Editor | On 21, Oct 2002

Darrell Mann
Director, CREAX nv
Ieper, Belgium
Phone/Fax: +44 (1275) 342960
E-mail: Darrell.Mann@creax.com

This article is about the possible application of some of the TRIZ tools to the problem of marketing, and specifically issues surrounding the systematic creation of disruptive advertisements. Disruptive advertisements according to one of the world’s leading advertising agencies are those that attract customers because they fundamentally challenge and disrupt conventional modes of thinking. In TRIZ terms, a disruptive advertisement is one that challenges a contradiction. The article uses a UK survey of the nation’s favourite television advertisements as its foundation and examines them for the presence of contradiction elimination and, where relevant, the strategies used to overcome those contradictions.

One of the world’s biggest advertising agencies has published two books in the past four years on some of the secrets of their success (Reference 1, 2). The underlying philosophical basis underlying a lot of what they have achieved involves the recognition and challenging of conventions. Jean-Marie Dru calls this ‘disruption’. Disruption is effectively about finding a new way of presenting things; it is about paradigm shifts; finding new s-curves (Reference 3, Chapter 7). What Dru and his team have found – without any apparent awareness of TRIZ – is that locating these shifts involves the identification and resolution of contradictions. In many senses, from their advertising context, they are looking for the same sort of disruptive shift in the thinking of the recipient that comes from humour. Humour, as discussed every month in the CREAX newsletter (Reference 4), is fundamentally about contradiction resolution. As illustrated in Figure 1, a joke involves sending the listener in one direction while the joke teller travels in another one. The ‘joke’ emerges when the listener learns that they have travelled in the wrong direction, and make the jump to the right direction – i.e. they solve a contradiction.

Initial investigations at CREAX have revealed that the contradiction solving mechanisms underlying humour are bound by the same 40 inventive strategies that have been uncovered during TRIZ research (see also Technical, Business, Social, Architecture, Food Technology, Software Development, and Microelectronics examples of the 40 Principles at References 5-11 respectively).

Bearing in mind the apparent similarities between humour and disruptive advertising strategies, our working hypothesis at the start of this investigation has been that disruptive advertising strategies will also be strongly connected to the 40 Inventive Principles contained in TRIZ.

In order to test the hypothesis, the investigation has made use of the output of a national study conducted by a UK TV channel and newspaper (Reference 12), after their survey to find the ‘100 Greatest TV Ads’ in the UK as voted by viewers.

The basis for the investigation, then, has been to examine each of these 100 advertisements – starting from number 100 and working systematically to number 1 – for the presence of a contradiction resolution, and then, if one is present, an evaluation of the inventive strategy used to make the disruptive shift. In recognising that not everyone will be familiar with advertisements in the UK, the results have been presented in generic terms with, for each advertisement, an identification of the underlying convention before a particular ad appeared, the convention shift created by the ad, and then the strategy used to achieve that shift.

The analysis of the ‘100 Greatest Ads’ revealed an apparently very high proportion (85%) of advertisements featuring a disruptive content. In order to check whether this ‘high’ figure was in fact typical, the author spent several days monitoring advertisements on the three terrestrial national UK TV channels. In all around 100 advertisements were observed. The number of advertisements featuring a disruption was found to be four;

• Pot Noodle – a snack product with a reputation as being low quality is presented as a product that emphasises and exaggerates this feature (‘only dirty people eat Pot Noodle’)
• Toyota Corolla – more a disruption in the story than the means of advertising – monkeys in game parks have a reputation for damaging the cars that drive through; here the monkeys get out cleaning equipment and begin polishing the car.
• Lillets – a tampon advertisement with a man in it.
• Fosters – latest in the series of ‘drink alcohol and something miraculous happens’ series – a man returns home to find his new domestic robot in bed with the microwave oven.

Ideally this type of experiment would last for longer to ensure the day monitored was a ‘typical’ one, but nevertheless the difference between 85% and 4% is felt to be significant enough to justify a comment that there is a definite and strong link between the presence of a disruption and a resultant positive effect on the viewer.

A similar experiment was commenced observing ads in the US, but time problems have thus far prevented acquisition of statistically significant findings. No ads featuring disruptions, however, were observed during the period of the experiment. Perhaps someone in the US may care to explore the subject further at some time in the future.

1. Based on this assessment of 100 TV advertisements, there is a very strong correlation between convention disruption and popularity of an ad – with 85 of the 100 most popular advertisements in the UK featuring a contradiction-breaking disruptive shift of some kind. This finding is highly consistent with the theme and recommendations of the Dru book (Reference 2) that prompted the investigation.
2. All 85 of the disruptive advertisements observed employed one or more of the known Inventive Principles contained within TRIZ – i.e. none of the disruptive advertisements featured a strategy that was derived from outside the known 40 Principles.
3. As is the case with humour (Reference 3), a very large proportion of the disruptive advertisements are built on Principles The Other Way Around (30 examples) and Parameter Changes (31 examples). In all 17 of the 40 Principles were used in the 100 advertisements featured. In descending order of frequency these were:-

In very general terms, it seems very apparent from the extensive use of Principles 13 and 35, and the preceding descriptions of the convention disruptions achieved by the 100 advertisements analysed was that the perhaps paradoxical fact that ‘successful’ advertisements tended to appear to be selling something other than the featured product

4. There was no significant correlation between the age of an advertisement and the likelihood of it being disruptive. Similarly, there was no significant pattern between the age of an ad and the Inventive Principle used to create the disruption.
5. One of the key features involved in creating disruptive advertisements appears to be the successful identification of prevailing conventions. While it has been relatively easy to reconstruct these conventions for this article, it seems clear that this is a task much more easily done in hindsight than looking forward. This ‘convention-finding’ (read; problem definition) task may turn out to be the most significant factor determining the success or otherwise of this type of advertising campaign.
6. In hopefully not a true reflection of the British psyche, alcohol and confectionery collectively accounted for over a third of the most popular advertisements. Animals were the subject or played a dominant role in 20% of the featured advertisements. A successful advertisement that did not feature a disruption, was highly likely to feature a cute animal.

We believe that there is significant untapped opportunity to use TRIZ to create stronger disruptive marketing opportunities – as the analysis here shows, less than half of the available 40 strategies currently appear to be being used. Our next job will involve looking at marketing strategy from a broader perspective in order to create a ’40 Inventive (Market Strategy) Principles’ article to complement existing field-specific data. We would welcome examples from anyone either working in the field, or who simply happens across an example of contradiction challenging advertisements/marketing ideas that they would like to share. Our target is to publish an article in January 2003.

1. Dru, J.M., ‘Disruption; Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace’, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996.
2. Dru, J.M., ‘Beyond Disruption: Changing the Rules in the Marketplace’, John Wiley & Sons, New York, ‘Adweek’ Series, 2002.
3. Mann, D.L., ‘Hands-On Systematic Innovation’, CREAX Press, 2002.
4. CREAX monthly newsletter, ‘Humour’ page, www.creax.com.
5. Technical Examples: The TRIZ Journal, July, 1997, https://the-trizjournal.com
6. Business Examples: The TRIZ Journal, September 1999
7. Social Examples: The TRIZ Journal, June 2001
8. Architecture Examples: The TRIZ Journal, July 2001
9. Food Technology Examples: The TRIZ Journal, October 2001
10. Software Development Examples: The TRIZ Journal, Sept and November, 2001
11. Microelectronics Examples: The TRIZ Journal, August 2002
12. Robinson, M., ‘100 Greatest TV Ads‘, Channel 4, The Sunday Times, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2000.