From Dumb Luck to Structured Excellence
(Originally published in Contagious Magazine Issue 42 in 2015)
Very often when introducing what we do at Contagious Insider, after we’ve described how we deliver on our promise of making brands braver, will come a stealthy question. Perhaps in the tail end of a conference call, or an office corridor, it will form the basis of the project we go on to deliver: ‘So… how do we actually develop braver, better creative work?’
Cue wry smiles all round, because, of course, it was only recently that brand owners showed any interest in that question. Cannes Lions was already 49 years old when the world’s biggest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, sent its teams along for the first time in 2003. In the 2009 book Power Brands: Measuring, Making and Managing Brand Success, by McKinsey consultants Hajo Riesenbeck and Jesko Perrey, the head of marketing at a major FMCG company is quoted as saying: ‘Creativity is irrelevant at best. Often, it is downright harmful to advertising success,’ (cited in James Hurman’s brilliant book, The Case for Creativity). And certainly when I was a client at PepsiCo UK and Europe from 2004 to 2013, there were occasional conversations that suggested that a zero-sum relationship might exist between work that was ‘creative’ and work that was ‘effective’.
The volte-face is based on two factors. First, clients everywhere have started to cotton on to the research done in the past decade by Peter Field and Les Binet. Using the British Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s peerless archive of business case studies, they have proved that creatively awarded campaigns are ten times more efficient at driving business results than non-awarded ones. Second, the explosion in content output, coupled with the reality that advertising is an industry whose output its intended audience will actually pay to avoid, means that the first and foremost barrier to effective brand communications today is simply to be seen in the first place. It is exceptional creativity — the defeat of the familiar by the truly original — that alone has the power to beat ‘cognitive immunity’ (a term that describes the way our brains become resistant over time to the constant presence of stimulus).
So far, so obvious. Cue nodding heads, polite applause and much sharing of inspirational quotes celebrating the wonderful power of creativity on office walls, PowerPoint slides and insipid LinkedIn posts.
Yet as our clients’ question suggests, while brand teams recognise the need to deliver more courageous work, many of them find it impossible or impractical to do anything about it.
The biggest problem in delivering good, let alone great work is the sheer complexity of it all. With so many moving parts and players in the development process, not to mention the myriad perverse ways in which those damned annoying consumers wilfully ignore the careful assumptions we have made on their behalf, it’s a wonder that advertisers succeed in delivering any predictable brand effects at all.
Brands certainly do brilliantly creative work. But the regularity with which they manage to do so is far less reliable. At Contagious Insider, we’ve lately been focused on how to move our clients from sparks of occasional and accidental creative brilliance towards a more systematic and deliberate quest for it, a practice of creative excellence. It’s on this journey that we’ve encountered a number of startlingly recurrent misperceptions that plague marketers almost universally. Each of these, on their own or in combination, can impede genuine creative endeavour unless addressed by the practical principals that follow.
THE PERCEPTION:
YOU’RE AWESOME AT YOUR JOB
You’re a marketing bad-ass going places. A high-functioning, red-blooded ‘80% is good enough’ decision-maker with your heart and brain wired together, cooking full tilt boogie for freedom and justice. This typology dominates senior leader- ship positions at many clients and for good reason: you’re able to walk into a room, quickly analyse complex evidence and deploy ruthless logic in order to make the right call. But although this behaviour may draw admiration from colleagues and bosses, it can undermine the very environment that creativity needs to flourish. More contemplative team members can be dismissed as slow-moving, fluffy navel-gazers and the constant demand for action-oriented behaviour can smother the need for the patience and deliberation so crucial for new ideas in their fragile formative stages.
THE PRACTICE:
JUST SOMETIMES, PARK YOUR INTELLECT AT THE DOOR
Remember, logical thinking can often be a barrier to genuine creativity. As Jim Carroll, outgoing chairman at BBH UK reminds us, choosing original ideas requires the courage to defy common sense. ‘When you think about it, ordinary work is actually the intelligent choice,’ Caroll wrote in You Can Now magazine. ‘Because ordinary work tends to translate the brief directly, observes conventions and uses familiar reference points. By contrast, extraordinary work often correlates less directly with the brief, breaks conventions and uses unfamiliar reference points.’ As an example he cites the famous BBH-crafted Audi slogan: ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’, written in a language, entirely illogically, that most of its audience in Britain could not be expected to understand, but which went on to become a long-standing and successful endline. He concludes: ‘Extraordinary work is ordinarily very easy to reject. In nearly all aspects of business, intelligence represents a blessing, a competitive advantage. But in the judgement of creativity it can represent a curse, a competitive disadvantage.’
Above all, ego-driven go-getters must remember that while self-confidence is the critical element in defining creative ambitions, self-doubt is what it takes to actually achieve them.
THE PERCEPTION:
GREAT BRIEF? JOB DONE
Brand organisations invest huge resources training marketing teams on the strategic elements of the advertising development process: how brand ideas link to brand benefits, supported by reasons to believe, and all neatly packaged into a company-specific briefing template. But this organised learning approach tails off when it comes to training clients on how to judge the work — the only part of the process the public will actually see. Not only does this imbalance mean that even the best clients struggle to find the right language to successfully discuss creativity with their agency teams, but it also builds the wrong-headed perception that the clients’ job ends with writing a brief.
THE PRACTICE:
PRIORITISE BEHAVIOURS OVER BRIEFING TEMPLATES
The truth is that good work does not have a correlation with good briefs and bad work does not have a correlation with bad briefs. Loads of the briefs that brand owners write are uninspiring. I know because I wrote lots of them. Yet, strangely, many went on to generate fantastic creative work. Russell Davies, responsible for leading Nike planning at Wieden+Kennedy and then at the brand itself between 1996 and 2007, says in the ‘Planning etc’ video on his Vimeo channel: ‘Loads of Nike briefs were basically “Do the same thing we did last year but do it differently.”’
The fact that Nike manages to nail it so often isn’t down to how good its briefs are, but the relationships, people and culture that both client and agency put in place to foster creative ideas. If you get that right, then all the brief has to say is, simply, ‘Start’. The brief is the paper that covers the cracks of a less than perfect client-agency relationship. Since perfect client-agency partnerships are impossible, briefs will always play a critical arse-covering role for the industry. That aside, let’s not overestimate their importance.
The more realistic and useful approach we introduce to Contagious Insider clients is to begin by understanding that truly creative work is based on non-linear cognition. The day-to-day processes in place between client and agency must leave room for the ambiguous ‘fuzzy thinking’ that allows consideration of ideas that exist at the periphery of your main discussions; the margins where creative excellence often resides.
It’s what Kaoro Sugano, Dentsu Toyko’s creator of Honda’s 2014 Sound of Senna campaign talked about on stage at last year’s Most Contagious conference when he called out the importance of ‘leaving room for the audience’s imagination’. Consider, for example, of the outlier thinking that in 2013 buried a screwball millionaire’s $500,000 Bentley in the ground in a bid to increase organ donation for the Brazilian Association of Organ Transplants — a campaign that claimed that rare grand slam — winning both a gold Lion for creativity and gold Effie for effectiveness (see Contagious issue 37 for the details of the campaign).
THE PERCEPTION:
WE SHOULD WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL VERSUS LOCAL
Many misconceptions are based on what I call the ‘zero-sum fallacy’; marketers set in opposition objectives or criteria that are not, in fact, competing. This mistake means work is seen as either ‘creative’ or ‘effective’; ‘innovative’ or ‘informative’. But by far the most common that we see is to automatically equate centrally created campaigns with compromised local market engagement. Although much harder to develop, there are many ideas that resonate equally powerfully in a range of global cultures, whether from brands such as Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, or Volvo’s Epic Split, or pop cultural phenomena like The Simpsons or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. Ultimately, advertising should aim to drive behavioural change at scale rather than focusing on niche, highly localised propositions. Unfortunately, in order to negotiate the tensions of head office versus local market realpolitik, most brands have set their creative ambitions too low.
THE PRACTICE:
RAISE YOUR AMBITION BECAUSE IDEAS HAVE NEVER HAD AN EASIER TIME CROSSING CULTURAL BORDERS
Global ideas can come from local markets. Coke was far from the first to develop the idea of personalised packaging, and yet its Share a Coke campaign has come to irrevocably own the territory. It did this by identifying local success in Australia, followed by a ruthless display of organisational efficiency to fast-track its roll-out in more than 70 countries across the world. In a 2013 report on food and drink marketing, Lucky Generals’ Andy Nairn cites a quote from a 2002 IPA Effectiveness Award Submission from the Olivio brand. It reminds us to ‘…focus not on realities that divide, but fantasies that unite… the secret is not necessarily to think global but to think big. Consumers do not know whether an ad is global — only whether it is great.’
THE PERCEPTION:
YOU’RE REASONABLE AND PRAGMATIC
In 2008 I was on the Pepsi UK brand team during our most significant product launch in 15 years. Pepsi Raw was a premium cola using all natural ingredients, inspired by the growth of independent, artisanal competitors. The packaging — a glass bottle indicating premium, provenance and craft — looked great and the product tasted genuinely fantastic. It had a solid launch in bars and pubs, but failed to stick during the mainstream launch into grocery retailers. A year later the brand was dead. Many of the reasons behind the failure are discussed online: my own feeling (given the smug benefit of 20/20 hindsight) is that the decision to replace the expensive glass bottles with more cost-effective aluminium cans before the grocery roll-out may have been a factor. This perfectly rational, understandable choice made to maximise financial economies of scale, also compromised the original vision and removed a visual cue to the critical qualities the brand relied on to justify its price premium over the rest of the soda cans in the aisles. Consumers were left with little to help them understand the difference.
THE PRACTICE:
BE AN ASSHOLE ABOUT THE STUFF YOU CARE ABOUT
It’s better to just ditch an idea rather than subject it to the death of a thousand cuts. Be wary of pragmatic decisions made for perfectly understandable reasons even by highly sophisticated and capable teams; PepsiCo is no slouch when it comes to marketing. New ideas are not usually reasonable or agreeable or led by consensus. New ideas are unreasonable because they are trying to change what most people think. Pick the ideas you LOVE, not merely like, and then dig your damned heels in. As P&G global brand building officer Marc Pritchard says: ‘I like to tell my people you need to inspire creative work that is so brilliant you’re willing to bet your career on it.’
THE PERCEPTION:
YOU THINK THAT CLIENTS AND AGENCIES ARE PARTNERS
Client-agency trust is the biggest factor in developing truly great work. And since trust requires an equal balance of power between parties, it’s understandable why we like to talk so much about clients and agencies enjoying ‘partnerships’.
But it’s a mirage. No partnership exists where one party holds the purse-strings, all the responsibility for the objectives and the unequal share of risk and reward. Client power comes with a burden: the hardest task in this industry falls not to the individuals whose job it is to come up with brave new ideas, but to the clients who risk their jobs in approving them.
THE PRACTICE:RECOGNISE THAT YOU HAVE ALL THE POWER, AND THEN GO ABOUT DIVESTING YOURSELF OF AS MUCH OF IT AS POSSIBLE
The danger of perpetuating the partnership myth is that it blinds clients to the critical responsibility of doing everything they can to level the playing field. Clients must take deliberate and humble steps to show that although they have the final say, a good agency team will often know what’s right for the brand better than they will. The moment your agency gives you the idea you want rather than the idea you need, all hope is lost.
AND FINALLY:
YOU’VE FORGOTTEN WHAT YOUR REAL JOB IS
You’re in a status meeting with the CEO and your peers in sales and finance. One by one, they present their data. Rates of sale, ROI and gross margins are revealed — clear, precise and direct measures of performance. But when it’s your turn, you’re forced to rely on a wide range of opaque proxies: brand engagement, brand desire, brand affinity, prompted awareness, loyalty — all open to differing interpretations. The unfortunate truth is that marketing is in the business of reinforcing and reinvigorating attitudes, and because this has a great deal to do with grappling with the ambiguities of human emotion, the return may never be totally measurable.
In the words of WPP’s Jeremy Bullmore: ‘Brands are fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half-real/half-virtual things. When CEOs try to think about brands, their brains hurt. No wonder they prefer to spend their time counting things.’
But increasing the sales volume of a well-known brand is simple: just discount the price until sales increase. It’s far more difficult to increase the value of those same units sold, increasing price while maintaining sales. This is by far the most successful route to increasing profitability and where braver, more creative work comes in. Among Field and Binet’s enlightening conclusions was that emotionally led advertising, the type of work that disproportionately wins creative awards, is much more successful at decreasing consumers’ sensitivity to price fluctuations than other work. Strangely, not once in my ten years on the client side did an objective to increase price ever make an appearance in my agency briefs. More fool me.
This is the real dilemma because most clients, deep down, in places we don’t like to talk about at parties, don’t really value creativity as much as commerciality, because creativity is not what secured the last job promotion.
And yet the marketing function has the privilege and responsibility of managing the company’s most valuable asset: its brand. A large part of this task involves bestowing personality (the brand) on an inanimate object (a can of soda for example): in this endeavour, creative work that conveys emotional benefits plays a crucial part. Regarding the development of this work, there is no other aspect of the modern marketer’s job in which personal judgement is so critical and yet so exposed.
But for those who are able to master this acutely challenging task the future looks bright. Research announced in January this year by recruitment firm Spencer Stuart found that the number of FTSE 100 CEOs with a marketing back- ground rose 7% between 2011 and 2014, while those from finance fell by 21% in the same period. The opportunity for marketers today is to master the emotional art as well as the strategy-led science of brand management. Remember the goal is to become creatively literate, rather than fluent; to develop the lingua franca to evaluate creativity and link it back to the realities of your business.
As Martin Glenn, my old boss at PepsiCo, and one of the few marketers to successfully make the transition to chief exec, said in January, it’s time for marketers to justify our position as ‘makers not just spenders’ of company money. And all the while to focus on today’s urgent imperative to trade the comfort of the familiar in order to harness the dizzying potential of the uncertain.