When I first joined xAd, I spent several weeks interviewing clients, investors, company employees and even my own contacts from the digital agency world, to better understand the communications and marketing challenges that lay ahead. One media agency executive said that the reason there’s such a huge discrepancy between ad spend on mobile compared to time spent is that advertisers feel like mobile screens are not good canvases for creativity.
We need to challenge this assumption.
Last week, I spoke to a friend who had just come from a presentation about the business advice book, A Beautiful Constraint. The entire premise of the book is that limitations can actually drive creativity, rather than stunt it. The example she gave was how Dr Seuss was only allowed to use a vocabulary of 250 words in his children’s books to make sure that all ages could understand.
On 25 February, sitcom Modern Family aired an episode shot entirely on an iPhone and iPad, and shown on a laptop screen. Showrunner Steven Levitan told the New York Times that he was inspired by a short film that premièred at the Toronto Film Festival, which was displayed entirely on a computer.
According to Re/Code, a post-production team had to create a replica of the operating system, Mac OS, to make the video appear authentic and real in the context of the laptop screen as displayed on the average living room big screen TV.
Reading about the approach that Modern Family is taking with its device-shot episode reminded me that the power of creativity goes beyond a canvas size.
There’s definitely something to that idea. While I still don’t quite understand the motivations of The Cat in the Hat, I can see how the limited word selection challenged Dr Seuss to educate and entertain generations of children with universal language. Regardless of how it’s shot, Modern Family always gets me to chuckle for its ridiculous misunderstanding, often from misuse or overuse, of technology. These examples just make me believe that the constraints of a smaller screen will only serve to push creativity in advertising to new levels, beyond the size of the canvas.
To find out more about the potential of location marketing, get in touch with the xAd team at contactus@xad.com
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