Campaign

A few years ago I was digging through some old copy test questions from the 1970s. I can't remember where they came from, but we might as well assume they were from J Walter Thompson, who seem to have been by far the best practitioners of this form of recruitment [1].

The question was as follows: "Using as few words as possible, write a notice to be placed at the entrance to a country-club [2] swimming pool requesting that members who have been previously been playing squash shower before entering the pool."

Now I imagine most people would have spent their time attempting to convey this message visually, since using no words at all does rather tick the box of "as few words as possible", none being just about as few as you can get. And they would have been half right.

But, a few weeks later, it occurred to me that this isn't primarily a creative question at all. It's a media and targeting question. For the brief contains a bad assumption. Since your only target audience is squash players, the place to put this notice is not at the entrance to the swimming pool but at the exit to the squash courts.

There are several good reasons to move the sign.

1) First of all, it is likely to be more effective, since it reaches people at a point where they still have time to change their behaviour. By the time the sweaty squash player has changed into his bathing trunks and is walking towards the pool, it's probably too late. (Read Nudge for more on this).

2) There is less wastage. Sometimes wastage is a good thing: but here I suspect you do not want to remind non-squash-playing bathers about the possible presence in their pool of sweaty people. It's a little like entering a restaurant and seeing a notice in the window reading "Staff required: no experience necessary." This is a case where spillover is bad.

3) When the ad is placed contextually at the exit to the squash courts, it can be more efficient as a piece of communication. You no longer have to waste part of the communication singling out your target audience. No need for "Been playing squash?".  It lets you be more concise - for instance "Please use our showers before using our baths." Or, if you are using pictures, you can use simpler pictures.

The value of this kind of media-creative solution (and the greater opportunity for devising them in the new media world) may explain the resurgence of the full-service agency. If the media and creative specialists are separated, this valuable kind of holistic problem solving is harder to do [3].

That said, having encouraged you all to solve problems in as broad a way as possible, I should now add a note of caution. Often, clients don't much like it when you do. There are quite a few reasons for this.

First, you regularly find - generally too late - that you are presenting your work to the swimming pool manager, who has no authority to put up notices in the squash-courts. To make things worse, in client-world you usually find the swimming pool manager and the bloke who runs the squash courts hate each other, because five years ago one of them tried to get the other one fired.

Then there may be the problem of metrics. The research methodology used at the country club involves asking random people in the pool how "aware" they are of the shower rule for squash players. Since only squash players would be aware of this rule under the proposed new media plan, it would completely ruin these measures, and the client's bonus would be badly reduced. It would also make his media buying measures look poor, because while the sign would cost the same, its superior relevance would mean that fewer people would actually see it, damaging his lovely CPM figures and getting him into trouble with media auditors for his excessive efficiency.

But a bigger problem still may be psychological. There's a slight feeling that, if you brief someone to come up with a press campaign and they come back with a solution involving text message reminders, they are somehow cheating. It looks like a cop-out - a  bit of a chiz. I remember a campaign we presented to a prospective client where we largely solved their business problem through several ingenious ideas which incurred almost no media cost at all. We thought we'd be heroes. They never even rang back.

If you think this issue is confined to the ad industry, remember the story of John Harrison and the £20,000 Longitude Prize. The great clockmaker was in his eighties before he was properly rewarded for his contribution; the full £20,000 promised was never awarded at all. Why? Because the Board was expecting an astronomical solution to the navigation, not a horological one. Harrison's clocks (H1 to H4 are on display in Greenwich) were seen as a cheat, because while they solved the problem beautifully, it wasn't in the way the brief writers imagined. 

You might call this John Harrison syndrome. The peculiar bias which means that, the more lateral the solution to a problem, the less likely it is to be adopted.

One small way of addressing this problem is to ensure every brief contains at its heart a single sentence definition of the problem, agreed by everyone involved.  (If I may be allowed a quick plug, I think the new Ogilvy briefing format does this well.) In recent years, I felt so much of a creative brief was consumed with vague speculation about the nature of a solution, that the problem at its heart was liable to get lost. By the time the brief reached the creative team, the problem may have been almost invisible beneath a heap of surrounding verbiage.

Guy Murphy was the first person to make this point, appropriately enough at the launch of the book commemorating Stephen King.   "We all spend too long quibbling about the solution and far too little time defining the problem."

Never forget, if you can find a new way of defining the problem, you've gone most of the way to solving it.

Just don't expect anyone to thank you for it. Or pay you.

In fact John Harrison spent more of his life trying to get paid than he did building clocks. I suppose he would have felt at home in a modern agency.

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1. I am delighted to say that the IPA is currently looking to resurrect this exellent idea, thereby allowing us to recruit copywriters from a wider pool than at present.
   
   
   
2. It might have been a "leisure centre" not a "country club", but remember this was the JWT of the 70s, where people may not have known what a leisure centre was. This was an agency where one distressed account director telephoned from home at the last minute to postpone a client meeting because "his horse had fallen into his swimming pool."
   
   
   
3. In fact what would often happen nowadays is that, while the creative agency were busily trying to work out what to put on the sign, the media agency would have already commissioned a seventeen-part soap opera for the Nintendo Wii set in a municipal swimming pool in which the protagonist's girlfriend dies from contracting a fatal disease from an insanitary squash-player - thereby cutting out the sign-writer altogether and pocketing the content budget. But, hey ho!