No man can serve two masters

The co-pilot lands the airplane

Something occurred to me today which I think is interesting, in that in aviation, if ever there is a task to be performed that is potentially dangerous, the co-pilot is the one who does it. This doesn't seem quite right at first look. Why would the pilot with all her years of experience not do the trickiest jobs and let the (relative) rookie do them instead?

It's not because she is so nice and wants to help the co-pilot gain experience.

The reason is because if the co-pilot is in the process of messing it up, it is much easier for the pilot to jump in and override them than it is for the co-pilot to tell their boss that she is in the process of making a terrible mistake. This social pressure to defer to the senior person has been shown time and time again to cause airplanes to fly into the ground at completely the wrong angle. The wild haired brainiac Malcolm Gladwell talks about it in his most recent book the name of which I forget right now.

The tendency if you want something done quick, maybe something you find easy,  is to do it yourself, however, if you want a good outcome you should get someone else to do it. Not because you then get the peculiar sensation of pointing someone at something, or because it helps them learn, but because they are more likely to do it right.

Having an idea is the easy part

One thing I´ve been thinking about while we´ve been away is that while getting a great creative idea is not exactly easy, it is probably the easiest part of the creative process. It is what happens afterwards that is the difficult thing. Anyone who has ever done anything as simple as draw a picture on a piece of paper has realised that what you see in your mind is generally poorly reflected in what is realised. (the irony is, the better the end product, the more intesely you feel this).

 

The idea is just the start of a long journey to prevent your idea and the campaign from dying, or worse, being crap.

 

Over the past few years in the ´blogosphere´ there has been plenty of attention on strategy - thanks to the value the discipline of blogging has had to planners, helped along by many prominent and enjoyable blogs, and more recently from some interesting creative perspectives, but I am keen to find where is the good stuff about actually making things happen, and happen right?

 

This surely is the third part of the holy trinity of insight, idea, execution, and like the trinity each exists as part of the others. There was a great chart that I remember stealing from somwhere which is a virtuous circle between ´thinking´and ´doing things´.

 

I hope I can remember how to use PowerPoint

Originality is an effectiveness issue

Every now and again you hear about how some famous piece of advertising or marketing work has actually been directly 'inspired' (or copied) from something else that previously existed. Notable recent examples include Honda's 'cog', Sony 'bunnies', the road safety basketball one and that Aero one with skateboarders in the swimming pool. In fact it is now the fun game du j0ur to see if people can spot the artistic or cultural references that spawned the commercial.

It is particularly important to creatives, the people paid, and are often under pressure to develop ideas, who prize the creation of something totally new so highly. Somehow, to be directly influenced by something that has gone before is cheating. However we are here to make money, not art and the end point of the journey is not the glittering diamond we release onto a virgin and untrammelled world, it is a change in the business fortunes of our clients, ultimately (dare I say it) sales.That is not to say by any means that originality isn't  important in the development of creative ideas. To create a difference between you and the competition, as David Ogilvy put it - “the burr of singularity” is vital. We humans delight in the novel, think on the truism that you and I are basically living inside the bodies of cavemen, we are always looking for the colour of a tasty new fruit, or the red flash of danger in the forest. The sea of green blends into the background. To create something new and different screams to our psyche, and that is why we as marketing people need to do it.

Bill Bernbach agreed,  “In communications, familiarity breeds apathy”

So while I agree that distinctiveness is vital (the Trifecta of Ogilvy, Bernbach and Law cannot be disputed), it is not necessarily that case that total originality is required, simply rather that the majority of the people you are exposing the work to consider it to be different enough to warrant attention.

Now we live in a recombinant age, but as pedants the world over write, was it ever thus. John Webster was well know for taking inspiration from situations in the street, other art work or references in culture. Who cares? William Shakespeare nicked all sorts of things including the whole idea of a number of his stories, as well as passages, characters from the classics and contemporaries. They used to have a name for it, it was called the renaissance. It is worthwile noting that there has never been a successful court case for plagiarism in advertising in the UK, and that is because, contrary to popular belief, copyright does NOT extend to ideas. Copyright applies to a tangible work, not to the idea behind it, so if you use a similar idea, but execute it in a different way (ie. Not a direct remake), no copyright infringement exists.

The point is not that there is nothing original any more, it is that whether it is completely original or not is not important.. The important question is whether the majority of the target audience will consider it to be a novel stimulus, if they do, it is original enough, and we should then content ourselves with evaluating is the work itself effective at its stated aim. Stat.

Against process

For the whole duration of my career every 18 months or so there is a renewal of "The Process", the agreed procedure for how the company internally organises and codifies the relationships between the different departments. A series of events that brings a heavy heart to all who hear its name. I suspect that this will continue until the day I retire, have a breakdown or drop off the perch, whichever comes first.

Since I have spent most of my career focusing on digital communications, I would be interested to see if the same thing happens in direct or 'ATL' agencies, as their workflow is more established. However, since a lot of the friction and the proposed changes are due to the shifting power relationships between different departments as much as they are around the quality of the output I would imagine they will be.

Ultimately, the intention of any formalised process for doing things is to create an environment in which great ideas can flourish and not be killed as they are born. The difference is whether this is an idiot proofing of the system, to prevent ineptitude destroying good work, or whether it is a collection of best practices to help people create better work

This is an important distinction as competent people (and you should be working with competent people) do not need a process. If you are working with incompetent people, you will never achieve anything so get out of there as soon as you can.

Nothing is ever comprehensive enough to cover all of the potential situations that may arise anyway. Suppose you are close to your deadline, the client requests copy changes that will make you go over budget and the only way to get them done is to feed them directly into the final website or artwork. The creative director has an alternative copy version that will mean the layout needs to change slightly and you will probably need to do this on Saturday morning. How can any piece of paper tell you what to do, or in which order in this situation? And this isn't even that uncommon a type of occurrence

Countless hours have been spent constructing impressive looking documents, which are gret if that is what you need – to impress clients for example, but in practice they are just not used by the vast majority of people doing their daily business. While they are potentially useful tools in learning the craft of managing a creative business, I do not believe they are useful on the whole in actually carrying it out.
 
Paul Feyerabend was an influential philosopher investigating how scientific developments  came about. His seminal work – Against Method – rebelled against trying to codify or contain the creative endeavour of what is essentially an anarchic process. Essentially, in creative matters "anything goes"

Scientists do not solve problems because they possess a magic wand - methodology, or a theory of rationality - but because they have studied a problem for a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are not too dumb (though that is rather doubtful nowadays when almost anyone can become a scientist), and because the excesses of one scientific school are almost always balanced by the excesses of some other school.

People stumble on the right answer often over the course of a project, and while awards entries encourage Olympian levels of post rationalisation suggesting that the only successful campaigns are the ones that run like clockwork with a well thought out big idea that arrives fully formed some time after the creative brief and before you start finalising any artwork. The truth of the matter is that you never have the strategy completely nailed before the creative work is on the table, the concept is only half done when you go into production, and changes that right at the end of a project make all the difference between success and failure. I would contend that not 0nly is this the only realistic way of doing things, it is also important to the creative method, and the way things should be done.

So what are the important features of a process? For one thing, a process acts as the statement of a philosophy or way of doing things. At the very least you would understand from it if you are living in an authoritarian regime or not. Acting as a 'playbook' from which you adapt and use the relevant parts is a good way to go. Dare have the somewhat happy clappy 'good and nice' philosophy to recruitment policy which filters through to the key stages process. This is infinitely better than a massive document that nobody uses.

I had  a previous client who was beside themselves that the agency I was working at could not produce an encyclopedic process document. We ended up writing one, which was 90% made up on the spot, to my shame we didn't but should have insisted that we work to a series of waymarkers based on our own experience, an make the rest up as we go, and that is the best thing to do. I wonder what they would have said.

Account management: pay scales, 2009

Digital account man salaries

ATL account man salaries

Following on from Scamp's post about agency pay scales, I have tapped up the nice people at the talent business for account management figures.

The numbers above tend to echo the overall findings from the creative scale, in that overall the ATL salaries are higher - with a particular skew at the more senior levels. At the graduate, Account Manager and even AD grades, the salary levels are more or less the same.

The key difference coming in with the senior levels comes about as a result of the gap that exists in the digital industry of truly senior players. At just about every level that exists in inter-agency meetings there is a three to five years (minimum) experience deficit in the favour of the ATL agencies.

Planning coming later...

Account management - remember your ABCs

Accept nothing

Believe nobody

Check everything

The nifty fifty

We had a proper old school Account Man who used to work at DDB London called John McKnight and he was an absolute legend, smart suit, elegant 'tache, cigar cradled in one palm and a glass of brandy in the other. You get the idea. Every year he did a training course for junior account people, which at Tribal we also attended (integration 2001 style).

The one thing I remember from that course that has been useful to me over the years is the idea of a 'nifty fifty'. The central idea is that as an account man you MUST NEVER HAVE LESS THAN £50 IN YOUR POCKET. This simple yet beautiful wisdom has done me proud on a number of occasions.

Actually, a second, but related point is that you must never have less than 1/2 tank of petrol in your car. His point being you never know when you might have to dash across the country on some Red Adair style last minute client grooming. However, for some reason, the exhortation "your reward's in the car park" has never quite rung true with me.

Eight things that terrify Account People

Khayal : Stressed out, originally uploaded by KhayaL.

"If you're an agency exec (AE), face it, everyone hates you. Your client is smarter than you about the industry and thinks you're an idiot. They complain that your agency and your creatives never come to them with any truly breakthrough thinking.

Your creatives hate you because you obviously don't get it, and you are interfering with them creating their pièce de résistance, their homage to film noir via streaming video and Flash that is going to make them famous so they don't have to sell out anymore.

Your CFO hates you because you don't bill your client on time. Your management hates you because you are not extracting enough value from the client, and you're using too many agency resources.

In fact, your spouse and kids probably hate you because you're spending too much time at work. So why do you even bother? Why don't you just stick your finger in a light socket and be done with it?"

Well there are plenty of reasons - but that's not the point. This is the warm-up to quite a well thought out piece on iMediaConnection. Despite the demotivational intro, there are apparently 8 things that really freak account people out. I'm not sure there are only eight, but these make a good start.

• Client being acquired
• Agency in review
• Winning business the agency can't handle
• A tight job market
• A new chief contact at the client
• Massive short-term increases in budget
• The traditional agency pitching interactive ideas
• The client makes a pass at the AE