Part I, The Thinking · Chapter 7

The Impossible Brief

Promotional strategies for the brief that cannot be done

A car you could give back

At the start of 2009 the American car market was not in a slump. It was in a hole. People were losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands a month, and the ones who still had jobs were watching the news and deciding that this was not the year for a car loan. Every carmaker had the same brief: sell cars to people who are frightened. Every carmaker had the same answer, which was money. Bigger rebates, cheaper finance, longer terms.

Money was the wrong answer, and it is worth being exact about why. Nobody was standing in a showroom thinking the car was two thousand dollars too dear. They were thinking: what happens to me, and to this loan, if I am the next one let go? A rebate makes the car cheaper. It does nothing about the fear. You can push the reward fader all the way to the top and the shopper is still not in the car, because the thing between them and the car is not price.

Hyundai did something else. In January 2009 it launched Hyundai Assurance: buy or lease a new Hyundai, and if you lose your job within a year, give it back. Hyundai would cover the gap between what you owed and what the car was worth, up to $7,500. A few weeks later it went further and offered to make up to three months of your payments while you looked for work, before you had to hand anything back.

That January, Hyundai sold 24,512 vehicles in the United States, up 14 per cent on the January before. The market as a whole fell 37 per cent. Not all of that was the promise. Hyundai sold small, sensible, cheap cars, which were exactly what a frightened country wanted, and it would be a stretch to hand the whole result to one offer. But a carmaker growing in a month when the market fell by more than a third does not happen by accident, and the marketing professors who wrote about it at the time read it the same way. The offer had answered the question the shopper was actually asking.

Look at what Hyundai did not do. It did not find a bigger reward. It did not make the claim easier or find a better venue. It changed the promise. The brief everyone else had was “make the car more attractive”, and that brief was impossible, because attraction was not the problem. Hyundai rewrote it as “make the purchase safe”, and that brief could be done. As far as reports go, a few hundred cars came back. The rest of the buyers simply drove away with a car and a little less fear.

That is what this chapter is about. Every so often a client puts something on the table that cannot be done with any setting of the five faders. A headline the budget cannot survive. A reward nobody will believe. A retailer who will not say yes. The ordinary response is to say no, or to say yes and quietly deliver something smaller. The dark art is the third answer: change what the desk is plugged into.

What makes a brief impossible

In our experience, briefs are almost never impossible in the way they first look. They are impossible in one specific place, and the useful work is finding which place. Put the brief on the board from chapter 6 and one fader will be past its stop.

Sometimes it is Reward. The client wants a prize that would move the category, and the budget would buy a tenth of it. Sometimes it is Belief: the prize is big enough, but the odds are so long that nobody in the aisle will believe they could win it, so the big number does no work. Sometimes it is Friction, when the only way to prove a purchase is a process no tired parent will finish. Sometimes it is Liability, when the client loves an open-ended offer and the finance director has done the sum on what happens if it runs hot. And sometimes it is Venue: the idea is good and the retailer will not have it in the store.

Naming the fader changes the conversation in the room. “We can’t afford that” becomes “Reward is past its stop, so who else could pay for the reward?” “Finance will never sign this” becomes “Liability is past its stop, so who could carry it?” Each of those is a question with answers, and the answers are the moves the rest of this chapter is about. None of them is clever for its own sake. Each one moves the impossible part of the brief somewhere it can be done.

Prize indemnity insurance: selling the risk

In April 2007, Jordan’s Furniture, a New England furniture chain, made its customers an offer that sounded like a stunt. Buy furniture during the promotion, and if the Boston Red Sox won the World Series that October, you got your money back. All of it.

The Red Sox won. They swept the Colorado Rockies four games to none, and nearly thirty thousand Jordan’s customers got their furniture free.

Jordan’s did not go broke, because Jordan’s had never been holding the bet. Before the offer opened, the risk had been sold to an insurer: a specialist that looked at the Red Sox’s chances, the likely sales in the window and the size of the refunds, and named a price for carrying the lot. Jordan’s paid that price, a known number, and in exchange swapped a liability it could not survive for a cost it could budget. When the Red Sox won, the refunds were the insurer’s problem. The customers had the best story in Boston, and Jordan’s had paid a premium it had known about since before the first sofa sold.

Nineteen years later, Jordan’s ran the same play. Buy furniture or a mattress between 20 January and 1 March 2026, and if both of the University of Connecticut’s basketball teams, the men’s and the women’s, reached their national championship games, the purchase was free. USA Today put the possible refunds at around fifty million dollars. Jordan’s former chief executive said publicly that the promotion was insured. The women’s team lost its semi-final, the condition failed, and nobody got a refund. The policy paid nothing, which is exactly what a policy is for. Jordan’s bought the ability to make a fifty-million-dollar promise for the price of a premium, and the promise did its job whether or not it came true.

This is prize indemnity insurance, or promotional risk cover, and in Australia it is the quiet engine behind the biggest numbers you see on pack: the million-dollar instant win, the hole in one at the charity day, the “if it rains on the day, your money back”. Chapter 4 met the principle: a gate you can model is a gate somebody will insure. The machinery is the same in each case. An insurer can price anything with a probability. Your job is to design the promise so it has one.

There is one Australian aisle where somebody has counted. Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, logged every liquor store promotion it could find from 2022 to 2025. In 2025, 73 of the 646 it found were insured, about one in nine, up from 60 in 2022. They are where the big numbers live. Of the 2025 promotions that published a prize pool, the insured ones had a median pool of about $411,000; the rest had a median of $10,000. Three in four insured pools were over $100,000, against three in a hundred of the others. The report adds the caution we would add ourselves, and it is worth keeping in mind for the rest of this chapter: those figures link insurance to the size of the promise, not to whether the promotion sold anything.

Three things follow, and they are the part clients get wrong. First, the insurer prices the odds, so the odds have to be real and fixed before launch: a sealed draw, a set number of winning pieces, a named sporting result. A promise whose odds you can change halfway through is not insurable, and a promise that is not insurable is a promise your finance director will not sign. Second, the cover is for the promise as written. Change the headline, the dates or the condition after the policy is bound and you may have changed the risk without changing the policy. Third, the premium is not a small number when the odds are short. Insurance makes a long shot affordable. It does not make a likely event cheap. If the brief is “a hundred people will definitely win a car”, you are not buying insurance, you are buying a hundred cars.

Insurance moves the Liability fader, and only that one. It does nothing about Belief. A million-dollar prize that nobody in the aisle thinks they could win is still a million-dollar prize doing no work, however safely it is covered. The best insured promotions pair the big covered number with a reward that is certain and small, the Dopamine Sandwich from chapter 3, so the Gambler has something to dream about and the Accountant has something to collect. That is the shape the Australian liquor aisle has been moving toward. In the same count, the family of instant wins sold as odds, the 1 in 3s and 1 in 7s, grew from 5.4 to 8.4 per cent of all promotions between 2022 and 2025, while the other insured types stayed flat or fell. One in seven is as close to certain as a chance gets, which is what the Accountant wants, and the insurer is what makes it affordable at that volume.

The prize nobody meant to give

Now the cautionary tale, because a chapter about impossible promises has to have one.

In 1996 Pepsi ran a promotion called Pepsi Stuff. Drink Pepsi, collect points from the packs, swap the points for gear: a T-shirt for 75 points, a leather jacket for 1,450. The television ad ended, as a joke, with a teenager landing a Harrier jump jet outside his school. On screen: HARRIER FIGHTER 7,000,000 PEPSI POINTS.

Seven million points was meant to be absurd. The trouble was in the catalogue. The rules let you buy extra points for ten cents each once you had fifteen from packs. A business student named John Leonard did the sum, raised the money from investors, and in 1996 sent Pepsi fifteen labels and a cheque for $700,008.50. Pepsi sent the cheque back. Leonard sued.

Pepsi won. In August 1999 a federal court in New York ruled that the ad was not an offer, and that no reasonable person could have thought a soft drink company was really giving away a military jet. The appeal court agreed in 2000. Pepsi kept running the ad, with the jet now priced at 700,000,000 points and the words “just kidding” added.

It is a funny story, and Pepsi was right in law. But it took the best part of four years and a federal judge to say so, and the story is still told, a quarter of a century later, as the time Pepsi would not hand over the jet. Here is the lesson we take from it. Every number in a promotion is a promise until the terms say otherwise, and the shopper reads the number before the terms. In Australian consumer law the test is what the offer would lead an ordinary shopper to believe, and we would not want to rely on a joke as a defence. So the rule in our office is short. Never put a number in a promotion you would not be prepared to pay, or to insure. If it is a joke, make sure the joke cannot be bought.

Five promotional strategies for an impossible brief

Over enough years the moves sort themselves into five. They are not a checklist, and most good answers use two of them at once. What they share is that none of them pushes a fader harder. Each one moves the problem.

Sell the risk. When Liability is past its stop, find someone whose trade is carrying it. Prize indemnity, a fixed fee per redemption, a capped fulfilment contract: each turns an open promise into a known cost. The condition is that the promise has odds an outsider can price, so this move usually comes with a redesign of the gates. Jordan’s is this move at its boldest.

Borrow the reward. When Reward is past its stop, ask who else wants to be in front of this shopper. An airline with empty seats on a Tuesday, a resort out of its busy weeks, a streaming service that wants trials: each has a reward that costs them far less than it is worth to the shopper, and a reason to give it. The partner’s spare capacity becomes your prize. This is also how a modest brand ends up with a headline that looks expensive.

Make it conditional. When the client wants a huge reward and can afford a small one, tie the huge one to something outside anyone’s control: a team winning, a temperature, a date. The shopper prices the hope; the insurer prices the odds. Done well, it turns a purchase into a story people follow for weeks, which is why this move belongs as much to the Headliners as to the Loaders. Done badly, it is a lottery with a furniture shop attached.

Cap it in time or in number. When an open offer frightens finance, close it: the first five hundred, the first fortnight, one a day for thirty days. A cap turns an unknown liability into a known one and adds a reason to act now. The cost is belief, if the cap is so tight that the shopper assumes it is already gone, so say how many are left wherever you can.

Change the promise. The biggest move, and the rarest. When no setting of the faders works, ask what the shopper is actually afraid of, or actually wants, and promise that instead. Hyundai stopped selling a cheaper car and started selling a safe purchase. A money-back guarantee, a try-before-you-commit, a promise about what happens if things go wrong: none of these is a prize, and all of them are promotions. They work on the Belief fader from the other side, by removing the reason not to believe.

Where this leaves the brief

Every chapter of this book ends up back at a brief, and this one ends at the hardest kind: the one the client half expects you to turn down. The temptation in that room is to be the sensible adult. To say the budget will not stretch, the retailer will not wear it, finance will not sign. Sometimes that is the right answer. More often it is the first answer, and the first answer is usually just the place the thinking stopped.

So the question we ask instead is narrower. Which fader is past its stop, and who else could hold it? An insurer can hold liability. A partner can hold reward. Time can hold a budget, and a better promise can hold belief. Almost every good idea has a version that works, and in an impossible brief the version is usually found by moving the problem to someone, or something, built to carry it.

That is the end of the first part of the book: the three seconds, the one job, the two pilots, the friction, the engine, the five faders and the moves for when the faders run out. Part II takes the six jobs one at a time, starting with the hardest thing in marketing, which is getting a stranger to try you.