🧑‍🔬 How To Create Ads Your Audience Will Love (And Share)

Brand: Taskrabbit

Psychology Concept: MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable)

Days Running: 40 Days
(This gives an indication of how it’s performing)

🧪 The MAYA Principle

The MAYA Principle, coined by industrial designer Raymond Loewy, stands for “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”

It’s the idea that innovation should balance familiarity and novelty—something new enough to excite people, but familiar enough that people can understand it.

While the MAYA Principle is mostly used in product development and design, the basic framework can be used in advertising and marketing as well.

🤳 How Taskrabbit Uses The MAYA Principle

TaskRabbit's ad, featuring lyrics the famous lyrics from Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” is a perfect example. It uses familiar song lyrics to grab attention while applying them in a surprising and novel context (TV mounting services). This contrast makes the ad memorable, engaging, and a textbook example of the MAYA Principle.

This was actually originally part of Taskrabbit’s out of home advertising campaign (the above is the only example I’ve found running as an ad on socials). Below are some more examples - the first photo is the one I took on the subway in Toronto.

🧠 How You Can Use The MAYA Principle

Ok, now that you’ve had a nice laugh reading the above let’s discuss how YOU can use the MAYA principle in your ads.

The key to the MAYA Principle is balancing the familiar with the unexpected.

To do this, we can reference three core principles I’ve discussed in previous newsletters:

1. The Familiarity Heuristic: people tend to have more favorable opinions of things, people, or places they're familiar with as opposed to new ones.

2. The Humour Effect: people remember funny information better.

3. Nostalgia Effect: our tendency to reminisce about the past more fondly than the present.

So with the above in mind, here are three frameworks to think about how to create a surprising twist:

1. Combine the Familiar With an Unlikely Context: Take something your audience expects like the most common customer for your product or assumption about your product/industry and show it in an unlikely context.

2. Add Humour or Irony: Start your copywriting with something your audience thinks they know, then take it somewhere unexpected with a playful or ironic twist.

3. Use Nostalgia to Trigger Emotional Connections: Try referencing something your audience would remember from their past and pair with a new idea or something related to your product.

Taskrabbit used all three of the above to create ads that people actually remember and share.