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- Agency land (5)
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- What's it all about? (5)
Blog Archive
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2007
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May
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- Liking your audience
- This is England
- We're all individuals
- The Tyranny of Consumer Insights
- Five principles to design by
- Helvetica is 50 years old!
- Web 2.0 'neglecting good design'
- Should your strategy be showing?
- Communication Preferences
- Tony and Morph
- To brainstorm or not to brainstorm?
- 2007 Creatives Roundtable
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A curious list of blogs
- Adliterate
- Ads are boring
- Bigshinything
- Brand New
- Brandtarot
- Contagious
- Coolhunting
- Disruption Stories
- Fallon Planning
- Greenormal
- Henry Jenkins
- Herd
- Love
- Pink Air
- Random Culture
- Rock'n'roll & Advertising
- Russell Davies
- Simon Law
- Tasty research
- The Hidden Persuader
- The Uncoolhunter
- TIGS
- Trendwatching
- Uncoolhunting
- Welcome to Optimism
- What if
A curious reading list
- Building Strong Brands
- Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
- Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace
- Herd
- How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World
- How to Plan Advertising
- Ogilvy on Advertising
- Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
- The Brand Innovation Manifesto
- The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information
- The Perfect Pitch
- The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten
- The Wisdom of Crowds
- Thinking from A to Z
- Truth, Lies, and Advertising
- Unleashing the Ideavirus
- Welcome to the Creative Age
3 comments:
A very 'worthy' debate ending in a sympathetic whinge (albeit credible) from a creative. I think this issue is well known (although never articulated so well perhaps). But surely at the end of the day they've forgotten to ask the most important question. Did any of it work and deliver sales? I suspect it probably did work quite well. There's always a place for creativity but clients have to be prepared to pay for it and it has to be proven the consumer is affected positively by it. Otherwise, it's just all guff and these guys should go and be artists if they don't like the commercial reality of the business.
That's a bit strong!
While I admit some of the postings on this blog are a little self-indulgent and navel gazey, there are some interesting points. Is the most important question did it work and deliver sales? That depends on whether you’re going to restrict your measurement of results to your expectations.
Brilliant, memorable campaigns massively exceed expectations and are usually a risk. You never get that by simply repackaging the safe option and following what was done before. You may get ‘as expected’ results, but you’re never really going to do anything amazing. So pushing things and trying something different can actually have a commercial benefit!
But it’s always a compromise. Creativity and commercial reality exist in the same space and that tension is what makes our business so exciting. You can find pure commercial reality in any estate agents on London Road, but where’s the fun in that?
This has a lot to do with something that we in planning get frustrated with. That being research is only 50% of the job, it's what you do with that information that creates the interesting work. Hence the reason planners replaced researchers in agencies in order to do things with information rather than just find it.
We are often asked to give people an insight, when what they actually mean is a fact. Coming up with an insight is about finding the fact then adding something to it, or looking at it from a different angle. That is where you create the interesting and effective work. Unless you do this people conciousness will just glide over messages that are all saying the same thing. Particualry in categories such as FMCG.
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