Creatives have always looked for ways to beat their competitors.
That’s their job.
Always looking for an advantage.
You might start off trying to do a better ad, but that might not be enough.
So you put your creative mind to work trying to find other ways to turn things to your advantage.
For instance Mary Wells, a copywriter, got Braniff, a tiny airline, to paint their planes different colours: one pink, one chartreuse, one lavender.
She changed their strategy into a style airline, an exclusive choice.
Bill Bernbach, a copywriter, used the fact that Avis was a small company to position it as Hertz’s challenger, and changed car rental into a two horse race.
He gave them their company strategy: We Try Harder.
George Lois, an art director, took Esquire magazine and invented the graphic, single story front page that dominated the news-stand.
He gave them their punchy, main lead story strategy.
Now every magazine copies that style.
This wasn’t just pictures and words, ads or commercials.
This was upstream thinking.
Thinking about the problem before it got to advertising.
That’s why these people did the best advertising, they were thinking outside the advertising box.
So what happened?
Planning happened.
This upstream thinking became known as strategic thinking.
And it became a separate discipline.
It even got its own department.
Well, once you cut strategic thinking off from intuition, you’re left with just reason and logic.
The problem is, there is now no intuitive creative leap.
With planning, we now put “how we got there” ahead of the intuitive creative leap.
The logic and reason is more important than originality, surprise, and unexpectedness.
We’ve replaced creativity with intellectual book-keeping.
The strategy and the media is done long before the brief comes anywhere near the creative department.
This means all the so-called creatives can now do is execution: pictures and words.
That’s what Edward de Bono meant when he said, “There are lots of people calling themselves creative who are actually merely stylists.”
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Dave,
I am on my first work placement and have recently found this out. After a lengthy time working on your own briefs, in which the proposition, strategy and the target audience are completely in your control and up to you. I was gutted when I got my first brief and the target audience, strategy for the brand and proposition had all been done.
I thought hold on, when do I get to be creative.
I’m not saying the planners aren’t doing a good job. But if you had a great idea in terms of strategy for a brand to follow that you think would work better than the current TOV and strategy, how would you get this across, especially on a work placement?
In a wonderful speech, Bill Bernbach spoke of this dilemma, the ‘ … uphill, if not impossible, battle that reason and logic have in the final conduct of a man.”
He observed that, ‘… our brain is not made to search for truth; it is but another organ of survival, like fangs or claws. So the brain does not search for truth, but for advantage, …”
Planning is a scam to get university graduates into agencies without their having to learn how to make advertising.
I think modern advertising is a microcosm of society. All the fun’s been removed and replaced with greed, complex administration and souless managers, who haven’t the inclination or the ability to look beyond an invoice. Ditto society. Ban this. Ban that. And let’s pack the public sector with unimaginative bureaucrats who say all the right things, but achieve fock all. Don’t know what that’s got to do with your post Dave but I feel better for having got it off my chest.
Good point Gordon. Although in my experience the best planners don’t have an advertising background or didn’t study it. Like politics, as a discipline it suffers from people entering it as career.
People tend to link the decline of advertising to external factors - proliferating media, busy lifestyles etc. I think it is directly linked to the amount of people who study marketing.
Anyway, I think planning should paint a scene for the creatives - this is what the world looks like to our consumers - and allow the creative to make that intuitive leap, which I believe comes from empathy.
(Another issue is that planners are generally in awe of their cleverer, more hard-working friends from uni who got “proper” jobs - in the city, in consultancy. The masters of the universe. These masters of the universe live in a world of rational economics - if a man is given a range of choices, he will choose the one that maximises his potential gain. Hence P&G’s legendary “reason to believe” and “the science bit”. Planners attempt to construct the world in those terms, so the proposition becomes a dry, lifeless tool. Get rid of it.)
As an example, I had to brief a team on “compliance” for a medical client. People wouldn’t take their drugs.
I said to the team “Every time they open the medicine cabinet and see that box, it is a reminder that they are dying. Every time they take the pill, it is a reminder that they are dying. How do you talk to that person? What do you want to say to someone in that position?” That, I think is planning - researching, speaking to and understanding people, and then bringing their hopes, dreams, fears to life for a creative team.
That and spending 5 hours a day on Facebook.
I once did a shitty thing while being totally pissed on a client. he was constantly saying things like: do something nice and fab like this and than showed me some cool ads that even won in Cannes (he got them via mail). so I did pretty good stuff but it was all rejected. and than one day I drew storylboards from 3 Cannes winners and present ‘em. guess what? they were all rejected.
that’s what went wrong.
Great post Dave. The first step in our after briefing is to evaluate the proposition completely and make sure we feel its in the right direction. If we don’t think it is, we tend to scamp up one in their direction and one that we feel is better. We always seem to win.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all plannersare automatically bad.
I think running the whole process like an assembly line is bad.
So the person at down the line (creative) doesn’t get any input into upstream decisions.
So a lot of the creative possibilities are lost at that point.
once again i agree. i was struck by how flat and lifeless a lot of the work in the last Campaign press awards was. the ads made sense, but that’s about all. they weren’t particularly moving.
UK advertising used to be subversive and full of life. i’m not sure how much of this is down to the culture of planners but based on the conversation here it seems to be the case. is it?
Hi Vinnie.
I don’t think planners are the cause of fear and suffocating control, but I think they’re one of the products of it.
As soon as something exciting happens the human mind wants to analyse, control, reproduce, and homogenise it.
Client’s desire to do that was there before the planners were.
Demand dictates supply.
Hallo Dave
Yes, times have changed.
Used to be people said (at least in the Far East) that “an agency was suit controlled.”
But now, they say “it is planning controlled.”
And that, to me, is worse.
Suits you could reason with them.
Maybe because they had no real reason for not wanting to sell a piece of work.
“I don’t like it” or “the client won’t like it” are easy to counter.
But now, with planners, it becomes, “our research has shown the consumer won’t like it.”
Still, it depends on the agency - and the time.
John Hegarty’s famous Audi tagline almost didn’t make it because reserach said it won’t work.
But Sir J convinced the client to go ahead.
Similarly, Akio Morita’s first Walkman idea researched badly.
While research said t go ahead with the “New Coke” man years ago - it failed badly.
Think sometimes planners need to be reminded that they aren’t all-knowing.
Regards
[...] Dave Trott slår et slag mot planning. Og hevder at planning fjerner mulighetene for kreative til å tenke utenfor “reklameboksen” og derfor gjør dem kun til “stylister”. [...]
I believe Edward de Bono was referring to designers and not creatives. Conceptually speaking.
It’s own fault.
We hired “ideas people” who could quite often be idiots.
Copywriters, art directors….these guys are admen.
“Ideas people” are usually j just lazy rich kids who are confident.
I know plumbers who are ideas people. I know teachers who are ideas people. Being an ideas person is not trade enough.
You need to offer more. And because, for so long, we didn’t … planners took the mantle.
We had it. We gave it away.
I think you need an ideas person + at least one visible skill. Otherwise answering other people’s briefs is probably all you are good for.
100% agree with this mister Dave.
That’s why at our place there are exactly 0 (count them - 0) planners.
But there are side issues to this problem:
1. A lot of people in the business are more comfortable pretending there is a ‘process’ like a production line to creating good advertising because this means they don’t have to accept that great ads come from great ad people. They’re not comfortable with the thought that their most valuable company assets tend to get drunk and swear a lot. They’d rather pretend there’s a system they can own.
2. Some creative people seem to be fine with this sorry state of affairs - they do their bit of ‘creativity’ (styling) and say ‘judge me on that’ without a thought as to the bigger picture.
3. The current system of awards don’t recognise great advertising, just ‘clever’ execution. ‘Avis is no.2 - we try harder’ is a fantastic advertising idea - you could set that line on a page and you have greatness there. Would that get recognised today? Would it f*ck.
4. There are too many play it safe so-called-creatives who are playing their part in this farce, but are more like middle-management yes-men than true ad creatives - and what the hell is a ‘creative’ any way? When we call people Art Directors, Copywriters and Ad-Men things are much clearer.
The thing is, this problem is so much more important than people think - in one fell swoop is it suppressing the great ideas that could once again prove advertising’s worth to business, creating a generation of happy-to-fit-in civil servant creatives, and discouraging those with an original and enquiring mind from the mainstream of the industry.
More crapping-on about this from me here: http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/in-ghetto-creative-ghetto-that-is.html
What about making up (lets use the “good” old terms) ad-cw-planner teams?
instead of this who-is-above-who game, 3 people as partners, struggling, dealing with the same problem. coming up with the right brief for themselves, with one they feel comfortable about. it could also ease the stress and frustration, based on the clichés that creatives cannot stand the smart ass planner bullshit and planners dont get why these narcistic people dont want to understand them.
Obviously the idea and the ad cannot be separated but agencies are built exactly on this! insane!
Actually i cannot really see the essential difference between these 3 “positions” (especially cw and ad). What knows one that the other couldnt do? how to use photoshop?
They are just approaching from a different angle but the basics are the same. And exactly these diff. point of views would be needed, should be involved. all along the way.
i also think its a must to have creatives involved from the very beginning but im also sure that the planners job shouldnt end with giving out the brief and (then maybe ask for modifications). its just stupid and kills the fun.
im a bit late with the comment but so curious what you think.
Hi Babett.
I think we agree.
You need all 3 skill sets, but they don’t need to be seperated.
Think of it as a Venn diagram.
The part where the three circles overlap is where the fun and magic happens.
A good idea doesn’t care who had it.
But in the system most agencies operate under, it can’t be a good idea if the right people didn’t have it in the right order.
Hi Dave,
yes, I think we do. especially because I had exactly the Venn diagram in my head when I was thinking about this :).
How can be new and fresh ideas expected by operating under a totally old-fashioned and rigid system with patterns and templates, in an uncomfortable atmosphere.
If you want to have people around you thinking big and sparkling then provide them with a method that allows them to do so and which can also assist to it.
Actually I think Id drop the word “creative” forever (as a slogan, label or topic to be discussed all the time at the agencies). It only divides people in one group that feels desperately obliged to be creative by any means and other group that is closed off of it by not having the title “creative”. nomen est omen.