I remember reading Stan Richards' book when it first came out. The part that stood out to me was his open office concept, which was more rare at the time--and how no one, except, I think, his CFO had a door. Stan said that with doors employees always think, "if there's a closed door there's a 100% chance they are talking about me in there." I thought that was well-stated.
I also remember losing a pitch once to The Richards Group years ago because the client loved a particular piece of work they did for The Home Depot. It was called "Happy" and I happened to find it still out there...
"Well, we start with a simple one. I really believe and have always believed that people need to like the work. It has to be endearing in some way. It may create a smile. It may create a laugh. It may create a tear. It may provide information that wouldn't have come any other way, but there's some element that makes the people like the advertising, and we work very hard to find that element."
The first time I saw Chick-Fil-A work, I backtracked the agency--and it was Richards. I did the same with Motel 6. Stan should be in the Advertising Hall of Fame, which just happened.
Most industry people probably think of Stan for the recognition he's received for not selling his agency, saying that he has "watched a hundred agencies be acquired and cannot name one that got better." This is also well-stated and pretty much true. Rarely are things black and white. I'd argue that R/GA, Adam & Eve and Deutsch all 'got better' but, yes, it's sad to think of the Ammiratis and the Wells Rich Greenes who are no longer around and the many, many others who are still here, but aren't nearly the same as what they were before.
For me, Stan's agency has consistently done work that is 'endearing,' to use his words. The fact he hasn't sold is great. But I've just always been a fan of the work. It's an agency I've always liked. Only competed with him once, and it's Stan 1, John 0.
It's true what this year's editor of The Gunn Report said about ideas. It's why nearly any agency can have one hit.
But the real marks of agency team success are two fold: does success happen over time, and does success happen in one shop across multiple categories in one calendar year? If so, you're on it.
"Ideas are fragile; they can collapse at any point. Sometimes an idea is pure and simple, you can feel the power of it from its inception; others have been shaped and crafted into great. It takes passion, tenacity, it takes a team and a great client. None of it is easy, but greatness comes in not giving up."
I think in the corporate world we freely use ‘positive words’ like ‘transformation’ and ‘innovation’ in order to indicate our progressive, modern leadership style. But we shy away from a proper engagement with ‘negative words’ like ‘risk’ and ‘mistakes’. We don’t like the suggestion that commercial success is a calculated risk, because we don’t like to accommodate the prospect of failure. It offends our faith in optimism and positive thinking. In this respect we do ourselves a disservice. It’s like talking about rights without recognizing responsibilities.
And we are particularly cautious around the word ‘creativity’. Creativity belongs in Pandora’s box, along with art and Bohemia and adolescent paintings of Coke cans; along with hirsute cyclists of dubious politics and personal hygiene; along with an excess of emotion and a scarcity of common sense. Creativity is all about soft sell and soft options, not hard data and hard facts.
I wonder if we in the creative businesses have chosen the wrong word. Would we fare better if we were called ‘change managers’ or ‘commercial disruptors’? Would our expertise be more highly regarded if we were ‘innovation scientists’? Would we sit at the mythical ‘high table’ if our chair said ‘transformation consultants’?
Recently I logged in to Twitter and received a promoted tweet from Amazon. The tweet said "50% off today's Deal of the Day!" I clicked. Waiting for me was a product page of great deals on a clothing brand I had previously searched. There was a 50% off deal on a t-shirt. Because I have a relationship with Amazon Prime a click or two purchased that item and shipped it to my house. I clicked back in to Twitter to resume what I was doing. The whole thing took under 45 seconds.
But if you really think about it, the most common reason people don't like an ad has little to do with creativity or the message itself; it's because it's irrelevant to them.
Consider the things largely funded by advertising: the entertainment industry, the news industry, sports broadcasting, Google. Remove advertising and many of the things we like suddenly disappear. And yet advertising comes with a small price: for the last 100 years all ad buys had to contain a certain amount of waste. Are pharma ads extremely annoying to you? That's probably because you're not interested in Cialis. But you're watching football with a lot of other people.
Take a scan across the industry and the improvements in creativity, design and marketing over the last five years are notable. While the negative souls will always say that "it's not what it used to be" the truth of the matter is that it's better. Some historic campaigns may never be topped. But many of the most viral things on the web today are great advertising ideas.
The most acute challenge the industry faces today, the area that needs the most help, the most guidance and the most focus is the part that we talk about the least: media. And fixing it can have the greatest affect on people by helping them find what they want. If advertising must exist, let's at least try harder to have it be valuable and helpful to people.
In the past media teams spent their time strategizing whether to run an ad in GQ or Esquire. Last year, 22 percent of all US ad spending was digital. This is up 19 percent from the previous year. Such volume has given rise to DSPs, or demand-side platforms, which allow advertisers to buy online campaigns more efficiently, adjust in real time according to effectiveness data, and actually use strategy to inform placement.
Today we're witnessing the staying power of TV. At the same time, we're also witnessing TV and online video merging together, which will be valuable. With TV we know reach and frequency, but not engagement, whereas with online we have data around engagement, but how well are we at documenting viewability?
Work is now being done to tie online display advertising standards to online video, which is currently that to register as "viewable" 50 percent of the ad has to be in-view of the user for one second. Why one second? Research shows that when we're on a web page we're going to make a decision about what to do with an ad--ignore, click, leave the page--in less than a second.
Digital has also been shown to drive more reach. The IAB has Nielsen research which says that moving 15 percent of a TV budget to digital can increase reach by up to six percent while decreasing the overall CPM.
I don't believe the studies that say people prefer big web ads. I do believe that if a web ad contains something interesting and relevant to people that they don't mind it as much.
Consumers have some control here. With ad settings, we can tell Google what's interesting to us. Or, more importantly, what isn't. Not into fishing, fiber & textile arts, or foreign language study (to name a few "f" choices)? Then remove them. It's reasonable to assume that more people will do this considering it's only one click in from many ads served up today.
The tools are finally arriving where advertising can be better for people. We can tailor per person: eliminate what is irrelevant and offer what is helpful. Doing this saves money for clients. It also provides insightful data into customer behavior, which can inform marketing and brand decisions, both online and offline.
Nice. I love this collection of work. More so than previous Cannes Grand Prix winners for whatever reason. Maybe it's because it all feels so on-culture. The winners aren't just amazing creative executions this season but ideas that are really close to the sentiments of society. At least, that's the way I feel.
Outdoor / Coke "Sharing Hands" Ogilvy/Shanghai
Ambient / Mercedes "Invisible Drive" Jung von Matt/Hamburg
Mobile / Google "Project: Re-brief" Grow Interactive/Norfolk
Direct Marketing / American Express "Small Business Saturday" CP+B/Boulder
Design / Austria Solar "The Solar Annual Report" Serviceplan/Munich
Cyber / Nike+ "Fuelband" R/GA NYC
Film / Chipotle "Back to the Start" CAA/Los Angeles
So the secret's out on why agencies are built the way they are. For many years when people in other industries walked through good ad agencies and design firms an interesting discussion would typically follow about the space itself... Why is it built so differently than other offices?
There are three things that can impede creative thinking at work. And a creative company is constructed--from the building to the culture to the day-to-day processes--to help navigate them. The better these impediments are managed, the greater the odds of creative success.
Finding the Moment of Insight.
Gladwell wrote once that insight seekers need to determine if they're solving a puzzle or a mystery. The difference? A puzzle is a business problem with missing pieces (e.g. go field more research) where a mystery has all the information there it just needs to be looked at from a renewed perspective. Agencies solve both but mysteries are more frequent.
It's worth mentioning that mysteries are often the most difficult creative problems to solve because at first they seem impossible. How will it be different this time? But a moment of insight changes all of that. Like the moment a 3M engineer figured out the use of an extremely weak glue (while sitting in church) which led to the production of Post-It Notes.
Insights often come in the strangest places, don't they? In the shower, walking the dog, making breakfast in the morning. Basically doing things that aren't related to a job description. Why does that work? The answer apparently lies in science. The moment before an insight appears a part of our brain, called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (or the "aSTG"), exhibits a spike in activity and this region in the right hemisphere excels at drawing together distantly related information. And it turns out there are certain things that make people more likely to have an insight...
One study found exposure to non-related humorous videos increased insight success rates by 20%. Another study found that alcohol consumption actually helped with solving complex word problems.
What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate—this approach can inhibit the imagination.
And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.
So why do places like Deutsch offer pool tables and Google have ping pong? (Aside from creating a more fun work environment.) For just this reason.
Keep On Going.
It's hard to find more passion than someone who keeps turning and churning creative ideas in search of the answer. Sometimes one has to watch the hours--you're intensely working on a solution on Tuesday afternoon and suddenly it's 7:30 at night. (Boston Consulting Group has set up alerts that when employees consistently hit over 60 hours/week their managers are alerted to help avoid burn out.)
But creative people know when they're close to the answer... They just may not know how close. Einstein famously remarked that "it's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." Creative companies have to feed this ability. Part of this is having a safe place to work late into the night without worry. Another part is allotting enough time and alertness to do the creative necessary justice. Drake Cooper keeps the now-famous Red Bull fridge stocked for us all.
And then there's fear. As legendary creative Harvey Gabor says midway through his Re:Brief ad: "The fear will make you work harder because you've gotta present stuff to the client... the neurotic parts (of the job) make you work much harder."
It's that sort of mentality that often leads to greatness. There's the famous example of Milton Glaser whose original cursive "I Love New York" slogan was approved and ready to print but he just wasn't satisfied. So one day he drew this:
And then of course there's Helmut Krone who would toil in his office for hours and hours at DDB to produce beautiful, unmatched art direction during his time:
When you're close to greatness, always keep going. It has a funny way of not being there again in the morning.
New Raw Materials.
"Creativity is just connecting things." That was Steve Jobs' approach. It's true--the best ideas often come from far off, otherwise unrelated things.
In 2010, Newsweek produced an excellent piece on creativity in which they said:
The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).
They're right. And to succeed creative companies have to be the ultimate space of openness and convergence. All thought is allowed and you have to let those raw materials inside, like what DTAC has done in their Thailand office:
And like Melbourne's ANZ Centre:
It certainly doesn't need to look that pretty but the more we associate ourselves with things outside of our immediate area of specialty the more innovative we become. This probably seems intuitive but it's backed up by research. Consider a recent study of 766 Stanford MBA graduates turned entrepreneurs--those with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on metrics of innovation.
These three types of creativity--Finding Moments of Insight, Keep On Going and New Raw Materials--all live and thrive at creative companies.
And now, since we're at it and all, there's a final thing not in the article that must be included:
Teamwork & Collaboration.
In July of last year, the same author of the NY Times piece wrote a post surrounding The Auteur Myth--the idea that true creative greatness is rarely done alone:
I certainly don’t mean to disparage the genius of Hitchcock or Steve Jobs or to defend uninspired data driven design. But it’s also important to remember that nobody creates Vertigo or the iPad by themselves; even auteurs need the support of a vast system. When you look closely at auteurs, what you often find is that their real genius is for the assembly of creative teams, trusting the right people with the right tasks at the right time. Sure, they make the final decisions, but they are choosing between alternatives created by others. When we frame auteurs as engaging in the opposite of collaboration, when we obsess over Hitchcock’s narrative flair but neglect Lehman’s script, or think about Jobs’ aesthetic but not Ive’s design (or the design of those working for Ives), we are indulging in a romantic vision of creativity that rarely exists. Even geniuses need a little help.
There it is. Four things to foster creativity.
So now everyone knows why good agencies are built the way they are.
Burger King has gone back to the food. Students of advertising will remember that the burger chain has done this before.
A favorite historical agency of mine, Ammirati & Puris, won the Burger King account in 1994 away from DMB&B, a large, prominent creative agency at the time. The BK campaign for the first four years of the Ammirati relationship was "Get Your Burger's Worth."
Take away the differences in pop culture and fifteen years worth of filming advances and the ads could be from the same campaign.
I like mcgarrybowen, the agency doing the new work, and I loved Ammirati so this will be interesting to watch...
There's a world of difference between 1995 and 2011. But in the first year that Ammirati had the Burger King account and the creative went "back to the basics" and "focused on the food and good value" as it's apparently doing again today, sales went up 6.6%.*
I started reading Ad Age when I was 16. Of course at that age you're too young to comprehend most of it. But something I always had an affinity for was the rankings and the agencies themselves: who was up, who was down, who was producing the best work. Acknowledging and studying the shops doing the good stuff has always been important to me.
So when Campaign Planning launched in 2007 one of the first things I did was to create a TypeList of my favorite shops. Never worked at the majority of them, just places I study, follow and learn from. That initial TypeList has since grown to about 45 creative companies doing all types of things, advertising and beyond.
On that inaugural 2007 list was Modernista! I've always had a fondness for their work. So I felt sort of glum when I heard that they were going to be shutting things down. But then I thought about Ammirati & Puris and Ally & Gargano and Wells Rich Greene and other fine agencies which are no longer. And then I felt better.
Today is Modernista!'s final day of operation. So this week's Great Work post is a collection of personal favorites from their portfolio. Enjoy.