principle number two avoid facial expression changes so again this sounds a bit strange is this what it is advertising but hold on hold on hold on if you study human beings language itself has actually not been around that long thing that's been around much longer than language is our facial expressions the face doesn't lie so when you're looking to create an advert if you wanted to create a terrible advert, you would never look at this, but you're looking to create a great advert. The facial expressions are the key signal if you're causing emotion. If you ask a lot of advertisers about how to sell things, it's that you want to cause emotion in the person that you're speaking to, the person that you're advertising to.
Emotion is the liquid energy that gets somebody from where they are scrolling on a news feed or seeing a billboard to actually taking action if there's no emotion just the advertising laws of physics conclude that person will not take action and the upstream from emotion is the facial expression muscle if their facial expression muscles change that's a good sign likewise when you come up with an idea if you smile if you frown um if your eye if your eyebrows raise those are all key signals that it's going to be a great ad the best ads right now on whether it's meta tiktok snapchat billboards tv whatever you name it when they see it their facial expression muscles change once you see this principle you can't unsee it notice every advert that you end up enjoying or buying from you will have some kind of facial expression muscle change.
When it comes down to designing ads that cause people to change their facial expression muscles, I recommend the following. So my friend Sian has this idea around viral content or great advertising can be compressed and summarized all the way down to a few well-known acronyms or words. Essentially nothing longer than four letters. So wow, lol, OMG, WTF. Anything that can get compressed all the way down into those things is a sign of a potential great advert. It could be yes, it could be LFG, it could be ouch. Anything that compresses it all the way down, those sounds are basically just representations of our facial expression muscles changing so if the advert i would design with those simple acronyms in mind how you're going to pull in at least one of those in the adverts and if you do that you've massively simplified what you're trying to achieve and remember without their facial expression muscles changing there is no emotion and without emotion there's no liquid energy to go out and actually buy the product or download the app or whatever goal your adverts are looking to achieve.
So to flip this principle around, the inverted one is to avoid the facial expressions. So you want to study facial expressions like you've got a PhD in it. Whenever you hand somebody an ad, look. Whenever you see an ad yourself, study it in yourself. It is the gut signal, the strongest signal that an advert is going to work that you can know before you run it.