What would you say is the single most important characteristic of an advertising person? Or advertising agency? Or advertising campaign? Most people would answer all these questions with the same, single word answer: CREATIVITY.

There is no denying that creativity is important in advertising. It is considered so important that one of the major departments within an advertising agency is named after it. But is it really THAT important? Or could it be that we have taken the reverence of creativity one step too far?

To address this question properly we first need to discuss the roles of creativity in advertising, and as Goose (Anthony Edwards) says in the movie Top Gun – “the list is long and distinguished”:

1. Much like artists, and particularly poets, advertising professionals try to communicate a lot of information in a concise, and preferably aesthetic, manner. Creativity is very useful for dealing with this challenging task.

2. In a marketplace that is rapidly becoming more and more crowded – advertisers need their campaigns to differentiate their brand from the multitudes of competitors out there. Creativity is certainly a useful tool for developing such campaigns.

3. With the decline in consumers’ attention span for everything – including advertising –agencies strive to find more and more engaging ways to grab & maintain the attention of their audience. Here, again, creativity has an important major role.

The list goes on and on, but you get the picture… Creativity has become such a dominant factor for a very good reason. So can there really be such a thing as an overdose? The answer has to do with a paradigmatic shift in the status of creativity – a change in the way it is used and perceived by both advertising professionals and their clients.

If we review the  list describing the roles of creativity in advertising we will find words like “useful”, “tool” and “role”. These words indicate a functional benefit – a way to achieve something, or get somewhere. Indeed, creativity is a tool – one of the most effective and important tools in the advertising toolbox. It used to be a means to an end… but not anymore.
Over time we have gradually moved from “creatively developing effective campaigns” to “effectively developing creative campaigns.” Creativity has made a full transition - from a means to an end, to an end in its own right. And that transition – ladies and gentlemen of the jury – is where the problem begins.

It becomes a problem when advertising professionals “forget” that they are hired to increase the sales of the product and not to come up with the most creative campaign for the brand.

It becomes a problem when advertisers reject effective campaigns, which would perfectly execute the marketing strategies they themselves have developed, simply because “they are not creative enough.”

It becomes a problem when customers are excited about a particularly beautiful, funny or moving TV ad, but cannot recall if it was for Heineken or Carlsberg the next morning, not to mention the next time they are at the store.

Let’s take a step back from advertising and explore the role of creativity for other professionals. The adjective “creative” or the noun “creativity” appears in many other industries. A simple Google search for the words “creative accountants” will yield over 2 million results. “Creative lawyer” yields around 10 million results. “Creative technology” will get you over 28 million results. And “creative education” tops the chart with over 55 million results. Many professionals in a variety of other industries also enjoy the soaring stocks of creativity. But you can hardly imagine the clients of a lawyer rejecting an effective line of defense on the grounds of it “not being creative enough.” Similarly, very few managers will criticize their accountant for presenting monetary plans that do not adhere to some vague creativity level that they had expected.
In other words – while the importance of creativity is increasing in many other industries – it is still considered a tool for achieving bottom line goals. In the words of Jerry McGwire (Tom Cruise), professionals in these industries are still expected to “show me the money” rather than “show me how creative you are.”

So how come creativity has conquered such a unique status in the advertising industry? At least part of the answer has to do with the intensity & frequency of using creativity within this specific industry – even when you compare it to other, creative-rich, industries.

Think for a minute about high-end Manhattan restaurants. There is no doubt that a creative menu is vital valuable for such an establishment. But the creative courses in such a menu need to be developed once. After that – the restaurant is measured for the exact repetitive execution of each course. There is little creativity involved in this phase. It necessitates very different qualities and characteristics than the ones needed for the development phase .

Now think of successful architect agencies. Many of these have relatively routine projects that necessitate only a moderate degree of creativity. But even in those that deal with more challenging or complex projects – the creative phases are usually limited to the development of the general concept and to the translations of that concept into preliminary designs. Once these phases are over, the rest of the work must be meticulous, precise, practical and aesthetic – but not necessarily creative.

The fact of the matter is that for many professionals creativity plays a major role in only a limited portion of their practice. In other words, while creativity may be crucial in the initial phases of a given endeavor, the following phases usually involve activities that necessitate very different cognitive capabilities.

In the advertising industry the situation is almost reverse. The initial phases of developing a campaign are analytical, systematic and organized. These phases take into account different types of data, strategic or tactical goals, demographics, client preferences and several other factors. It is only after these phases, when it is time for the ‘real work’, that the full-blown creative process begins. Every step of the way (e.g. copy, art, production and media) involves a high level of creativity. In the simplest term - in the advertising industry creativity does not GUIDE the execution. It IS the execution.

This unique dependency of the advertising industry on creativity can be viewed as mitigating circumstances for the confusion around its status. It makes this confusion understandable, but it does not make it OK. It is the responsibility of advertising professionals, and more so, of brand managers and marketing managers, to remember what advertising is meant to do. It is not meant to make us laugh, or to make us cry. It is not meant to move us or excite us. It CAN do all of these things – if, and only if – it serves the real purposes as defined by the customer (e.g. increased awareness, sales, brand recognition etc.). It is perfectly acceptable if sometimes we try to achieve these goals and fail. It is a whole different matter if, for the sake of creativity, we fail to even try.

Amit Mayer is a Senior SIT Facilitator, and a creative & didactic manager at Medidactic Ltd.

Amit and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.

Click here to contact us

If you liked this post, you might also want to read Roni’s post on The Importance of Being Innovative

In a recent stunt (a curious fusion of market research and marketing) Burger King made one of their US branches a “Whopper Free Zone”.  Using hidden cameras, they simply recorded the reactions of their customers upon being told “Sorry, we no longer serve Whoppers.” As the clip illustrates, the contorted disbelieving faces tell more of a story than answers on a survey every could. The stunt was aptly named the “Whopper Freak-out!”  So, what we have is an innovative market research approach, using, you’ve guessed it: the Subtraction tool.

For those of you familiar with the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign from Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, you’ll notice an interesting parallel.  This famous campaign managed to convince the milk-drinking public that it was in their best interests to keep an extra carton of milk handy.  In advertising terms, they created a series of TV commercials depicting the miserable consequences that can befall you if you “ain’t Got milk”.  Say, when your mouth chokes up while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you’re unable to give the winning answer to a $10,000 dollar radio quiz.  “Got milk?” Well, next time better make sure you’ve got some around.  In SIT’s advertising terminology we call this the Inversion pattern – whereby the ad dramatizes just how bad it is not to have the advertised product.  For those sharp eyed SIT tool-hawks out there, yes, Inversion is very similar to Subtraction.

The Burger King “Freak Out” and “Got Milk” campaigns show how a little Subtraction, can be a powerful way to add value to the challenges facing your product and brand.

The book includes a mixture of systematic analysis of the creation aspect of advertising, together with a taste of the real world of advertising and what makes it work.

Marketing professionals in companies will learn what to expect from their agencies, whilst agencies will be able to explain their work to clients in an analytic language that is easily understood.

Books can be purchased online through the Cambridge or Amazon websites.

So, how can we make our objectives more inspiring?

Take this Cannes Lions winning ad for Softlan Ultra by Y&R Malaysia for example:

Advertising Agency: Y&R, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Creative Directors: Rahul Mathew, Rowan Chanen
Art Directors: Richard Chong, Scott McClelland
Copywriter: Rahul Mathew
Retouching: Magic Cube

One possible way to describe the objective of this campaign is: “Sell more Softlan” or “The softest fabric conditioner”. As a matter of fact, this is one of the most popular ways that clients phrase objectives in their briefs to the agency. But, just think of the poor copywriter who gets yet another brief asking him to “sell more”. These guys get dozens of such requests each week and are expected to come up with a completely new creative idea each and every time.

Now, imagine the same objective written in an inspiring manner, such as: “Make people realize how soft Softlan is by experiencing its benefits when they least expect it”, or “Softlan is so soft that it turns the unpleasant into pleasant”.
These examples, as well as any other practically phrased objective, enable the creative teams a clearer understanding of the objective of the brief and provide them with some creative meat to chew on.

Why not even think about it as a simple formula? Get….by….. (e.g. get the consumers to realize how soft “Softlan” is by demonstrating the extreme benefits of using Softlan, when they least expect it”)?

This can even easily turn into an overall communication strategy!

Consider the following joke: 
“My wife just ran off with my best friend.  Boy, do I miss him.”

Now, look at the following ad for Pedigree Dog Care products (Advertising agency: TBWA\Paris, France, Creative director: Erik Vervroegen)
“Beware of the Dog. He’s got terrible diarrhoea”

Both are funny. Now, what’s interesting is to ask, why?

For one, both use some kind of “twist” to create the punch – whether that’s a wry smile or a vocal laugh.

But what is a “twist” and how do you create it? As a mechanism, the twist works by messing with what we were expecting to happen. 

To understand the structure of a “twist” I consulted the “College of Comedy” for some assistance.  I learned that many jokes have three basic parts: The first part “sets up” a basic assumption in the audience’s mind, the second part reinforces this assumption, leading up to the “punch” in which this assumption is suddenly flipped on its head.  Interestingly, there’s a structure to jokes.  Miss one part of the joke, and well, you become the joke.

Let’s go back to the Pedigree “Beware the Dog” ad, and try and understand its structure using the SIT framework of Thema and Rhema.  In a nutshell, Thema refers to the part of a communication that “we already know” (our underlying assumption), and Rhema to the part that’ “is new to us”.  In this ad, I suggest the “punch” comes by making a slight change to the Thema.  “We all know that dog signs warn us of violent dogs” (That’s the Thema here).  By changing “violent” to “dog with diarrhoea” we cleverly upset the Thema, and in so doing, have created something that takes us by surprise.

So, like many good jokes, many “creative” ads work by subverting our expectations of what we think should happen. 

In many ways, comedians and creatives are both expert at toying with our expectations, and teasing our assumptions. Their originality notwithstanding, what’s interesting is that, consciously or not, they seem to use these structures or formulas repeatedly – because they work. What’s really amazing is that we the audience are oblivious to these structures, and fall for their effects, when well executed, most of the time.

I’ll end this post with an amazing campaign for the Buenos Aires Film Festival by La Comunidad featuring mustachioed men and clowns in a carpark.  Apart from the absurd genius of the scenarios, notice the underlying structure of the stepped approach to building up to the twist.  Enjoy.  

This is the second in a series of posts called “Creativity Uncovered: the amazing patterns behind amazing creative” in which I try and look for the structures underlying great ideas and executions.

Now, let me ask you: what brand was advertised?

Vodafone?
Stratos?
Nike?

Find it hard to recall? So does the consumer!

When screening this Stratos TVC In our SIT advertising projects, we ask the participants to fill a memorability questionnaire. What we typically find is that most people cannot identify the correct brand. In fact, usually they think it’s a Vodafone ad.

One of the most basic conditions for the effectiveness of a campaign is that your consumers recognize your brand in the ad.
Did I say basic? Not so simple!

Every so often we fall in love with a great commercial, totally carried away by the intelligent story, or the emotional impact it produces, but forget completely what brand was being advertised.
Worse, we sometimes even confuse it with the competitor’s brand.

To ensure that your ad is more effective from a brand recall perspective, you need to find ways to ‘fuse’ the brand with the creative idea or the execution.

The SIT method refers to it as Brand Fusion, and the more well defined a brand’s identity and properties are, the easier Brand Fusion will be to achieve. Just think of Orange or Guinness.

If you want to know a little more about it email me, or if you’re in the neighborhood, you can see SIT in action at the SIT Moscow Marcom Innovation Event on October 6th.

My car certainly needed washing, so I took up the offer and parked my car there. Three hours later I came to get the car and was prepared to pay for two hours parking. To my surprise, the cashier at the booth told me to pay for one hour only.

I couldn’t hide my surprise, and so the cashier explained why.

“A few weeks ago we decided to change the offer from one hour to two hours free parking. We started this new offer before we received the new sign. When we saw how surprised and grateful people were on learning that they actually get two hours free instead of one, we figured that it would be best to leave the sign as it is.”

“You see,” he explained, people are so excited about getting two hours free instead of one that they tell all their friends about us, and so we decided to leave the sign offering one hour free parking.”

Well… they’re absolutely right. On leaving the parking lot, I called three friends to tell them about the parking lot, and now I’m passing on the news to many more people worldwide!

The marketing moral is simple (and well known): If you want people to talk about your product, give them a reason to do so - equip them with a good story.

This story is a great demonstration of SIT’s Qualitative Change principle. The usual thought is that the more attractive the offer we advertise, the more customers we’ll get. Here the opposite is true (at least to some extent).

Of course we have the Closed World principle here too. Instead of spending money on advertising, we let our customers do the job.

If you know of similar stories, please share them with us.

See you in my next posting,

Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website

Photo copyrights: ©iStockphoto.com/eyeidea

No matter how hard I tried to be witty, original and persuasive, few of my concepts ever seemed to quite resemble those magnificent campaigns that graced our screens and magazines. Bruised but not (totally) beaten, I limped off to become an account planner, where from close distance I watched my colleagues in the creative department bash out their wares week in, week out. What was their secret? What was I missing?

We are now in 2003 and I am just about to read a mind-expanding article that will radically change the way I think about advertising. The article, entitled “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads” , offers a revelatory perspective about the way award-winning ads are created. You can probably guess it is not written in Madison Avenue. The authors, a team of researchers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have made a fascinating discovery. Not only have they discovered a set of patterns that repeatedly pop up in award-winning advertisements, but they have succeeded in designing a methodology for imitating these patterns. For a moment, I feel like I’ve stumbled into a Magician’s Training camp…”this is how we saw the assistant in two, and yes, this is where we hide the rabbit”.
To quote Professor Jacob Goldenburg, one of the authors and a founding father of SIT®:

“…Creative ideation is a highly complex process…which is difficult to formalize and control. Evidently, even in a complex thinking context certain patterns of creativity may emerge. Relying on such observed patterns may help in “organizing” the creative process by promoting routes that have been proven to lead to productive ideas and avoiding those that do not.”

All of a sudden I see the Stella Artois campaign in a completely new light (that lessens its magic, but in no way its appeal). There is a simple, robust logic behind this ad. It’s the logic that explains why a Stella drinker will not think twice about cracking open a bottle of Stella on the sparkling bodywork of his new BMW or use his beautiful B&O hi-fi as a make-shift bottle opener for his favourite Belgium brew.

Like a Victorian botanist, SIT would classify, describe and name the patterns they identified: this particular one is called Extreme Effort. In the manner of the many other ads that follow this pattern, we see the consumer go to some outrageous length or make some personal sacrifice to get hold of the advertised product. A villager will risk catching the plague for a sip of beer, or a prisoner happily accepts solitary confinement as long as he is with his bottle, and a tongue dislodges from its owner’s mouth to track down an ice cold beer.

Viktor Kayam once famously announced in an ad campaign for Remington shavers (funny how it is ads from the 80’s that most readily stick in my mind) “I liked this shaver so much I bought the company”. In my case, I liked the tools so much I joined the company, teaching ad agencies how to make use of these tools and promoting the belief that “creativity can be learned” (read Peter Souter’s article). Working in the field, I’ve become a pattern-o-phile, always on the look out for new patterns or patterns in patterns. For example, why do we see a higher than average number of Extreme Effort type ads in beer advertising?

In my view, Ad patterns seem to evolve by natural selection. Some patterns simply suit the marketing challenges of certain types of products or the shifting mentality of the consumer (as he becomes more marketing-weary) better than others. In the case of beer (or soft drinks and snack foods for that matter), real product difference is hard to find among the hundreds of competing brands. As a beautifully self-ironic TV commercial for Carlton Draft beer tells us “Made from beer”. Thus, rather than wave the white flag, creators of quality advertising, have found a way to by-pass the issue altogether. By exaggerating the efforts made to get that “icy beer” they have found a neat way to suggest desire, without having to really explain the reasons behind it. And we, the consumers, seem to play our role faithfully time and again. When we see someone making some super-human effort for a product, we assume it must be worth that effort because…well… just because! Thus Extreme Effort, plays on a little psychological deceit. As long as the pattern works, it stays in production.

SIT has to date identified around 12 patterns behind award-winning advertising which it has turned into thinking tools. With time, some early discoveries like Extreme Promise or Extreme Promise Inverted have faded into history, while others have been discovered, Extreme Need and Absurd Literalism. Some often appear with interesting mutations. Every year we scan the Cannes Lions awards to see which patterns are popping up where (spotting a tool is, as you can imagine, an interpretative art, but we think we’ve honed it). A pattern like Absurd Alternative will recess one year, and then the following “account for” many of the Gold Lion winners. I haven’t identified a pattern for this yet.

Those familiar with SIT’s Advertising Tools often fall into two groups: the yays and the nays. Before I am assailed by a flood of criticism by the “Anti-Advertising Formulas League” I will end this blog with a little qualification. In the numerous workshops I’ve run with advertising professionals, I’ve gained a more rounded picture about the benefits and limitations of using the tools. Although for some, they’re a kind of ad “cookie-cutter”, I prefer to see them as very useful catalysts for unleashing lots of fresh ideas quickly. And because SIT’s tools follow “routes that have been proven to lead to productive ideas and avoiding those that do not” they continue to help creative teams in dark offices the world over, deal with the stresses of having to produce a consistent flow of good ads.

As anyone who has ever tried to create great advertising knows, it is a “Reassuringly Difficult” task. Nevertheless, using the SIT “tools” can make the effort a little less extreme. Try them and make up your own mind.