This was the debate at the IPA on Monday evening. David Golding vs Dave Trott. And, my sweet Lord, was it good! Quite possibly among the best single hours I have spent at an event in my working life.
I also however have a slightly odd take on this argument (if I were a planner I would probably describe my stance as being Feuerabendian). My position is that I completely accept the value which planners and other specialists can add to the creative output of an agency - and I believe that varied groups of people are a good thing. But I believe our current, sequential approach to using different talents is a dreadful way to use our mix of talents to best effect.
In a single sentence my view is "Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad".
In short I believe that the way our business now tends to make "being interesting" subordinate to "being logical" is the single greatest reason why a lot of advertising is awful (and explains why the number of people who "believe the ads are as good as the programmes" has been in constant decline for over 20 years).
Put another way, when given a choice between post rationalisation and pre-rationalisation, I'd choose post-rationalisation 80% of the time.
Here goes.
1) I think there are really only two types of people in advertising agencies. Good people and crap people. Hence I am a little wary of debates about "what sort of crap people should we employ - crap planners or crap creatives". It's more important to have good people than to obsess about what they do. If I were a septic, I would quote Vince Lombardi here: "Hire the best athletes" was his mantra. He simply drafted the best people, without much caring whether they were quarterbacks, running-backs, line backers, motherf***kers or whatever else you have in the NFL. Incidentally our business of charging by the hour makes it difficult to hire except by specialism, which is a problem.
2) There are many, many ways of solving a business problem. Your solution could be reached through highly analytical means or purely creative means; by interrogating a database or by interrogating your mum. None of these is right or wrong, better or worse. I would argue that if you are turning human understanding into business advantage for your clients, you're doing a good job; if you're not, you're not. You can do this with a marker pen; equally you can do it with a speadsheet. In fact I ecccentrically believe data analysis and really good statistical modelling can be immensely creative - because, just like a good creative team, well-worked data can reveal wonderfully unexpected, unasked for truths. In Freakonomics the guns-vs-swimming-pools insight is arrived at numerically, but it is no less an astoundingly original thought for being uncovered by computers. Never forget this, folks: turbo-charged logic is a valid form of creativity.
3) Good agencies should be entirely open minded as to how they solve a problem. Via persuasion, behaviourism, business insight, econometric modelling, wild creative leaps, economic theory, anthropology, technology, media insights, by design, PR, promotions, digital....... (Dave T's Sainsbury's pitch story was tremendous at illustrating this). I also agree entirely with DT in that "brand" should not be - as it seems to have become - the default starting point for all thinking - though it should patently direct the way the solution is implemented.
4) A better mix of people will hence have a better chance of arriving at an optimal solution. Interestingly, diverse groups, according to recent behavioural research, seem to work rather well at problem solving - homogeneous groups are a catastrophe. Hence Planners alongside Creatives seem a better idea than Planners then Creatives. (Neither, by the way, is as good as Planners+Creatives+Media, which is what we had before a bunch of greedheads discovered you could make 1% more money from clients by supplying them with disjointed solutions).
5) So far a stalemate, right? No. And here's where I side with Dave. What I am saying above is that all means of arriving at solutions are equally valuable. Fair? And yet our processes and thinking are inherently biased towards the rational and away from the creative. How so?
6) Notice that all creative people have to present and justify their thinking to rational people. This does not usually apply the other way round. I have never seen a creative person given the chance to critique a media schedule or a budget. Yet media buyers are routinely asked what they think of the ads.
7) It is assumed that the process starts with rationality and eventually moves to creativity. Why necessarily this way round? Why not work in parallel, or even in reverse? A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic. Okay, you have to pretend to clients that you reached the solution in sequential order, because anything else makes them nervous. The same applies if you present a scientific breakthrough to the Royal Society - you can't start a paper with the words "I was sitting in my lab one night and I, like, had this idea, right....." But it is fundamentally a benign lie. This may explain why many advertising successes are arrived at despite the established process, not because of it - and why pitches are more fun than real work.
8) Because of this sequence bias, in many cases the brief can be 1) excessively simplified or 2) overcomplicated before a creative even gets a whiff at it. (Much great advertising was made to a promise so simplistic - eg Heineken is refreshing - that no planner would feel they had added much value by writing it). David assumed that creatives would always leap to certain default solutions without planning input - eg Land Rover advertising always boiled down to military/safari/mud/dust. But are they wrong? Most of the best Land Rover advertising generally features some mud. I owned one of the damn things for three years and suffered the pain of 16mpg because it felt like Rorke's Drift on Wheels. I'm not sure the creatives weren't right.
9) Creatives are often paid on a project basis while Planners and Account People are on retainer. This is a complete con. It effectively says - "why don't the rest of us feel free to ponce about on your business for months - and we'll just drag a couple of creative people in at the last minute if it's absolutely necessary to execute something".
10) DT observes that creatives would rather produce something irrelevant and visible rather than irrelevant and visible. You could view this as a criticism. But in a media-fragmented world what DT described as the instinctive creative approach (ie "let's make something people will like and see how we can put it to good use") makes more and more sense compared to "let's spend weeks determining precisely what we want to say and then ask a creative team to try not to make it dull", which is often the default approach when you start with planning and move sequentially to creative thinking.
So, in a sentence, I think both disciplines are equally valuable. But I think creativity needs affirmative action more than planning does. In particular, the assumption that planning always gets to work on the problem first shows an inherent bias in our thinking which is not only uncreative, it's also downright unscientific.
As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner..... "You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first."
I think Richard Storey's creators vs creatives distinction nailed this debate
I need to see this. Do revisit my post, as what you read was the rough version.......
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I'm very much in favour of an inclusive, sitting round the table approach when work first gets briefed in by the client - this stops anyone pissing in the well first.
Great stuff, Rory, can I borrow it wholesale? I've been trying to make these points in my own inarticlate way for years but it's easier to steal your words I think. And how nice to see the great Chris Wilkins quoted. One of the best and funniest men I ever worked with.
The point about post-rationalisation is interesting. Everyone knows when they hear a great creative idea. But we still feel we have to post-rationalise to make it seem respectable. I would argue that the rationalisation has already been done – it’s just been done instinctively, naturally and often subconsciously in the mind of the person who stumbled upon the idea. They perhaps can’t put it into words, but then it’s a dull old world when you have to slow your thinking down to typing speed. We think quickly, and so do the people who consume our ads. Kind of makes sense to mirror their thinking, doesn’t it? By the way, sounded like a good event – wish I’d been there.
Can anyone point me to the piece which Charlie cites?
And great to hear from you, 217540. It's been too long...... do you see much of 4096508 any more?
Richard Storey's basic premise is that agencies need ‘creators’ just as much as they need ‘evaluators’ if they are to truly achieve ‘effectiveness culture’.
(sorry can't find where I read that).
I have to agree with him. But also coming from an agency where DM is the heritage culture, there's really no point coming up with a creative idea if you can't back it up with a way to measure how effective it is- post rationalising it or not. Aside from who starts first in the process, I reckon planners who understand the power of data, technology and media are usually way more creative than people who sit in the creative department. But I would say that...
Hi Rory, Brilliant. That's what I would have said if I was more erudite.
You've given a university exposition of an art school argument.
As Picasso said, "What good are computers? All they can do is give you answers."
I understand your overall thought, but there are two points you make that I STRONGLY disagree with:
1) Your assumption that planners are rational and creatives are, well, creative is a popular mistake, but indeed a mistake. Good planning combines both rational and creative, and as a planner it often occured to me to be gifted by a sudden inspiration about an idea or a proposition, and then wonder whether it would fit within my strategic framework. The difference between planners and creatives lies in what part of the work they're in charge of (brand framework and proposition vs creative idea and execution), and not on how predictable vs original their output is.
2) The dichotomy relevance vs visibility is very, very wrong. Possibly the greatest value of planning is to come up with a proposition that is SO relevant that is inherently visible, and then it's up to creatives to push that potential to its limit. And that is even more important today, when you have to compete with plenty of irrelevant yet extremely visible work (on youtube, for instance), and you can't just rely on visible for the sake of it.
1) Your assumption that planners are rational and creatives are, well, creative is a popular mistake, but indeed a mistake. Good planning combines both rational and creative, and as a planner it often occured to me to receive a sudden inspiration about an idea or a proposition, and then wonder whether it would fit within my strategic framework. The difference between planners and creatives depends on what part of the work they're in charge of (brand framework and proposition vs creative idea and execution), and not on how predictable vs original their output is.
2) The dichotomy relevance vs visibility is very, very wrong. Possibly the greatest value of planning is to come up with a proposition that is SO relevant that is inherently visible, and then it's up to creatives to push it to its full potential. And that is even more important today, when you have to compete with plenty of irrelevant yet extremely visible work (on youtube, for instance), and you can't just rely on visible for the sake of it.
A fascinating debate. But perhaps it has more to do with the value of lateral thinking over linear thinking than whether creatives are better at it than planners?
To my mind, the most creative of thinkers, be they 'creatives' or 'planners', instinctively think laterally.. i.e. they start with a hypothesis and then work backwards to see if it fits the problem.
Someone (maybe Tim Broadbent?) once said to me that the future of planning lies as much in post rationalising great ideas as in prescribing them. I couldn't agree more.
That's something Mr Golding did rather well for us on the Land Rover account when he was just a young slip of a planner I seem to remember.
"You've given a university exposition of an art school argument."
Perhaps the best praise I have ever received, I shall make that my new mantra.
Stefano, a few answers.....
1) I have no beef with people - a good planner will indeed be highly creative - it's the order of the process I quibble with. And why worry about whether the idea fits the framework? Just build the framework to support the idea!
Your point two is brilliantly put. Thanks. Although I occasionally believe that relevance can be a fault.....
Chris Herd. I couldn't agree more.
The titles have ruined the thinking.
The so-called 'creatives' must now be rthe only ones who do any 'creative' thinking.
And the 'planners' the only ones allowed to do 'strategy'.
Under those rules Frank Lowe isn't creative and Tim Delaney can't do strategy.
Exactly.
And I, rather sadly, would be neither creative nor strategic.
(Although I'm sure there are many out there who would probably agree with that.)
Rory. Many moons ago I put forward two rather radical ideas. (Sadly Cordiant collapsed before we at Bates could put them into practice). They were...
1. Give the client brief to the creative team on day one. Once they've generated some great ideas, pass these on to the planning department to work out which are best and rationalise why & how they will work. The result of this, surely, would be great ideas, well sold.
2. Disband the traditional creative pairings and instead create new 'creative teams' made up of one planner and one creative - sharing an office and working together.
I'd still love to know whether these ideas would work. Maybe you could try them out for me?
Rory. In answer to Stefano's criticism of 'relevance v visibilty' I think it's worth clarifying what I meant.
Adam Smith put it best:
"Unintended coinsequences of intended actions."
In real life, we always post-rationalize. The right side parallel-processor of our brain is just much better at synthesizing several inputs than our left side sequential processor. We do however need the left side for output of our results. Hence the post-rationalization.
Forcing pre-rationalization in a creative process (into which I include everything from first contact with a client to the very last) is as bad an idea as doing the same thing in real life.
In meeting with different New York agencies, I've encountered great confusion when I described myself as both strategist and creative. "No, you can't be both" was the general opinion at traditional agencies like TBWA and Saatchi, while agencies like Anomaly and Johannes Leonardo were all for it.
I agree with the "just get the best people"-practice.
I am just a bit weary of the whole "are planners the new creatives, are dogs the new cats, is up the new down" type debates.
See link:
http://tinyurl.com/5ty95l
Solving clients business problems using imagination and insight is what a "Planner" does and what a "Creative" does too.
Though saying that I quite like the idea of handing a creative team a client brief without any planning input and seeing what would happen...
Back in my old agency we had the idea of pairing a planner with a creative to come up with strategy & creative ideas, and then let specialist creatives work out the execution, but it never took off. I think creatives needed to retain some sort of ownership on the creative process, or they feared they'd lost status.
(Yup, it was a laaaaarge, traaaaaditional agency)
Great stuff Rory - It seems these days that a lot of "planners" are not really contributing to (or expected to contribute to) creative development at all. They're simply mopping up a lot of the "collaterel" that goes along with making ads (data crunching, research reporting etc) Most of this has no real added value but is intended to make clients feel like "work is being done" I suppose the theory is that they are then more positive about their agency and perhaps more likely to buy brave work. It seems a bit duplicitous though.
Amelia Torode says, "I quite like the idea of handing a creative team a client brief without any planning input and seeing what would happen..."
This is easily done. Look at what creatives and agencies did before planning: Billl Bernbach, Mary Wells, George Lois, Charlie Saatchi, Collett Dickinson Pearce, Ed McCabe, Frank Lowe, Chiat Day.....
Advertising wasn't invented in 1980.
And it isn't creatives who need planners, it's clients.
Oh Dave, cmon!
You're looking at exceptional talents that did both the planning bit and the creative bit themselves. Not to mention that advertising back in the old days was easier, simply because there was much less clutter, and it was a new frontier, a virgin field of ideas that with time has become, ehm, a bit less virgin.
On the other hand, we act as if we don't work in advertising agencies: each of us can experience everyday whether creatives are better or worse off with or without a (good) planner.
If they were better off without talented planners, agencies where creative work matters more than finance would get rid of them.
Hi Stefano. My comment was really in reply to Amelia Torode above, who assumes creatives can't do anything until briefed by a planner.
People who behave like that are not creative, by definition.
I've been teaching creative students for years, and I never give them a brief, just the name of a product.
Working out a brief is the first creative thing to learn, media is the second, writing ads is the third.
If we assume only planners can write briefs then we have to accept whatever brief we're given.
Which is lazy and uncreative.
The best people are creative whatever deprtment they're in.
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Planning serves a great purpose for clients - it gives the sense of confidence and belief system they need to proceed with a new idea. But no matter much time analyzing consumer behaviour and message, there is no substitute for a spontaneous surprise attack on a consumer's consciousness. BOO!
Get the idea!
Dave, can't help but agree on that. And Nicholas, wonder what kind of planners you've been working with. They sound more like salesmen...
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I think an over-reliance on Planners to come up with 'something good' has got creatives out of the habit of thinking like/about their audience (which is what every one of those listed in Dave Trott's August 12 9:07am post do/did). If creative teams got the time to think about, meet or watch their audience as opposed to just read about them in a brief which took a month to write, we'd get better advertising?
In reply to Mr Herd
[quote] "Rory. Many moons ago I put forward two rather radical ideas. (Sadly Cordiant collapsed before we at Bates could put them into practice). They were...
I'd still love to know whether these ideas would work. Maybe you could try them out for me?"
I do. Whenever we win a pitch, I notice that this is usually pretty much how we have worked. It would work just as well on established business, but unfortunately the "process" (ie a repetitive system of working designed for thick, unimaginative people) takes over and you never get the same chance......
If people know the true golden end of what they are doing, you don't need to adhere to procedures.
I think a book called The Medici Effect explains how, surprisingly often, the best ideas come from outside the specialism. The most interesting new diet, for instance, has come from an Economist studying nutrition.
Wouldn't one way round this be to slash the media thereby forcing both sides of planing/creative divide to think much harder about creating something that not only fits the brief but that gets noticed? Of course, were you to cut the media budget to zero you would be left with a discpline called PR in which the creative not only has to be on brief but must be so compelling as to convince an editor to include it in his/her publication for no charge at all....
Totally agree. As a planner I know there are a lot of agencies who work like this (planner > creative). Fortunately for me, we tend not to work like this, which makes planning and working together with creatives a lot nicer. With better output as well. The creatives give input/comment on the brief, just as we review their work. But I understand your frustration on working on a crap brief and expected to do your creative 'tric' in two days e.g.
Couldn't agree more with your one sentence summary:
"I think both disciplines are equally valuable."
In fact, I've been in one agency where creative was on the left side of the building as you entered, and the account folks on the right.
Sitting and watching for a while, it became very clear that one couldn't exist without the other. And further, sometimes the "suits" had better creative ideas, and the "extroverts" had better planning/execution ideas.
Diversity of thought is almost always a good thing.
Rory Sutherland
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