PLAYING IT STRAIGHT: To break through the quick-cutting, speed-chattering clutter, new testimonials use real-time sights, sounds and stories By BARBARA LIPPER

There's no doubt that we're living in the time of the

And as more and more advertisers get hip to speed, the corollary would seem to be that slowness equals old and slowness equals death. But it’s not that easy. There are times when everybody wants to get off the treadmill. What’s more, as quick-cut visuals start looking like so much video-game wallpaper, the power of sound – of music and the human voice – will be more important in breaking through.
That’s one of the reasons for the strength of that other, apparently contradictory, trend in advertising. Call it the switched-on testimonial. It combines the influences of Ross Perot and the Home Shopping Network with sophisticated cuts and direction. It feeds into our need for real stories, for regional voices, for any kind of connection, and for something that lasts, while also acknowledging our visual intelligence. It manages to transcend the dated, manipulated ad promises and benefits that we don’t even hear anymore. The only thing that seems real is to present the information directly, in the consumer’s voice.
But this is tricky business. We’re not talking about putting a sinus sufferer in a soundproof room and filming him as we switch his usual sprayer. This new genre requires some awareness of human interest, of how compelling a tiny moment can be. So far, Saturn advertising sets the standard with perfectly focused character pieces. For example, we get one hypnotic moment watching John Carelli in a barber chair. We’re hunkered down with the camera at haircut level as he offers snapshots of all the Saturn owners in his family posed next to their cars. But my favorite is the spot featuring Amy Fisher lookalike/obsessive cleaner Andrea Capotosto. The jury of three lemonade drinking family members is shown sitting in front of the Capotosto East Coast homestead, sipping and critiquing as Andrea, in cut-offs, T-shirt and big hair, assiduously washes her car at the curb. ‘She finds a spot and she goes and she does and she scrubs,’ her mother says. It’s funny and charming. It’s also almost impossible to write and cast stuff like that now without coming off as stereotypical or offensive. (Hip background music is also basic to the new testimonial. It needs to be quirky, perhaps with a little accordian work.)
By the way, this real-people-in-advertising trend is quite different from the last one we experienced back in 1988. At that time, ads typically used the word ‘real’ without any attempt to show actual people using the actual product. For example, a Winston cigarette ad offered ‘Real friends. Real people want real taste,’ while picturing artificially hearty L.L.Bean/J. Crew model types actively not smoking. Or in John Hancock’s revolutionary and seminal ‘Real life/Real answers’ campaign, script-reading actors talked about their made-up real-people problems.
These days, the new Midas campaign also fits the switched-on testimonial bill. Nicely done, it relies on that old letters-from-satisfied-customers routine, but takes away the sting of featuring straight, goony, over-earnest-brownie-point-earning letter-writers by incorporating some unexpected elements, like clanking typewriter type, subtitles over the visuals and saving the shot of the testimonial writer until the end. The dislocation of having the letter writer’s voice (and native accent) over disparate visuals gets interesting, too, because the draw throughout is the voice.
The new MasterCard spots also experiment with voice displacement. And while they don’t exactly fit into this switched-on testimonial arena, they do take the idea of breaking through to cynical consumers to a new level. They literally put words (or in this case, Rob Morrow’s twinkly, ironic, contemporary voice) in people’s mouths. (In one, it’s a supermarket bagger who looks right out of Northern Exposure.) Advertisers are constantly wrestling with the issue of believability, and ways to hide the man behind the curtain. Here, curiously, the more obvious you make the voice manipulation, the more honest – and believable – it seems.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)