How to Hijack a Familiar Format for a Campaign

One of the easiest ways for advertising to become invisible is for every brand in a category to start looking the same.

Beauty often ends up soft, polished and expensive. Finance tends to drift toward reassuring people talking directly to camera. Car advertising has its own familiar visual language. Tech often falls back on product demos, floating interfaces and slick motion graphics.

None of those approaches are inherently bad. The problem is that once a category develops a recognizable style, audiences know what they are looking at almost immediately.

One way creative teams get around that is by borrowing a format from somewhere else.

Instead of making another conventional ad, you might structure the idea like a news report, movie trailer, sports commentary, tutorial, dating app conversation, documentary or pre-roll ad. The format gives the audience something familiar, but the brand uses it in a way they are not expecting.

That is the thinking behind Hijack a Familiar Format.

Why familiar formats can be useful

Formats come with rules people already understand.

A news report feels immediate and important. A movie trailer builds anticipation. A tutorial suggests you are about to learn how to do something. A pre-roll ad comes with the expectation that you will probably skip it.

Those expectations can become part of the idea.

Geico's "Unskippable" campaign is a good example. The Martin Agency took something specific to YouTube pre-roll and built the creative idea around it. The main insurance message is delivered before the viewer has a chance to skip, then the ad keeps going after it has supposedly finished.

The idea works because the media format is not just where the ad appears. It is part of the creative thought.

That distinction matters.

Putting a fake news graphic over a normal product ad is not really using the format. The idea should depend on the way the format works.

Start with the category

A useful place to begin is looking at what everyone else in the category is doing.

If every competitor is making polished brand films, what would happen if the idea behaved like a piece of live sports coverage?

If everyone is using product demonstrations, could the idea work as a true crime documentary?

If the category is full of serious financial advertising, could the idea live inside a group chat or another everyday format people already recognize?

You are not choosing a format because it is trendy. You are using it because it changes how the audience experiences the idea.

The best version usually creates a connection between the format and the product, message or behavior you are trying to communicate.

If you can remove the format and the idea still works exactly the same way, it probably was not doing much.

The format still needs a reason to be there

This is where the technique can go wrong.

A familiar format can make an idea feel fresh very quickly, which also makes it tempting to use one without much thought behind it.

You see this when advertising copies the surface of a news bulletin, documentary or social platform but the underlying idea is still completely conventional.

The audience recognizes the reference, but there is no real reason for the brand to be using it.

The stronger examples use something specific about the format.

Geico used the skip button. Sports campaigns can use the language and rhythm of commentary. A tutorial can become interesting when the instructions themselves reveal the product benefit or the absurdity of the problem.

The format should help carry the idea, not just decorate it.

How this works as a Heista Playbook

Hijack a Familiar Format is one of the creative Playbooks in Heista.

You can apply it to a brief when the work is starting to look too much like the rest of the category, or when you want to explore a completely different way of expressing the same proposition.

The brief stays the same, but the creative approach changes.

Instead of asking for more versions of the same campaign, you can deliberately explore what happens when the idea has to behave like a trailer, news report, documentary, tutorial or another familiar format.

If that produces something interesting, develop it.

If it does not, swap the Playbook and attack the brief another way.

That is really the point of Playbooks. They give you different ways into the same problem to crack open the brief.