When I was a teenager I was a mod.

Everyone thinks all ‘mods’ drove scooters and wore anoraks.

But actually that was West London, and came a bit later.

In East London, the whole point was to be different, and be first.

It was much more about creativity, and less about fighting.

The whole point was not to look like the mass of people.

Be different, and be first.

The sheep would all catch up later.

That was the rush.

Especially when those people started to take the mickey.

Because you knew that in about 6 months to a year, they’d be copying you anyway.

And they’d be wearing what they were laughing at now.

Isn’t that what creativity should be like?

Striving to be different, ahead of the game.

Not just striving to win an award for doing what conventional wisdom decrees we ought to be doing.

I prefer what Vinny Warren said.

Vinny is an Irishman working in New York.

He did the “Wassssssup” campaign for Budweiser, that caught on around the world.

He said that, if we were really doing our jobs, we should be AHEAD of the awards.

We should be doing work that they don’t even have awards for yet.

How great is that?

The most stylish mod I ever knew, was a guy called Bob Beer, from Mile End.

I once asked Bob what he thought real style was.

He said, “Anyone with a few bob can go down to Yves St. Laurent, pick out a suit, shirt, shoes, shades, and come out looking okay.

But REAL style is being able to walk into C&A and pick the one thing in the entire store worth having.”

True to his word, Bob used to buy his shoes from Annello & Davide in Covent Garden, but his white shirts from Marks & Spenser.

I think the really creative people in our business are like that.

Be different and be first.

Let all the sheep catch up later.

When I was deputy ECD at BMP, John Webster promoted another guy over me to be sole ECD.

I would work under John because he was better than me.

But I didn’t think this other guy was, so I decided to leave.

That meant getting an ECD’s job somewhere else.

And I fancied a big agency.

Trouble was, I wasn’t famous enough to land one of those jobs.

So I needed to get famous in a hurry.

I thought the easy way to get famous quickly was to get your name on an agency.

David Abott had just left French Gold Abbott to open Abbott Mead Vickers.

I thought maybe I could talk David’s ex partner, Mike Gold, into opening an agency with me.

That way people might see my name next to Abbott’s ex partner and think I was in the same league as Abbott.

When we talked to the bank we found, if we put our houses up as security against the loan, we could stay open just 6 months.

So that’s what every ad was about.

Make this ad famous, make it stand out.

Because we won’t be here in 6 months.

We were trying to do advertising that everyone talked about.

The one thing we couldn’t afford to be was safe and invisible.

So we attracted clients who couldn’t afford that either.

Clients who had to get a result right now.

(What we now call ‘challenger brands’.)

And as Bob Dylan says, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

And you know what?

It worked so well that we didn’t go out of business.

Our concentration was so single minded, that our advertising was different to every other agency’s.

And accidentally we were a success.

Campaign said our advertising had, “The muscularity of American advertising with the style of British advertising.”

They also said it was like, “A brick coming through the consumer’s window with the client’s name on it.”

We just had to make sure everyone noticed our advertising.

There’s a fantastic energy, clarity, and freedom in that.

You stop worrying about other people’s opinions, and just focus on the result.

A martial arts expert once told me, to strike the most powerful blow to your opponent’s face, you don’t aim at his face.

You aim about a foot behind his face.

That way your fist is atill accelerating at the point of contact.

I think this is a similar thing.

Go for something beyond what you actually want.

Then you’re still accelerating as you go through it.

Recently, someone who’d just graduated from art school was showing me their portfolio.
It was good.
But nowadays most portfolios are pretty good.
It wasn’t anything special.
It wasn’t different.
And, given there aren’t enough jobs for the number of people applying, this is a problem.
For every ten good portfolios, there is maybe one job.
Now I had heard that this particular person was very creative.
But there wasn’t any special evidence of that in his portfolio.
Just half a dozen good campaigns, TV, print, ambient, like most other portfolios.
I asked him why this was.
He said that he had been going around to agencies getting advice and then doing what they told him.
The people who would mainly see him were juniors, who’d recently been hired.
They all told him roughly the same thing.
Which was how to make his book look more like their book.
How many campaigns he’d need, how may press ads, how many TV, how many digital.
Which ideas they liked.
Which ideas were old fashioned.
So every graduate is going to see the people who’ve also graduated recently.
And then changing his book to look more like everyone else’s.
I asked him if he thought his book fully displayed his creativity.
He said it didn’t, but that was what he’d been told he needed.
He’d much rather do something, more creative.
I asked him where it said, in the advertising rule book, that you could only have one portfolio.
He asked me what I meant.
I said I know you have to have a conventional advertising portfolio, but who says that’s ALL you can have?
How bad would it be to say to a creative director, “I’ve got two portfolios, one that’s conventional advertising, and one that’s full of unconventional creativity. Which would you like to see?”
Doesn’t that make you different to everyone else straight away?
Sure, junior teams want to look at books full of advertising.
But junior teams can’t give you jobs.
Just crits.
ECDs can give you jobs, and they clearly don’t want to see just another book full of ads.
They want to see something different.
Something creative.
It was like a light going on in his head.
It had never occurred to him that you didn’t have to follow the rules.
That you could do something different.
This creative person had been led to believe that the rules for an advertising portfolio were as inflexible as the civil service.
Absolutely everybody had to do it absolutely the same way.
Then I asked him what his favourite agency was.
He said Droga 5.
So the next question obviously is, do you think they are doing everything absolutely the same way as everyone else?
Or do you think they’re doing something different?
Isn’t it strange that everyone admires Droga 5 for breaking the rules?
And everyone carries on obeying the rules themselves?
Maybe they’ll stop obeying the rules when someone gives them permission.

A brief can sometimes be a mind dump from the account group.
The things the client wants to highlight.
The things the client doesn’t want highlighted, but wants mentioned.
The new direction the advertising must take.
The nod in the direction of the old advertising.
Pretty soon, you’ve got so much information your head is swimming.
The job looks insurmountable, your energy is sapping away.
There’s just too much to get into an ad.
Especially an ad that has to compete in a very crowded environment.
An ad that has to be powerful and simple to even stand out.
In my experience, you can often get a simplified brief by replicating
these conditions with the account man.
Get him angry.
When people get angry they get frustrated.
And when they get frustrated with trying to convey complex thoughts,
everything suddenly gets very simple.
For instance:

Me: What’s the brief?

A M: It’s a value proposition.

Me: What does that mean?

A M: (Rolls eyes upward) It’s a quality-to-price ratio enhanced by
package delivery.

Me: Does that mean it’s cheaper?

AM: (Exasperated sigh) Not per se. Not in terms of individual unit cost.

Me: So how is it value if it’s not cheaper?

A M: (Through gritted teeth) The quality has remained unchanged, as
has the cost, the innovation is the new volume packaging.

Me: But if it costs the same, how is it better value?

A M: (Finally cracking) Look, it’s just fucking BIGGER, alright.

Me: Got it.

You see creatives have to deal in a world of single, simple thoughts.
So we have to reduce everything to that.
It seems crass, because it is.
That’s the world we live in.
If we’re to be effective.
Remember a brief is supposed to be just that.

Brief.

When people write a brief, they often write it as if it’s the end of the process.

Just because to them the brief is the end of their part of the process.

They think that’s what they’ll be judged on.

So they try to get absolutely everything into the brief.

To make sure no one will feel ignored.

You see as creatives, we think the brief is just written for us.

But that isn’t necessarily true.

The planner has a view.

The account director has a view.

And all the clients will each have a view.

And they will all expect to see their contribution represented in the brief.

So we are at the end of a long process.

But, although all those things are in the brief, we can’t get them all in the advertising.

We all know that advertising should be done from a single thought.

So how do we decide what that thought is?

In my experience, when the brief seems complicated, confusing, and even contradictory here’s a good tip.

Get a yellow pen and go through the brief.

Highlight whichever word occurs most often.

You’ll usually find this word is the actual brief.

Here’s a vastly oversimplified made-up example to make the point:

Audience:             Young, modern thinking professionals. Not excluding older families, who are open to modern ideas.

Out-take:              This is an established brand, but which understands the modern world. It fits with my traditional family values and my modern lifestyle.

Proposition:         A reliable, familiar brand you can feel comfortable with, that has adapted perfectly          to modern needs.

Support:               This is a well known company with traditional values, that has made significant changes. It is now well equipped to compete in the modern market place in which it finds itself.

Obviously that’s not a real brief, but it’s not a million miles away.

And behind all the mass of detail, you can see what’s really on

everyone’s mind.