Data killed the creative brief, and data can save it
By James McDonald (left), director, Audience Group
Stop for a second. Think about beer. Now, sing me a beer jingle. Go.
I can remember so many beer ads from when I was a kid growing up in the eighties. They all had different jingles, characters, stories and art direction and yet – looking back – they were all the same. They were all about working up to that beer moment in your day and then drinking a beer. To put it another way, they were all about promoting the category, each with their own distinctive way of doing it.
I can remember my first creative briefing at a proper agency. I was a young account exec about to brief an ancient creative team (they were over 40!). I can remember the fear. I was worried that they would take one look at the brief, tell me that there was no insight, that the proposition was dull and then ban me from the creative department. I still get a little bit of that fear every time I have to brief.
I spent a lot of time honing my brief writing skills. I got very good at organising the information and getting clients to sign them off before I trundled into the creative department. Over time my briefs began to stipulate so many inclusions, branding guidelines, market segment preferences, focus-group-identified-elements etc. that I had left the creative teams with nowhere to go. I was killing creatively by creating neat little strategic boxes. I was even killing great ideas that, in hindsight would have worked, because they weren’t “On Brief.”
My briefs sounded a little something like this: the car ad must show a blue car driven by a brunette mum with two kids (one baby, one in public school) wearing a pastel top and drinking coffee. I was complicit in delivering a watered-down message that “works because the research says it works”. Using a tone that “works because market segmentation says it’s the right fit”. I helped create some of the most boring ads in history. But hey, my clients loved my briefs.
The more data I had, the tighter the brief. The tighter the brief the more beige the work was. Too much information led to too much strategy, too much strategy led to crap work that required lots more media behind it.
Now, finally, data combined with analytics is helping to sift through this information and discard most of it. We have more information, more data than ever, and we can use it to loosen up the brief. The more I look at the sales results of our clients, the more I see that people buy what’s available to them. Advertising’s role is to increase the mental availability of a product so that more people are likely to choose it when they are in category. The best ads take a brand’s distinctive assets and insert them into a generic category story in an interesting way. So all a brief needs to tell you is, what are those category moments and what are the brand’s distinctive assets?
Ignore all the useless information. Write a loose brief and get out of the way to let creativity happen.
Oh and bring back the jingle. I can feel a XXXX a coming on…
9 Comments
Huh?
What a great insight. Stop suffocating the creatives with a bunch of mandatory inclusions. What a revelation.
I like where you’re going with this. Kinda.
I reckon all of our clients just need to remember that a) no one cares about your fucking proof points, b) your ad, be it digital, TV or social, is competing with everyone’s mental real estate, not just your competitors, so c) your ads better be funnnier than your mates comments on Facebook, more memorable than the last episode of Handmaids Tale and worthy of interrupting the latest meltdown on the Block, because no one needs to watch an ad any more. Clients need to get out of their bubbles and start competing with the rest of the media landscape. Your funny online content for salt-reduced butter better be as entertaining as the latest Liberal Party spill or you’ve already lost your audience.
Research can only be an aid to judgement. Once a strategist uses it as a substitute, or a crutch, failure almost always follows. A planner worth a pinch of poo knows this.
Agency land has never recovered since the financial crisis put Bean Counters in charge. We’ve whimpered as we’ve watched agencies continue to succumb to clients … even after the recovery…resulting in years and years and years of beige.
Beige be gone, yes we all cry!
But the Agencies will need to reassign the leadership role to creative and drag their clients out of the beige (where their jobs are safe) and into the world of colour (where the modern audience exists) for this to change.
give me back the last 3 minutes of my life reading this
Could not agree with you more.
The sad future affecting most agencies is trafficking creatives like a studio.
15 minutes on this job, 20 minutes on that.
No fucking vision or foresight to say ‘This job may not be profitable, but it could change the world. This job is extremely profitable, why don’t we make money on this and transfer it to the non profitable stuff that will raise everyone’s profile’
It’s shithouse. Especially when everyone thinks a bunch of bouncing boobs is brilliant, what the hell has this industry succumbed to.
Even the creators are old enough to know it’s not brilliant at all.
The bouncing boobs is brilliant because it’s relevant to the product.
Unlike 99% of the crap on TV, it’s a real advertising idea.
You have obviously never had to pay the bills.
Awards sure look good but they taste like shit.