It's interesting, when you think about it, that the answer to the question "was it something I said?" is usually No.
Much more likely is the answer "No, it was just the way you said it" or "It was something you did." Or "It was just the way you did it."
People are generally not much bothered by what people say. For proof of this, simply look to the late Alan Clark. A self-professed Nazi with a lovely prose style, he is remembered for the prose not the Naziism*.
Or take the Economist campaign. Take away the humour, remove the twinkle in the eye, and the actual message was really quite offensive. Management trainee, 42 is an ad that says "If you don't read this magazine, you're a loser." (Interestingly a planner would have been laughed out of the room had he written that proposition). The campaign is what is known in the film industry as "execution dependent". And if you want an example of this, go and see Mamma Mia!, which is a fabulous film which says absolutely nothing).
As well as taking offense, we also decide whether or not to be delighted or seduced almost entirely on the grounds of "how it's said" rather than "what's said". The phrase "I finally persuaded her to have sex" is not one which often betokens the start of a long relationship.
And there's a perfectly good evolutionary reason for this. Words are cheap. It is much easier to lie in words than in actions or manner. Everybody trying to sell something will say it's good. We decide whether to buy in the basis of what we feel about the person doing the selling. The subconscious is much less of a sucker than the conscious.
Yet almost all research revolves around the assumption that an ad is there to say something, not to convey something. Like the sensory homunculus above, we are all mouth and no trousers.
Now this is not a new observation. Plenty of people before me have argued that consumers buy with their right brains. And Bill Bernbach knew all about the difficulty of tonality when he asked, "How do you storyboard a smile?"
But it's worth repeating. After all, noone going out for an evening on the pull would approach the problem the way a conventional planner would. "1) decide what to talk about. 2) decide the style in which you wish to come across. You'd do it backwards, wouldn't you? Which may explain why Alan Clark is more famous for enjoying hot troilistic action than, say, Stanley Pollitt.
Plenty of neurological research bears out the idea that what ads say matters less than what they convey. But advertising methodology doesn't. Moreover the bias is worse than we think. Because it causes us to always look to solve problems with words and images, rather than proposing other solutions - for instance behavioural solutions or brand actions. The order of engagement is what do we say followed by how do we say it. We never do this backwards - "let's be charming and then decide what to talk about later" - which, let's face it, is how most humans get their sex. Nor do we ever start with the question "Never mind what we say - how can we just do something really cool and get other people to do the talking - preferably about us."
David Ogilvy claimed that he only failed to sell one big idea in his working life. He was approached by a huge US paper company who wanted a corporate campaign. There were no planners in those days, so David was allowed to have an idea. He suggested that the company should open up a few of its million acres of North American forestry to the public, and should build lightly branded picnic sites in among the sylvan glades for the enjoyment of 200 million Yanks. This was a brand action, not a brand message. The company went to another agency and ran an ad campaign instead.
It's no surprise that this idea failed. Almost all advertising people and clients believe that marketing works by having something to say. Sometimes this is the right thing to do. Often it isn't.
Yet - think about it for a second - what mechanism exists in the current advertising model which allows ideas like this to happen? Ever? There isn't one.
Last week I had an idea for one of our tech clients that they should spend 20% of their ad budget installing wifi in UK churches, driving footfall for the church and creating a few thousand new working areas from precious real-estate that is wasted six days a week.
This may be a rubbish idea, I grant you. But that's not my point. Even before this idea gets killed by a bunch of crooks at the buying agency "''Cos the NI deal's already been done, mate" it doesn't stand a chance in hell. Because it doesn't really say anything specific in the way an ad "should". Or at least what it does convey is not something that would ever be written on a comms strategy chart - or on the brief that may have been already written and signed off before a creative person is even aware that there is a brief at all. More than that, few clients could ever buy it, because, not containing a single-minded (ie monotonous) proposition, it is impossible to research comparatively - since research methodologies also depend on us all buying into the idea of rational persuasion.
I have to ask - and I am entirely in harmony with Dave Trott in asking this...... Has our established agency process and the order of engagement been designed to narrow ideas rather than broaden them? It seems so. And has this process really been secretly designed to secure time-intensive jobs for planners and account people at the expense of creative people, by claiming that creativity is a skill you only deploy for brief, intensive bursts using a small number of specialists after a lot of expensive groundwork has been performed by an awful lot of time-consuming (ie fee-earning), unimaginative people.
If this is the plan, then a glance at the Ogilvy phone list - and at your agency's phone list, too - suggests it's working rather well.
