Better ways of working part one

So more stuff from my trip to VCU.  It's a collection of things I've found useful working with creatives to help try and inspire them to produce better (more creative and more effective) work. They're not by any means the be all and end all, but I've found they've increased the odds of the work positively impacting business.  And frankly it also makes work more fun.  (I should point out that the first two are heavily inspired by Russell and the good folks at W&K London).

#1   Do strategy and execution together

The best work is created by planners and creatives doing strategy and execution together.  Having more conversations.  Building on stuff. It means that your strategy is going to be more creatively useful, and the work more likely to work.  This means I'm afraid that the process in most agencies is wrong.  It's not about acting like this:

Where the Client passes the brief to the account man who passes the brief to the planner who passes the brief to the creative.  Instead, the best work comes when we work like this:

It's not only the greatest try ever scored (and I'm convinced the reason for my name), but also it shows (as Mark points out in Herd) the importance of teamwork, the ability to 'play' out of position, to help one another to achieve a desired goal.

This belief leads to point 2.

#2  Make lots of stuff that is a collection of strategic and executional ideas around a theme

Stop doing brand vegetables, keys, forests or whatever your agency or client calls them.  There are more important things to do to make the work work than make adjective soup for powerpoint charts.  One thing that seems to help make better work and more inspiring brands/briefs is to create books and films that are a collection of strategic and executional ideas around a theme (or even a number of 'rules').  This allows you to help create much more nuanced and interesting brands and communication with a greater breadth of potential communications output.  Which hopefully you'll understand from a post in the next day or so is incredibly important in a culture that craves complexity and a world that is complex, unstable and unpredictable

#3  Great solutions require great problems

The point here is about why being radical makes commonsense (something HHCL understood very well in its heyday).  Radical has two meanings - one is about being different, but the world actually originates from the latin 'radix' which means the root.

Too often I believe we try and solve superficial or symptomatic problems with communication.  Which means we don't address the root problem.  So, given this, it's unsurprising we so rarely manage to impact behavior.

An example from my time at M! was the work we did a couple of years ago for Napster.  Previously, the brand was running ads that essentially were 'price' comparisons between buying and filling an iPod and subscribing to Napster.  The strategy we developed was instead based off the thought that the challenge the brand faces is much deeper -  its operating system of subscription is at odds with how we have been told we need to experience music by the music industry.  Our habitual behavior and belief is that you have to own music (not 'rent' it) in order to experience it.  We decided we needed to challenge this assumption in the communication. (there's a great John Lennon quote that "Music is everybody's possession.  Only publishers think that people own it.").  This led to fresher, more effective work because we tackled the root problem.  Here's one of the ads we made:

I'll talk about some more things over the next couple of days that I think can help produce better work.   

Comments

[Paul]

Great post Gareth. It always struck me that the idea of a creative brief (traditionally executed) facilitated the baton passing more than the Rugby try - there is no way you could script that and no way you could know the extent of your involvement at the start.

Being from NZ though, I take issues with the Greatest Try tag - but that's another argument.

Although carrying on the metaphor (because I just love Rugby as a metaphor), I bet this is how many creatives view the process (the first try):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Vl6uK3st0

(not to pick on creatives, because I think they have a tough job - more for comic relief)

[Will]

Gareth - great post. In particular, the 'Do strategy and execution' together point I've found oh so useful - professionally, I've been able to refine and hone my briefs just through having a good chat to a creative team, painting a picture in their minds - it's really been useful.

[Scott Karambis]

Agree with it all Gareth. The conventional firewall between strategy and execution has never made sense to me or any planner who thinks of their job as inspirational as well as analytical. We all know that executional choices have profound strategic impact. I've always told my creative teams that I'll learn more from their first round of work than 6 months of research. The only tricky part (sometimes) is convincing creatives to look at their early work as "raw material" in the developing/process idea.

[Angus]

Superb post.

[fredrik sarnblad]

Great post. And just like Will, I think the 'Do strategy and execution together' point can't be stressed enough.

Everyone should also take the "Stop doing brand vegetables, keys, forests or whatever your agency or client calls them" advice as well. It simply frees up time for useful stuff.