world at large. They just don’t reflect modern day society.
I think we should kill them off one by one. As creatives and marketers we have the power! KA-POW!! Perhaps we start with a quick question and ask ourselves who is excluded when we use the same tropes. For example, the couple with silver hair, blissfully holding hands on a deserted beach (sick bucket at the ready) – what about the silver-haired Generation X partners who prefer to be living their best life at a festival, raving like it was 1992!?
Fast forward to the depressed person with their hands on their head… let’s get real - who does that?! More like the depressed person faking it with their friends pretending that everything’s OK. Oh… and the the gays, yes, people like me. The cliché twinks surrounded by rainbows (I do love a unicorn, but come on). Move over twinks! What about the bears?!
Stereotypes and clichés are close relations and neither is true just because it’s familiar. We need to create a different familiar. A new familiar which inspires, supports communities and minorities. A familiar which creates inclusivity and a familiar which actually reflects the actual world we live in, not a world made up by some old relic in an ad agency.
Rick Morrison
Associate creative director at SS+K, part of M&C Saatchi
Clichés sit at the very tippy top of our brains. The same place we store our address, phone number, and favourite donut—the stuff we can just rattle off. So when a cliché shows up in an ad, it’s an indication the people who came up with that ad may not have dug deeper than the tippy top of their own brains for a way to express their thought. (I, too, have been guilty of this.) And then, when a consumer sees the cliché, the ad doesn’t penetrate past the tippy top of their own brain because it immediately recognizes the cliché, says “Meh, I know how this one ends,” and goes back to playing NYT Connections. I’m saying “brain” a lot but there will be a point.
So then how do we get past the first brain layer to the deep places where memories and revelations and desires happen? Ironically, to surpass the cliché, we have to come up with an idea that is worthy of becoming a cliché. Because that’s all a cliché is: a thought that was once so original, so surprising, so memorable that people were like “Wow! I never thought of it like that! I will remember this forever! And tell my children!” Fast forward five hundred years and that’s why we’re still saying “wild goose chase” from Romeo and Juliet.
So when we sit down with the goal of writing a commercial, or banner, or—let’s be real— Instagram caption that will get past a consumer’s tippy-top brain bouncer, we must push through the sweaty crowd of clichés at the top of our own brains. Down to the place where ideas that have never been spoken squirm around waiting. That counterintuitive, godlike state where we go from cliché users, to cliché makers.
