Craig Hunter: An Apology to Creatives from a Planner
Craig Hunter, ex-DDB Planning Director and now Founder and Managing Director of Blacksheep Strategic Group, has penned an apology to the creatives of Adland.
I was inspired by the ads of the 1980s and 1990s in the UK. I was desperate to join the industry whose craft could move the nation; inspire, shock, make laugh or cry all within 30 seconds. I find it saddening that once joined, it was my discipline as a Planner that helped bring about the decline of those very ads over the next 30 years.
Why is advertising and the famous, entertaining campaigns it used to produce no more (or at least limited to very few successes globally)?
There are multiple reasons for the lack of memorable campaigns. There are the usual suspects. We are not all huddled around a single screen anymore. But I don’t believe reach is an excuse for lack of creativity. Of course, technological change and the preference for performance marketing it inspired has played a role. As did the associated reduced or redirected budgets, chasing sales performance over brand building. The ease with which we can justify short term product/price ads, and the patience (and tenure) required to see the results of brand campaigns has led to an approach that favours ‘sales response’ over advertising that moves and entertains.
But we are also to blame. Even now with brand building back on most Marketers agenda, why do we often struggle to produce campaigns as entertaining and memorable as we once did? It is no coincidence, ask the creative leaders in any country, that the slowdown in creative advertising corresponds with the growth of Planning. The strategic planning process itself is limiting creativity and the subsequent entertainment, fame and memorability it inspires.
It has become clear that strategy has ‘got in the way’ of creative. Specifically, over engineered strategic process leading to restrictive and nonsense strategic summaries: brand summaries and creative briefs. The two core outputs of strategic planning.
(A ‘Brand Positioning Summary’ would be the strategic summary of your brand, often and traditionally communicated within a framework (key/onion/pyramid) detailing: mission, vision, values purpose, personality and essence (to name a few). The ‘Creative Brief’ is the universal piece of paper that agencies use to brief their creative departments on the required advertising task. Typically using the headings: advertising objectives, target market, proposition, support/proof, tone/style and mandatories).
The uncomfortable truth is that as a Planner and Strategist (working across four continents for 20 years in international and national Advertising Agencies) I believe brand summaries and creative briefs to be limiting. If Planners and Creatives draw on the same well of creativity (allegedly paraphrasing Sir John Hegarty) why should the Planner get to piss in in first! (I’d love to know if you actually said that Sir John)!
Planning constricted creative potential with these summaries. To the degree where it began to negatively influence and limit creative development and subsequent consumer engagement.
Strategic summaries which relied too heavily on the Planner, the Consumer and the Client early in the process led to over prescriptive brand direction and creative briefs, before the opportunity ever reached the creative department.
The goal posts were narrowed before the team took the field.
Traditional brand summaries and creative briefs were not just narrowing opportunity; they also created a myth that the process can be controlled and is largely sequential. Evidenced time and time again within the mythical (but powerful) Effectiveness Case Studies and Awards. These studies argue a naturally brilliant, sequential strategic process that effortlessly leads to the effective ads. The truth is great advertising seldom comes from the brief (it is post rationalised into case studies after the fact). What typically happens in my experience and for strategic leaders like Paul Feldwick and Robert Heath is: messy, a fluke, by chance, or stabbing in the dark! However, over time Advertising came to believe that the process was linear and sequential. The Brand Summary leading to the Creative Brief in most agencies around the world became best practice. The process was comfortable, logical – creativity was explained and tamed. What followed was 30 years of hurt. An embarrassment of mediocre creative executions, based on summaries that by their nature encourage a proposition, a message, ‘reason why’ to buy, typically product or service attribute or benefit based in nature.
So, the proliferation of strategic planning narrowed the goal posts as the strategic summaries became enshrined in Agency process the potential for surprising, unusual, entertaining and famous work declined.
Because the majority of highly creative work would be ‘off brief’, creative and original ideas would simply not be entertained, as creative energies were harnessed to only answer the brief. The work that was ‘on brief’ resulted in the plethora of immemorable executions that did little to advance Advertising or Marketing’s cause. Clearly, we need a new approach based of our own experience and one that is informed by best practice thinking!
To be clear, I believe in the ‘right’ strategic process for the ‘right’ creative task. There is much to be gained, as any Creative would agree, from asking the right questions of the consumer and the client that encourages and inspires a free creative approach. We just need to pull back from being over prescriptive. We need a broad platform from which the creative idea can leap, not a narrow funnel that leads to the bloody obvious. We, as strategists, researchers and clients, need to get out of the way!
So, with a sense of sadness, relief and hope. I genuinely apologise. I hope we can recapture what made me proud to be part of this industry: smart, funny, endearing, engaging and entertaining content. What is the answer to the problems we created? I have a few ideas. But I wanted this to be an apology not a way forward hypothesis. If you’re engaged in the business of Communication, I hope you forward and discuss this apology.
Craig Hunter
Craig.hunter@blacksheepgroup.com.au
Craig Hunter – worked at Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis then DDB in London. Moving to work for DDB Sydney as a Planner then DDB Melbourne as a Planning Director. After briefly running TLE in Melbourne he has run his own research and strategy consultancy, Blacksheep Strategic Group for the last 10 years, which now also includes Brand Causality, a brand strategy consultancy.