Phew! Chesapeake, Your Briefs are Full-of-it!

The new ad buster blog, Ad Decoder, takes a look at Chesapeake’s briefs in Part 2 of Ask Chesapeake: DECODED and it’s not a pretty sight.

Seriously, Ad Decoder is preforming a valuable public service in helping citizens deconstruct advertising and look at it with a critical eye. In this issue he tells us about creative briefs which are the “blueprints” for the ads.

Creative briefs are important because they expose the manipulation framework – and I mean that in the nicest way. Ads may be subtle, but the creative briefs never are. Where an ad may show an honest-looking guy in front of a big tree, the creative brief may read, “Convince environmental advocates that gas drilling is good for the environment.” So the creative brief drives the more subtle elements of the ad that are meant to achieve the final outcome.

I love digging into processes so I find this stuff fascinating and I can hardly wait for Part 3. He titillates with his description.

In my next post, we’ll drill down into the value proposition (pun shamefully intended) to find out what Chesapeake is promising people who don’t own their mineral rights. Hint: It all depends on a bunch of people doing the right thing, it’s incredibly convoluted, it’s politically nuanced and it states positions that their own high-level employees have publicly contradicted (wait until I show you the video of Chesapeake VP Tom Price saying, “we don’t know yet if global warming is fact or fiction” – guess he didn’t get the memo).

I highly recommend that you read it.