The “Literally” Syndrome

Working Paper No. 20

How to boost briefs’ immune system and protect them from the obviousness

Do you remember the first time you heard it in a conversation? Maybe you were at a cafe sipping an espresso —or was it at a fancy cocktail night evening between the shrimp platter and a fresh gin and tonic?

The famous and popular “Literally” expression.

I don't remember the first time I heard it in conversation, that's for sure. No one really knows its original source in our current landscape, where it started, and how exactly it took over the world. 

The “Literally Syndrome” is a bug that has been spread widely from tv shows to podcasts, from casual conversations to even business presentations. We live in times where “literally” has taken the world by storm, becoming a syndrome that makes us forget what we said in other times to express an exaggeration or an uncommon event. 

Do you remember when people used to say —“I was very thirsty”? instead of “Literally, I died of thirst.” No, you didn’t. You just described the dehydration process that your body was experiencing due to a lack of liquid.

Unfortunately, planning departments, creative teams, and marketers are not the exception to the long and unmerciful tentacles of the “Literally Syndrome”. Our industry is very human in the sense that we tend to replicate people’s habits and behaviours in our professional practices. When we adopt those conducts, we involuntarily reflect them at the moment we need to develop distinctive ideas to solve business problems without realizing that we all end up speaking and acting very similarly. If brands were people, there’s a moment where they also use the same vocabulary, wear the same outfit and speak in the same tone. This is what the “Literally Syndrome” means – it’s the act of joining overused expressions, actions and behaviours to be popular and accepted in an industry that has established its foundations on differentiation. 

Brands and communication professionals are falling into the trap that forces them to go safe and follow what the rest are doing. This syndrome leaves brands at the same starting point as the competitors, thinking the same, saying the same and looking alike. Sometimes we think that to succeed it’s more important to fit in than to stand out. Then brands end up being boring and not perceived, but the most unfortunate part is that the “Literally Syndrome” is so confusing that brands begin to feel comfortable and confident by being like the rest.

Luckily for us, we can deter this spread over time and give this word some rest, or at least a correct use. It’s on our strategic approaches, decks, and pencils the cure to such frivolous speech. 

Next time the Literally Syndrome is about to take over your creative brief, consider trying these antidotes:

Man Bites Dog

One of the most acclaimed shows ever created, The Wire, gave me an advertising lesson. 

I never thought that a story of cops in Baltimore, tapped phones, gangsters, and journalists could give me a master class about strategy. But, there’s an episode where a journalist says, “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news.” A creative brief is no different. 

What’s obvious is not inspiring and, consequently, will waste time, energy, and money on communication that the consumer already knows. This is an excellent filter to evaluate the quality of the insight you’re going to add to a creative brief that could be used as a mantra to make sure that what we deliver is unexpected and unignorable. 

What will be the man bites dog component of your creative brief? You don’t have one yet? No problem, keep digging. The dog bites man sort of finding can’t ever be an option because that is when the “Literally Syndrome” hits.

The Audience Before The Audience

“Read the audience.” 

It’s not hard —make sure you know how to appropriately express your ideas to your audience. 

This rule is so essential that we use it to write an e-mail to a supervisor, a landlord, a client, or a dear friend. In this case, the first audience that we need to persuade is the creative team. They are swift and effective when it comes to detecting the obvious.

In many cases, they’re magnets of what’s evident, and here’s where confusion may appear to distort all the information captured at the moment by bringing more questions than answers and the potential risk of reprocesses that often lead to frustration. It’s like sailing in a boat with no map and no destination. A great brief saves time, and when we do it, a creative team has enough inspiring resources to respond creatively to something that’s first, a clear objective and, secondly, through an unspoken angle. 

Forget The Template

We can’t forget that we’re also consumers. Advertising, Marketing, and Communications also participate in trendy expressions that are repetitive and popular. These representations have changed over the years, and they happen fast and massively, but then they’re gone forever. 

Over the years, we’ve seen this effect happening repeatedly, and it’ll be happening as more trendy practices emerge. Flashmobs, experiential, #challenges, 360-degree campaigns, mapping, augmented reality, QR codes, cancel QR codes, and bring QR codes again. 

Even though these were all practices that were transgressors at some point, many brands started to use them for no reason. What ended up happening was that these executions were wrongly perceived as ideas that didn’t provide any value to the brand. All these practices are templates like memes that we can fill out accordingly to solve a brand problem without understanding that sometimes it’s more important to start the conversation instead of joining one that doesn’t add value to the brand. This idea of using era-specific models is another way to make a brand become outdated and make it say “literally” in every conversation. 

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Even though we know that new expressions and trends are emerging by the hour, it’s essential to note that these cultural observations are only tools that will help us identify the patterns that lead to understanding human reactions behind a business problem. Our success depends on how we interpret and address those external agents that are impossible to control. However, that doesn’t mean we need to repeat and replicate these cultural expressions without first understanding that narrative. It’s easier to join conversations of this type when there’s massive participation of people that look like you —when this happens, they make you feel comfortable and accepted. 

The reality is that it’s harder to question why I should follow a majority that’s heading to a pitfall than taking a shortcut to salvation. Here’s where brands also feel the peer pressure of acting like the rest of the category, mistakenly thinking that competitors will guide them to successful results.

The “Literally Syndrome” has a variety of faces and can appear in a thousand places simultaneously. It evolves rapidly and adapts to any environment. They might live little due to overuse, but another will emerge as the best alternative. It makes you think you won't be cool or well-received if you don’t act according to its principle. This syndrome can disguise in emojis or hashtags. We don’t know what will be its next version.

The “Literally Syndrome” has taken many victims already, and we can help brands stay away from it. It’s impossible to protect text messages and social media posts from this omnipotent expression, but it’s in our hands to eradicate the obviousness and blandness of the first creative component that every campaign must have —the creative brief.