Surprising, Loud, and Authentic: How to Grade Creative

There are dozens of ways to start making an ad (and I use "ad" to be synonymous with just about any type of persuasive communication), but surprisingly few ways to determine if it's done.

Almost 20 years ago, Larry Durst taught me his SLAMM rubric for assessing creative work. These days I've been known to call it SSAMM, which despite being slightly easier to follow is admittedly significantly less memorable. Still, the premise remains, and it continues to be the most reliable grading mechanism I've found for answering one simple question:

"Is what I made any good?"

My weapon of choice is the SSAMM rubric, and I'd recommend running your work through this matrix over and over, from the first inkling of an idea to the final approval of the released asset.

No matter what you're making, in order for it to be effective, it needs to answer "yes" to these five questions (S.S.A.M.M.)—all of them, not just one or two.

Is my ad Surprising?

Surprise is the strongest emotion available.

If you want to break through and earn your audience's attention, try to disarm them with some element of surprise.

You can surprise people with information they weren't expecting. You can surprise them with how you present it. You can even surprise them by presenting it at an unexpected time or place.

You don't need an Orwellian twist. You just need to bridge the gap with something your audience wasn't expecting to be interested in today. Think about it: you're asking someone to take time out of their day and preexisting priorities to be sold something. Earn it.

This is true of every type of promotion, whether it's a million-dollar brand anthem or a discount on produce. Surprise them with how good it is.

Is my ad Shareable?

Larry would call this "Loud." But in the years since he first presented this idea to me, it seems the marketing world has adopted the word "Shareable" instead.

I don't blame Mark Zuckerberg for ruining the acronym because it actually gets more to the point. If a loud ad is something that expands beyond the page—into news or conversation, somewhere into the realm of free exposure—then the word shareable just gets to the point faster.

"Would you share this with someone else?"

"Yes, definitely."

Good. You've made something shareable.

Now here's the catch. It's not hard to make something worth sharing. But it can take a little more effort to make something worth sharing for the right reasons and with the right audience. Anything else is just borrowed interest (and probably wasted money).

Enter: authenticity.

Is my ad Authentic?

If you want to make something surprising that's also effective, start with an authentic truth.

A great example can be found in stand-up comedy. To say something that earns a real, resonant laugh, it has to be grounded in a core human truth. When that truth is surprising (particularly unique, unexpected, or simply presented in a fresh way), it gets a laugh.

And when it gets a really good laugh, people tell it to their friends.

In other words, to make an ad that's both surprising and shareable, it has to be grounded in authenticity—some core truth about the way people experience whatever it is you're trying to sell them.

Your solution doesn't have to be based in humor; that's just one clear example. There are countless other emotions you can tap into that work just as well: nostalgia, hope, excitement, curiosity, camaraderie... even fear. But fear is cheap and the benefits are short-lived, so pick something else, please.

Let's pause here for a pulse check.

When marketers produce work that's not Surprising, Shareable, and Authentic, it's most often because they gave up too soon. They're either married to an idea for the wrong reasons and it'll never be good, or they don't have enough confidence in the idea to make it good.

Folks often refer to the first issue as "being precious." More often than not, the second is simply "being lazy."

There's an easy fix for both: don't give up.

Once you build the habit of reviewing work through a consistent filter like SSAMM, you'll start catching problems earlier. Over time, you'll also find yourself starting from a better place because these questions become instinctive.

Back to our regularly scheduled rubric.

Is my ad Motivating?

You can make the world's coolest ad—it's surprising, it's authentic, it's going viral—but if people don't know what to do with it in a way that ties back to more business for you, it'll never be effective.

The easy answer is to make sure every ad has an obvious call to action. You know what you want your audience to do with this thing, right? They should too.

We've all received an email from a coworker that tells you a bunch of information and never tells you what they want you to do with it. Don't be that person. Clarity saves everyone time and energy.

"Buy it now."

Now here's a fun trick: if you start thinking about what you want someone to do before you start coming up with ideas for the ad itself, the action becomes inherent. You'll naturally come up with ideas that support the behavior you want people to take.

A friend recently reminded me that David Mamet says great stories arrive at "a conclusion both surprising and inevitable"—a point of view he attributes to the same idea Aristotle expressed more than 2,000 years ago. Trey Parker and Matt Stone simplify it even further: "Replace every 'and then' with either 'therefore' or 'but.'"

Do that, and your audience won't have to work so hard to figure out what you want them to do next.

Is my ad Measurable?

Alright, so you made an ad (or an email or a speech or whatever) that's Surprising, Shareable, Authentic, and Motivating.

Did it work?

You'll never know if you didn't decide how you'd measure it.

You may have made a masterpiece, but you formatted the file wrong and your audience never even saw it. Or maybe you thought you made a masterpiece, but you didn't realize it was tone-deaf. Both will result in failure, but if you don't know where it failed, you'll never know what to fix.

And what's worse, imagine instead that it worked great. You got lots of sales after you made this thing. If you don't know where they came from or what part of your audience it resonated with most, you'll never know how to replicate it.

Both are recipes for disaster. Give future you the gift of knowing. Set up your campaigns to be measurable.

One last trick: using the two M's in SSAMM, it's almost impossible to make a measurable ad that's not motivating and vice versa. When you define the metrics you're going to track, you'll naturally make something that guides toward those metrics. And if you invoke SSAMM at the start of the idea phase as well as at the end of the completed execution, you'll find it all comes together smoothly.

A Closing Thought

You may have already arrived at the realization that SSAMM isn't just useful for evaluating work, but also for talking about it.

Imagine a world where everyone can point directly to where a piece of work is falling flat: "Is there any way we can make this more measurable?" Or point directly to where a piece is outperforming: "This is definitely something I would share with a friend if I were the customer."

That shared vernacular is an ideal end state. When everyone is on the same page, work happens faster, is more effective, and removes uncomfortable conversations around feelings that can derail or confuse a project.

Want to put this into practice in your own organization? Let us know, and we'll send you a PDF that you can keep on your desktop for your next creative review.