Creativity is key but keep it simple

While advertising has always been a creative industry there has been persistent debate about just how creative the industry really is today. There are various definitions, depending on your dictionary of choice, but I like how Oxford describes it as “the use of imagination or original ideas to create something”.

Creating something, by definition, implies that it is new, the etymology of the word is biblical, leading back to a so-called original being or bringing something into existence. There once was nothing, then something was created, it didn’t exist before it was created. This is not the same as producing, which implies factory lines, automation, replicas, and scale.

That definition is a high bar by any standard, and while it may be unattainably high for everyday work, the sentiment should never be lost. Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy and Mather Group and author, articulates it well when he says: “Products are created in a factory, but value is created in the mind.”

This is exemplified by the thinking of copywriter Dave Trott, this week’s guest on the Inside Marketing podcast.

Sustainability: A whole new set of reporting with potential to be transformative

---

Tools and applications, in common use elsewhere in life, are still not standard in healthcare settings

---

Futureproofing the health system requires a new prescription

---

Twenty years a-growing – Ireland’s most important health summit goes from strength to strength

---

A creative director, and founder of several agencies in London, he is also a highly regarded author, penning Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-Thinking the Competition and Crossover Creativity and One + One = Three.

He says he’s not a good writer but understands his talent. “I just write for ordinary blue-collar people in plain English, and I talk common sense,” he explains.

His agencies have produced some highly memorable campaigns that I still remember nearly 40 years later, including the 1980s Holsten Pils ad featuring Gryff Rhys Jones and Toshiba (hello tosh, got a Toshiba?). I asked Dave Trott about first principles a thinking that goes back to writer GK Chesterton, the so-called prince of paradox. He starts by explaining a principle called Chesterton’s fence – where if you bought a piece of land and there is a fence down the middle of it, you don’t tear it down until you know why it was put there in the first place; is it to keep something in or keep something out?

“It’s the same with advertising: you can’t just write an ad until you know what you’re trying to do. We don’t ask ‘why’ enough,” he says. “Of course, advertising is created to sell things, but selling things is the end result, and advertising is only one part of this journey from producing a product to someone using or consuming it. You have to question the brief, you have to ask the question, why are we advertising in the first place? What do we want it to do?” He makes the point that today we have cultivated a production line churning out campaigns where everyone does their little bit but nobody really asks why.

Common sense

He says that in a bid to professionalise the industry, we’ve overcomplicated it. “Before we had planners, advertising was common sense. As I remember, the whole point of planning was to be able to charge clients more money. At the start it was a good thing. When you use planning for creative development it’s great, but when the client uses it then it becomes a problem. Then you start getting clients telling you what you need to do and not listening to the creative people.” He argues that the planning function today is carried out by graduates who know how to write a thesis but have no real-life experience.

So how do you build the best agency? Not by simply taking on big clients because you make money; you build an agency that makes better work than anybody else, and if Ford doesn’t like it then it shouldn’t be here

—  David Trott

His view on lived versus learned experience quotes Napoleon’s view that “generals don’t win wars, sergeants do”. In advertising, the creative director is the sergeant and planners are generals. Generals never leave the planning table to come and pick up a rifle; they just have an idea and then go and smoke a cigar, he says. “The sergeant is the one who makes the department get up and do it, and they will do it because they know he can do it and will do it with them. Planners have never written an ad.”

It struck me just how poorly our industry values the lived experience and how few people have life experience in agencies. Agencies today feel like no country for old men, or women. Graduates armed with a master’s in advertising but little experience cost less money. Although people with experience are expensive on a spreadsheet, their output is often invaluable.

“The final and most important thing today for an agency is money,” says Trott. “It’s not about producing great work; it’s making work that a client buys so you keep the account. Agencies used to resign clients that didn’t allow them to do great work. CDP [Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners] was widely regarded as one of the most influential agencies in the world in the 1970s and 1980s, and some of their more famous alumni included Sir Frank Lowe, Lord David Puttnam, Sir Alan Parker, and Charles Saatchi. The agency famously resigned the Ford account because the client wasn’t signing off on any of the work it was producing.

“This would be unthinkable today as Ford, at the time, was estimated to be worth between 30 and 40 per cent of the agency’s revenue. So how do you build the best agency? Not by simply taking on big clients because you make money; you build an agency that makes better work than anybody else, and if Ford doesn’t like it then it shouldn’t be here.”

It is often said that advertising is an industry without principles, too quick to disregard the things that have been proven to be effective in favour of fads. Trott tells the story of the ill-fated London bendy buses and argues that fads should never replace common sense, again reverting to the power of first-principles thinking.

“Someone decided London was a trendy city, so it needed to be transformed and modernised. They did away with double decker buses in favour of the more fashionable bendy buses used in other modern cities. But London wasn’t built for bendy buses, however trendy they were, and the city just didn’t work. The buses caused huge traffic jams as they couldn’t get around its winding streets. They were quickly discarded and sold to Singapore at a cost of millions to the taxpayer. All this because the powers that be didn’t ask why London buses were the way they were in the first place.”

A lot of marketing and advertising today seems overly complicated. There is a real skill to uncomplicating things. A great idea is usually simple, but it feels at times that advertising is an industry desperately trying to make itself sound more scientific and more complicated than it really is or needs to be.

To hear more go to irishtimes.com/tags/insidemarketing-advertisingfeature/