Creative advertising works better. Now, how can I get it?

Every now and then an article pops into one timeline or other and it's like switching a light on. And then, in very special circumstances an article pops up and it's like someone switched the light on, and a loud "hallelujah" echoed forth. 

In this case, it was this article by Ryan Wallman in Marketing Week.

So what did Ryan say?

In the afterglow or glow of cynicism following the Cannes advertising festival, he poses this simple question to marketers, : "How much should you concern yourself with the creative work that supports your marketing?"

Of course the answer is as simple as the question. A lot. You should concern yourself a lot. Marketers get the agencies they deserve, and they get the creative outputs they deserve. You and I know this. But incredibly there are some marketers that still doubt the effectiveness of creativity.

Ryan helpfully shows us some research:

1. Admap research, based on an analysis of more than 1,500 case studies, which ranked the top 10 factors that drive advertising profitability, showed that creative execution was the second largest contributor to advertising profitability after market size. Read more here

2. A 2017 Nielsen analysis of advertising effectiveness, based on nearly 500 campaigns across all media platforms proved that creative quality was easily the most important factor for generating sales, contributing more than double the next highest factor (reach). In fact, Nielsens says that "creative remains the undisputed champ in terms of sales drivers". Read the report here.

3. He references Les Binet and Peter Field’s work for the IPA, that demonstrated how creatively awarded campaigns are more efficient at driving market share growth than non-awarded campaigns. He also acknowledges some recent criticism of the "Survivorship Bias" of the survey which of course might be valid. However, the results are borne out by other research institutes such as Ehrenberg-Bass and Nielsen who have reached similar conclusions.

Highly creatively awarded campaigns are more efficient and more effective.

The main point of Ryan's article thus far is this: 

"To state what may seem obvious, marketers can benefit from good creative work – and can benefit even more from great work."

But how to get it? 

You might think that research is the answer. Turns out that sometimes gives you the exactly wrong answer. 

"Peter Field has demonstrated a negative correlation between the use of quantitative pre-testing and the success of IPA award entries. This implies that if you use quantitative methods to pre-test your creative work, you might be doing the opposite of what you intend thereby reducing its likelihood of success."


Here's where Ryan gets to the "hallelujah" part.

Loosen your grip on the creative process.

"Creative work is like a rebellious teenager – the more you try to control it, the less it will do what you want.
With that in mind, the first step is to give your agency some space. Brief them well, then let them do their thing.
Second, remember that it doesn’t really matter whether you ‘like’ the creative work or not. What matters is how your customers respond to it.
And third, don’t analyse the work to death. It will inevitably lead to compromise, and the end result will be anodyne (or worse)."

I'm going add some of my own magic dust onto his hallelujah. Here are my simple steps to achieving great creativity.

Understand, and believe in, great:

Take the day off, in fact take one day off every month, and truly understand  what makes great work great, and how it is an undisputed competitive advantage. If you really believe in its efficacy, maybe you'll try harder to make sure you and your teams deliver great, not mediocre-but-meets-the-deadline.
There are hundreds of resources: get your popcorn out and start with this one:  The IPA - effectiveness learnings

Write inspiring, tight briefs:

Briefs are a strategic document - not a process document. And tight doesn't mean prescriptive, it means absolute clarity in terms of the job to be done.
Briefs are way harder to write than anyone thinks and like most chefs can tell you: bad ingredients in, bad meal out. There are a few key tips to writing good briefs - but most important is to understand that it's not something to be banged out in ten minutes, or cut and pasted from last year's brief. Get the right training, get the right people to write them, give enough time for them to be inspiring. Remember also the three drivers of great briefs: Brevity, Clarity, Fertility. 

Learn how to evaluate and give constructive feedback:

Again, this is harder than it looks. Get your own opinions out the room. Use a tool if it helps to distance yourself. I invented one which I'll give you here for free. I call it R2OI2. (Trips off the tongue doesn't it?) Simple: R = Relevance and Resonance. O = Originality. I = Insight and Idea. and there's ROI = will it deliver against investment and objective?
Biggest wins - a powerful insight and a big idea. If you spend time looking through any Cannes winners' case studies (which you should, after you've done the IPA site backwards), you'll start seeing that insights and ideas are essential. When you evaluate work - if there's a gigantic idea there but you don't like the execution - keep the idea and work on the executions. Mostly, the execution is thrown out with the bathwater. 

And lastly:

Up-skill your team.

Many people land up in marketing or advertising with considerable skills, just not these ones. I'm not being facetious and I'm not saying it because our Creative Fitness and Business Marketing Academy courses could change your life. I mean they could. But, this stuff is difficult and it's risky and it's expensive, yet many people don't know how to do it, and even fewer of then don't know how to do it brilliantly.

It's worth investing the time and money into building these skills. If you don't want to call me to do it, spend some time reading the work of Beloved Brands - there more tools and tips in Graham Robertson's blog and Linked in feed than you can use in a lifetime. He is immeasurably generous with his knowledge.

In the end

We all know creativity works harder and is a competitive advantage and delivers more bang for same buck. In fact the less creative dreck that surrounds us every minute of every day (something above 3000 messages every 24 hours), that we ignore, is often more expensive, takes more time and breaks agency-client relationships.

If you remember only one thing from all of this it's this: Mediocrity is Expensive.

Someone clever said it, and the story of the quote is in itself a lesson. Read about it here.

Make the rest of your year about aiming high. Because your business deserves it.

___________________________________________________________________________

Contact Gillian on gillian@adtherapy.co.za or +27832659099 to help you figure out how to find this holy grail. It's not easy, but it's not hard once you know how.

Creative Account Management: the real deal

Account Management is a difficult job and a much maligned role. It is the interface between the marketing client (the fulcrum of all of the client's own internal politics) and the ad agency's system that produces the creative work: traffic, creative teams, strategy, production, implementation.

They are also a human punch-bag.

The client gives them a tough time because they place them in very difficult situations, and expect them to do the impossible, often. Some are downright abusive.

Inside the agency, some of the people they work with think that Account Management are "useless". 

Does your dog bite? Image by cjenjasuwan.

"They just do what the client wants".

"They don't know good work".

"They're more like the client than this client is".

"They don't push back hard enough".

I attended an Eagles breakfast many years ago when the agency CD from Mother London spoke. "We don't have account management", he said to thunderous applause.

Here's how Mother London's Stephen Ledger-Lomas explained it recently: 

"We don't have any account managers. The client can call the designer the creative strategist, they can call the chef if they want. That means there's no hiding places - they are the ones that have to explain their ideas to the client directly. there's no pass the parcel".

Personally - I love that philosophy. Cut down on the layers. Keep it responsive and flexible and accountable. Get the key people close to the client's business. 

But funnily enough, many creatives that I speak to actually don't want to take on that role. They want someone to be the 'buffer'.

So, why the disconnect? Why don't they value this person who's taking the punches for he team?

Because great Account Managers are few.

The person who can be the ideal Account Manager is multi-faceted. They are organised, numerate, diplomatic, have good people skills, are problem solvers, can project manage, are persuasive, are manipulative (in that they have to sometimes get stuff out of people that is almost humanly impossible), are motivational, are good marketers, understand media in all its facets, understand production, understand marketing and consumer behaviour, are strategic, and are creative. They aren't left brained or right brained, they are 'whole brained'.

And that's rare.

Some things have happened to the Account Management role that have worsened their lot. Not just here - globally. 

Ticking boxes isn't everything. Image by Danilo Rizutti

I once asked a colleague from Lowe in London what he thought the problem with Account Management was. He said "People have to stop promoting secretaries". Look, some of my best friends were secretaries, and sometimes that was their only way into the ad business, and they have done well. But often, secretaries get promoted into Account Management because of their organizational skills. Project management. Getting things done. Great. Tick. We need that. 

But that's not all we need.

The vast right brained chunk of what makes a great Account Manager is missing. Enter Strategists.

The strategists became the ones to fill in the gaps between what the project-manager-account-manager could and couldn't do. And great strategists are worth their weight in beluga caviar. But Account Management should not completely outsource this role. As I always say: "strategy is not a person". (As in, "let's call strategy"). It's a way of thinking, and Account Management has to lead, to direct, and contribute to this process, based on their intimate knowledge of the client and the client's business, to which strategists are only exposed every now and then.

So the Account Management role became just a glorious, glorified master of ceremony, bringing in the 'experts' to present to clients, wrapping things up at the end of the meeting and managing the project flow and deliverables.

Because of this, they became detached from the creative work - the real product that they are part of producing. They don't "speak creative". They don't consume great work; they don't read or watch what the creatives are reading or watching. If more Account Managers attended events like the Eagles Breakfast, perhaps there wouldn't be such a divide. The creative output becomes something to meet a deadline or a budget.

Inspire and lead - not manage. Image by KromKrathog

Another part of the problem is in the name. Account Management. It's boring. It says you manage an account. But you don't. You grow it. You inspire it. You inspire those who work on it. You live and breathe the success of it. The term 'Client Service' is even worse, as it implies that you simply service the client, do their bidding. Some clients want, and even demand this.  But, they will never get the best work from their creative resource as a result. 


(Read my analogy of Michael Jackson and his Doctor here to see why a client-agency relationship in which there's no respect for each other's skill-sets is doomed).

Some agencies have experimented with other titles. 'Brand Leader'. 'Communications Director'. And of course the creative eco-system, from which the account manager is banished through their own lack of organic participation, calls them names like 'Client Serpents', 'Client Surplus" or 'Client Serviettes'.

And then, equally polarising, are the terms "Creative Department", and "Creatives". Which means, by inference that other people in the agency are not creative. Which is of course what they should be to work in this business.

Part of the Account Management job is project management, part is marketing, part is strategic, part is creative and part is business, making sure that while the client's business is growing, so is the agency's.

At the end of the day a great Account Manager should live and die by great creative. As Colwyn Elder, head of strategy for Y&R said to me the other day: "it's rugby, not relay". It's as much your work if you're the Account Manager as it is the creative team's. But because the emphasis is on project management, and on handing over the relay baton, so the silos develop and become entrenched. Work, or client relationships get defined in terms like "theirs" or "your".

"My Client doesn't like your work" - accman to creative. Or "Tell creative that there are some changes to their work" - accman to traffic.

 The separateness works both ways: 

"Your client wouldn't know a good idea if it leapt from behind a bush" - creative to accman.

It's not yours, or theirs, or mine. It's ours.

In a fascinating article, Why Conformists are Key to Successful Innovation  in the Harvard Business Review, it shows the impact - good and bad - of too many "conformists" on a team of creative individuals. They are indeed necessary (and helpful) for innovation to be implemented, but they can also be idea killers.

Conformists tend to be the people who know how to get along with others. They know how the system works and they adhere to the rules. They have an eye for which ideas will be accepted by others. 

As you build your team, be careful not to overdo it on detail people, who tend to be risk-averse and uncomfortable with ambiguity. They can squelch nascent ideas. You don’t want the detail people forming a bloc. 

You might get lucky and find creative people who are also conformists. Those people do exist. In our study of 468 people, we found that 7% scored high on two of the three cognitive styles. You might even find creative people who are conformists and detail-oriented. But don’t hold your breath: Just 3% of the people we studied scored high on all three styles. 

And don’t overlook the importance of the people who are “none of the above.” I believe that people who don’t score high on any of the three styles tend to be the ones who form bridges among the creatives, the conformists, and the detail-oriented people. They foster understanding among the different types.

What to do?

An account manager that 'gets it'.
Image by KromKrathog

Seek those rare creatures who are 'whole brained'. Choose Account Managers who are strategically smart and creative and give them project management support. Do this rather than employ project managers, give them strategic support and expect them to go to war for great work. Project managers are always going to be task driven. This is a vitally important skill in an organisation in which the output is time sensitive and money sensitive. But it's not the essence of Account Management. Pure project managers are never going to grow client relationships and contribute to the creative dynamism that inspires brilliance from agencies. Not because they don't want to, they just aren't wired that way.

Find yourself the real deal. The ones that do want to. The ones that consider Creative Account Manager to be the ultimate title.



Adtherapy runs Account Management Workshop and Mentorship programmes for agencies that focus on building leadership capacity in the three most essential areas: Strategic thinking, Creative and Business. Contact Gillian if you need more info on gillian@adtherapy.co.za

All images courtesy www.freedigitalimages.net

Can you be happy, working in advertising?

Fast Company recently ran an article about the Happiest Companies in America, the result of research conducted by a recruitment company, Career Bliss.

The closest thing I can think of in SA, is the "Best Companies to work for" survey run by Deloitte. We also have something called "Best Employers".

But the notion of happiness, versus 'best employer', presents a far more holistic view.

The article lists the key factors of happiness at work as:

"... work-life balance, one’s relationship with his/her boss and co-workers, work environment, job resources, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture, company reputation, daily tasks, and job control over work performed on a daily basis".

So of course it got me thinking what the Happiness Index might be in your average ad agency. On the winners list of Best Companies to Work For and Best Employers for 2012, there is not a single ad agency. In any category. Not even a merit mention. So is it possible that people in advertising don't like where they work? Or are just generally unhappy? I spoke to Deloitte and in fact it's more likely that the agencies just don't want to pay the steep entry fee (R36,000 for company under 500 people).

But are agencies happy places to work?

In order to unpack the above-mentioned key factors in relation to the average ad agency, I thought it might be helpful to look at some pro's and con's (my own list - feel free to disagree vehemently or add yours). (And note I said 'average'. I'm sure there are many that would look quite different, and happy hallelujah to you, because then you're doing something right).

Pro's:

• Ad agencies are generally gorgeous to look at. (Tick for Work environment). There is a good chance there is a room with fake grass, you will probably have a bar fridge in your office and  a couch, there may be a statue of a cow somewhere, there'll be cool art on the walls, and a bar that takes up the whole top floor with a pool table, free beer and a view of the sunset.
• Ad agencies have great parties.
• If you work in an ad agency you get to go to cool events and conferences and indabas.
• It's a creative space in a corporate world - that's kind of fun.
• You work with amazingly interesting and sometimes strange people.
• You get under the skin of many different product categories, and work with some of the best brands in the world.
• You get to understand consumers and what rocks their world on a very much deeper level than the average Joe.
• You can wear what you like (except if you're in Account Management).
• It's a young industry, so you can move up the ladder, quickly, if you're good. (Yes to growth opportunities).
• There is very little to beat the thrill of seeing great work being produced and exposed to the world. Sometimes you win an award to, which is also good.
• There is also almost nothing to top the feeling of your work delivering astounding business results for your client.

Con's:

• Working in an ad agency is generally a high stress job: unreasonable lead-times, inexperienced clients (and agency staff), mistakes and high stakes.
• You will work more hours in a day than you knew there were hours in a day. Saturday's and Sundays are not always considered weekend days. (So a 'not so much' for work-life balance. There often is none. Especially if you also travel. That's added on to, not part of, the very long days).
• There is a good chance that you will experience massive rejection and critical self-doubt several times a day.
• Your relationship with superiors is quite possibly a bit tricky - the good ones are intolerant of mediocrity and push for the best. It's not always easy to do that in a nice way. Read the Steve Jobs book. (Strike: relationship with superiors. Not always bad, but sometimes kind of.)
• Company culture is a strange one: on the one hand, the culture will be about excellence, but also about having fun and doing good. So it will be a kind of bi-polar culture - you will love some of it (partnering with the orphanage), and you will hate some of it (win at all costs).
• Company reputation: if you're with a good agency - sure you feel fantastic. It's an ego boost. If you work for an under-the-radar one, you suffer the ignominy of people saying "Who?", when you mention where you work. Either way, the reputation is skin-deep: wait until the agency loses their biggest client and you're on the street.
• Agencies are always understaffed, or at least always think they are. They always feel if they had just one more team, just one more assistant AE, just one more junior strategist (to do the leg work), just one more art buyer... then time will miraculously materialise and the work-life balance will fall into place and everyone will live happily ever after, Except they won't. Because chances are the staff ratio is already too high, and the reason time is sucked up is because the systems and skills don't help them work more efficiently. And those new bodies would not be even noticed in a week. They would be sucked under too. (Big fat no to job resources).
• Compensation? Hold on. Let me just stop laughing because it's hard to type and cry with laughter at the same time. Some people in ad agencies earn a lot. Clients earn more. You only earn a lot if you are very, very good and probably own the company. If you had to work out what you earn, and what you do for that money, it would be a very poor trade-off. And of course Clients are squeezing fees, so the agency has less money, so that 13th cheque and increase are pretty unlikely. Some agencies do well and pay bonuses and that's great. Compare them to the average corporate salaried employee's bonus and you would weep into your designer stubble.
• And then of course the daily tasks factor. Depends what you do, but a lot of every day is about meetings about meetings. It's about admin and dotting the i's and crossing the t's and following up what people said they would do but most likely haven't. Or if you're on the creative side, your daily task may be to work on 'revert 56' for an ad that you stopped caring about on 'revert 8'. But on a good day, your daily task might take you to a photo shoot, or on a consumer immersion for a beer company; it might ask you to be creative and innovative and you might have a great meeting and get to do some really break through work. The ratio of great days like that to drag-yourself-through-mud days, is probably 6:94 (that's great = 6%; to drudge = 94%).
• And here's the real douzy: "job control over work performed on a daily basis". There is very little control over your own work. Unless you define control as 'being pecked to death by a flock of geese'. Everyone has an opinion, and your job is to listen to them all. Of course it should also be your job (because of your expertise) to thank them politely for their opinion, but explain why the option proposed by you is in fact better. Sometimes that works; a lot of times it doesn't.

The article gives us the 5 things they think that companies can do to be happier:

• Happy employees don’t stay in one role for too long. Movement and the perception of improvement create satisfaction. Status quo, on the other hand, creates burnout.
• There is a strong correlation between happiness and meaning; having a meaningful impact on the world around you is actually a better predictor of happiness than many other things you think will make you happy.
• A workplace is far likelier to be a happy place when policies are in place to ensure that people regularly get acknowledgement and praise for a job well done.
• Recognize that employees are people first, workers second, and create policies that focus on their well-being as individuals.
• Emphasize work/life integration, not necessarily "balance."

The article talks about Pfizer, one of the winners, and quotes:

"Staff achieves a balance between improvement, growth, and maintenance. Work burnout isn’t about too many hours spent on the job, it's about feelings that come from improvement, or lack thereof." It continues: "McClatchy believes a happy workplace isn’t necessarily free of conflict, either. At Pfizer, he says, management addresses conflict constructively.

Okay, so now let's add to our Con's list these factors:

• The average creative agency has inter-department disdain that would melt the skin off the less hardened. Account Managers roll their eyes and sigh when talking about the creative colleagues. Creatives sneer and sigh and pull paper clips apart when talking about their Account Management colleagues. Strategy and Production bemoan the skills of everybody in the building, but especially Account Management; Traffic would sell the whole Account Management department to the first bidder and so it goes. During one of my Account Management workshops with an agency, someone remarked on the language they used to talk about each other. He was right. Suit is not a compliment.
• Conflict is common in an agency. It's generally not managed well. Conflict can range from a difference of opinion, to the fury that you think you are entitled to one. Not everyone is equal in this space. And not everyone can handle it. 
• The work that the client in many instances wants is often radically different from what the agency wants to produce. In many instances, the client wins, and the agency produces work that pays the bills but has an enormous (downwards) impact on: resources, culture, reputation, work-life balance, client-agency relationships, intra-company relationships and so on.
• Advertising is trying to sell stuff. Let's be real. Apart from the pro-bono stuff, not a lot of it has a real Kumbaya feeling to it. The meaningful-ness quotient of the average ad is about zip.
• Most agencies are a bit slack about policies and reviews, and career growth paths and those important but not urgent things.

In spite of all this, advertising gets into your blood and under your skin. And while there may be frustrations in most agencies, you will still find a good bunch of eternal optimists who love what they do so much they put up with the niggles, consoled by their dream of having their own agency where things would be so different.


What can agencies do to be happier?

• Hire fewer, better skilled people and pay them more.
• Have fewer clients and more clients that partner with you on the work that you know works and will be inspired doing.
• Draw very clear and non-negotiable boundaries for down-time. Constantly exhausted creative people are uncreative people.
• Have fewer meetings with fewer people in them. Meetings are the Dracula of this business if time is blood.
• Reward people regularly and in ways that matter. A great book to read for every Agency MD is Daniel Pink's book on motivation called "Drive". Here's a quote from a great summary if you haven't got time to read the whole book (but you should).

"For any job that requires thought, creativity or problem-solving, Pink .. recommends.. three elements:
Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives;
Mastery: the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters;
Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves."

• Encourage them to master their skills.
• Listen and encourage a culture of listening to each other, to clients. Really listening (the Steven Covey way).
• Make sure the relationships that govern your agency's day, are good and healthy and professional and constructive and inspiring.
• Give people some freedom to work how and where they want to. Why do we all have to go to a building to work everyday? Liberate them.
• Let them work on things that have real meaning (to them) for a percentage of their time. Choose a charity, or invent something - let them form task teams that try and make the world a better place, and get rewarded for it. (Lots of info on this in Drive).
• And look after the wellness and whole-ness of your people. Send them on holiday. Send them home. Let them see their children before bedtime. Mostly: let your agency be an environment where your people are seen and heard.

“The annual review is dead. Happiness is a daily journey.”

Delivering Happiness at Work’s CEO James Key Lim

Advertising that makes you cry, or sigh...

My partner, Graham Pfuhl, is putting a presentation together on "emotions in advertising". He wants a "corker" at the end, and asked me what were my most memorable emotional TV ads. 

These were the ones that came to mind. Which ones can you remember that made you cry, sigh, think?

• Topsy Foundation; a poignant, gentle and beautiful story of hope in an HIV/AIDS ravaged society, filled with stigma.

 

• This spot, with a dramatic and chilling ending, Called "Alzheimers":

 

•  This one, one of my all time greats, for VW:
  
  
  And there were others: Pfizer Graffiti; Expedia Cancer Survivor; P&G's Mom ad for the Olympics, the beautiful John Lewis Christmas 2011 ad. 
  
  Music obviously plays a vital role, but the genius is the ability to make a whole movie in under a minute. Start, middle and end, with a tug on the heart strings and a strong and compelling brand message. Tall order.
  
  And double genius to use it to break though in a cluttered anvironment, for a usually non-emotional product category (unlike child abuse) - e.g. P&G, John Lewis and even KFC's  Memories.
   
   

The Super Bowl Brief vs the Common Creative Brief

If writing creative briefs is hard then writing great creative briefs is extremely difficult.

The main problems are a lack of clarity of thought and an inspiring proposition. These arise because sometimes the brief-writer isn't clear why they're really asking for this piece of communication, or what they really want to say, or who they really want to say it to. But, most of all they don't know why anyone should believe them.

So they write briefs that offer their creative teams, and their consumers', too many choices.  Then they use the creative offering to whittle down to what they think they should say.

"Actually, that wasn't really what I had in mind... What I think we really should be saying, maybe, is ....."

Of course it's not always that bad. Some creative briefs are perfect.

But the Super Bowl ad-fest inspired me to ask this question:

How does a Super Bowl Ad Brief differ from the Common Client Ad Brief?

Is there a different approach to writing the brief for communication that will be watched, and analysed, and talked about, by millions?

And, with so many eyes on these ads, why is that some just don't hit the mark, some are bad, and some are amazing?

In 2013, when I first wrote an article on this question, I picked up a quote from a Bloomberg's Business Week article entitled : "Game on: Super Bowl ads are already playing online". It was from David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America,  who "advises keeping an ad simple and honest. “It should also be an easy, reductionist message,” says Lubars. “You’re getting a canvas that 120 million people will see. You have to go where nobody has gone before. The ad has to be single-minded, relevant, funny, and emotional. If it’s done right, $4 million (for a 30 - sec spot) is a bargain. I would say 90 percent of the people running ads are wasting their money.”

So back to my question. Is the brief different?
The Common Client Ad Brief also claims to want to be original, single minded, relevant and emotionally engaging, right? So what's the big difference? 

Maybe it's because the agencies recognise that this is THE brief and assign their best teams to work on it? But even that doesn't always deliver great work. Even if the Super Bowl Ad brief is perceived by the agencies to be much cooler and high-stakes with more chance of creative risk-taking than the average Common Client Brief, then why do some of the Super Bowl ads come out boring, done-before, irrelevant and imminently forgettable?

It seems that the enormous viewership has something to do with it. Possibly a bit of stage fright and a trying-too-hard aspect? Or a client wanting to cover all their bases to justify the enormous spend?

My two cents worth would be that there's too much playing to the masses and too much losing sight of the one person that actually counts - the person who may do something, buy something, think something, as a result of your ad. 

Two ads I thought hit the mark are the Avo's from Mexico ad, and the No More (NFL sponsored) ad against domestic abuse, which used a real life story.

Both ads are disruptive, fresh, single-minded, and totally relevant. One is funny, one is deeply chilling.  Both speak to the truth of the message. Both address, in totally different ways, an interesting insight. They have both managed to create an ongoing dialogue, online, offline, in people's hearts and minds, about what the ad actually spoke to us about.

Both ads are personal, using different techniques and totally different approaches. Yet both managed to communicate clearly to the 120million plus audience. Budweiser's "Lost Puppy", BMW's "New fangled idea" made me cry and laugh, but were more expected than the ones above. And as for Carl Jr's "All Natural", the less said the better. (#didwejustgobacktothe80's?)

Whether the ad was a hit or a miss (I loved Dove's "Salute to Dads", but the product segment at the end felt like a sledgehammer),  here's what I like to imagine sets a Super Bowl brief apart form a Common Creative Brief:

1. The client (and agency) are aiming for GREAT. You have a much better chance of getting there if you aim for it, than if you don't.
2. It's presumably agreed upfront that the ad has to be entertaining with exceptional production values (with budget allowed for) - great advice for the Common Brief to borrow from.
3. The ad aims to be memorable, relevant and engaging. Tick, tick and tick.
4. It simply has to be distinctive. And talk-able, and shareable. And that means some brave decisions need to be made in the approvals process.
5. The message has to be totally singleminded.

Maybe we should treat each ad brief like a Super Bowl brief and see what happens to the work?

ps. I am not a fan of the 'reveal' of the ad prior to the Superbowl. To me it takes away so much of the excitement I used to feel if I've already seen them the week before. #justsaying