Terry O’Reilly likes to watch when media and creative professionals get into bed together.

The renowned advertising writer, producer and host of the popular Age of Persuasion on CBC radio, opened Media Day at the 2nd annual Marketing Week in Toronto this morning with a keynote address on why creative and media “should be spooning.”

Why? Because the most effective advertising today is the product of creative and media teams working together to surprise people, said O'Reilly, also the founder of Pirate Radio and Television in Toronto. 

“Surprise creates an impact, but it is getting harder and harder to break through,” he said.

Radio shock jocks and reality TV have desensitized people to most of yesterday’s advertising, at the same time the number of brand messages has gone way up.

“The branding noise out there is deafening,” said O'Reilly. And for marketers, that has become an all-important problem to overcome.

“You can’t sell anything to anybody if nobody notices your marketing,” he said.

The solution is to develop a good brand story and tell it over and over again.

But often good copywriting is no longer enough to make an impact, he said. When good brand ideas are combined with surprising media, people will listen. In fact they want to listen. 

Age of Persuasion gets about 600,000 listeners every week, and people tune in because they like good advertising, said O'Reilly. “They like to be surprised.” 

What they don’t like is boring repetition. “[And] this industry worships at the altar of consistency.”

O’Reilly talked about a number of his favourite ads that combined smart brand messages with even smarter media insights: Five-second Smart Car radio ads tucked in between larger 30-second spots to help demonstrate how easy it is to park the small Smart Cars; the billboard McDonald’s created with real lettuce for its fresh salads; posters made with fly paper for a pest control company that only revealed the company name over days as flies stuck to the paper, the one-second radio spot for the Guinness Book of World Records which itself became a world record for shortest radio spot. 

O’Reilly also showed the outdoor execution from Vancouver agency Rethink that illustrated the strength of 3M's protective glass by encasing thousands of dollars cash behind the glass in a bus shelter.

That is the kind of ad that people will talk about, and even bring other people to see it.

The brand message doesn’t have to be new, but the delivery of the message has to be surprising.

“You must make people feel your message, not just understand it,” said O'Reilly. And people can only feel those messages when creative professionals get together with media professionals.

“When creative and media share the same bed,” he said. “It is hot.”