Better Odds: In Defence of Gimmickry
In creative agencies, often it's okay and good to be creative for creativity's sake.
Today’s post is longer than usual. I try to keep them to around five-minute reads. This one is about ten. You’ll live.
So, where are we. We’ve talked about how ideation is probabilistic, how it can be made more effective with better questions, a model for thinking about improving the odds of a good idea, new data directing more effective solutions, the challenge of obviousness in creativity…
Now, all of this has been about coming up with effective ideas in general. Everything I’ve said is true for creativity in…
Innovating product and service features
Improving a website or app
Finding new ways to cut costs
Coming up with new fundraising activities
Developing niche or differentiation strategies for businesses
Ideating marketing campaign ideas
Among others.
Creativity is necessary for success in any of those endeavours. But we started this discussion weeks ago by asking, among other things, what all businesses and organisations can learn about creativity from the practices of those idea-having experts: creative agencies.
Now I have to do almost the opposite of that and point out a few ways in which these general lessons change a little when applied to the strategic/creative process in marketing agencies.
It is true that marketing agencies are engaged by their clients to achieve objectives. So any given client brief to an agency has an objective, like any other strategic/creative challenge, and that objective provides a point of reference for defining effectiveness or idea quality. That’s what success looks like.
And of course the client brief comes with constraints – the idea must work within a certain budget, by a certain deadline, conform to industry regulations, align with brand values, etc.
So far, so straightforward.
A few factors complicate the situation, and almost all of them point agency creative in the direction of non-obvious creative ideas, most of the time.
We’ve already talked a bit about non-obvious ideas being sometimes more effective and great ideas being always non-obvious. Thinking back to our model of idea quality distribution, a non-obvious idea is more effective when the non-obvious information or non-obvious way of viewing the challenge actually does reveal new more effective possibilities.
Okay. And this still holds true for agencies. It was an agency situation I used as an example case study of this. New information or new ways of looking at a situation can produce radically more effective ideas to achieve a client’s objectives.
However, non-obvious questions (in creative briefs) and non-obvious answers/ideas have a particular appeal for agencies, for a few reasons. Some of them involve the usefulness of non-obvious ideas in marketing, and some involved the inherent value of non-obviousness to marketing agencies.
For the rest of this post, I’m going to use the terms “non-obvious idea” and “creatively good idea” interchangeably.
One reason non-obvious ideas are useful in marketing is because marketing requires capturing attention and creatively good ideas tend to be better at getting attention than more obvious ideas.
They often stand out.
They often engage the brain as the viewer/participant connects the dots.
People will actively re-engage with them.
They get talked about more often, for example because people like to share clever and cool things.
In the olden days of TV advertising, people would say things like, “Oh hey, come back from the kitchen, it’s that ad I told you about.” (TV used to be broken up with “ad breaks” in which a series of ad videos would be played unskippably to interrupt the content and people would take toilet breaks and make tea. See, you can learn about history here too.)
Ads that require the viewer to connect the dots are particularly effective on multiple levels. Firstly, they can’t be experienced superficially without prompting a question – wait, what? Secondly, there’s a payoff feeling of satisfaction when you put the pieces together. Thirdly, if it’s done well, you couldn’t have put those pieces together without taking on board the key message being conveyed.
The Always “Like A Girl” piece is clever for a few reasons. How much benefit it had for the brand, I don’t know. But it’s an example of making non-obvious connections between obvious things which in retrospect are very obvious connections. In other words, like a good joke, they prompt the viewer to say, “Oh, that’s so true!” And having experienced that for themselves, they want to share it with others.
So there are instrumental benefits to non-obviousness in communication, especially in this very cluttered world. Non-obvious ideas can, by virtue of being surprising, get higher cut-through and sharability, both of which amplify effectiveness for most marketing objectives – whether brand-building or sales activation or anything else.
So much for usefulness for the client. Outside of that, why do marketing agencies favour non-obvious “creatively good” ideas?
The first reason for preferring non-obvious ideas is because, if nothing else, basically every idea an agency has needs to be novel. It must be new, at least in part, ideally in full. You can’t recycle someone else’s ideas – at least, you shouldn’t and you’re pretty fucked if you get caught doing it. Another reason agencies are like comedians.
But there are other factors which make creatively good ideas desirable, beyond novelty and regardless of the above instrumentality in achieving clients’ objectives. To sum it up cynically: ad awards.
Now, that’s not entirely fair to agencies, because your first thought might be that awards are purely about vanity. They’re not purely about vanity.
Creatively good ideas and the collections of awards that correlate with creatively good ideas have a variety of legitimate benefits for marketing agencies which, while having little to do with delivering value for their clients, are at least very understandable.
Here are a few:
Good creatives and creative directors are attracted to award-winning agencies. This reduces several costs for an agency. Creatives will agree to relatively lower salaries. Recruitment is faster and easier. It improves retention of creatives, cutting down on other recruitment costs. This is all true to a lesser degree for all the other roles in a creative agency. Suits love to win awards too.
All of the above is also true of just doing work that’s fun to work on, and that tends to be the creatively good ideas. I’ve been involved in Umbrella Academy-themed escape rooms in Singapore; Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant hosting video recipes of cannibal Thai food; a Wonka-esque flavoured bubble machine; a secret-agent organisation doing random acts of kindness… Cool work is fun to work on.
More selfishly, but still understandably, creatives’ careers are built on their portfolio of cool shit they’ve worked on. It’s part of how they get new and better jobs. (Wuh-oh, better find ways to keep them.)
Awards and award-winning work help market an agency itself. Clients are attracted to awards. Client stakeholders want to win some too. Awards are reasons to get exposure in trade news. Arrays of awards look good to prospective clients as they come in for their first meeting. Video reels of a bunch of cool shit looks great at the start or end of a pitch.
So it’s not all vanity at all.
And perhaps most importantly, because creatively good ideas are mostly more effective for client objectives, the two priorities – what’s good for the client and what’s good for the agency and creatives – are mostly not in conflict.
The most common occasion for conflict is when a client has a very straightforward request that really only needs a good idea and the agency insists on trying to make it a great idea – not necessarily greatly effective, but creatively great and all of the stuff that comes with it. The agency starts pushing the client to increase budgets or compromise on its original objectives for the creative opportunity. I’m not an expert in account management, but I’ve never seen that story have a happy ending.
(Well, it turned out pretty well for the “12th best campaign of the 21st century”, but you cannot convince me that this twee little Dumb Ways to Die music video had any effect on train-related accidents in Melbourne.)
What does all of this mean for creative briefs and the strategists writing them?
Well, one consequence is that, when nothing in the data and colour-by-numbers strategy is standing out as a particularly logically effective approach to a communications challenge, you’ve always got being interesting, non-obvious and creatively good as an option. At the very least, it will get attention and amplify the effectiveness of what is otherwise a kind of “good enough” message.
It’s important to know when you’re doing this, though, because you and everyone else can get very confused if you’re not conscious of it. I’ll try to explain.
With colour-by-numbers strategy, you’re basically looking for the best way in to direct and inspire creative. You end up with a logical flow that starts with the objective, goes through the relevant facts, details the implications, and poses a narrower pointier challenge that the creative ideas then answer. You and the client and everyone else nod along at every stage, following the logic, agreeing with the conclusion.
With this other approach, which we can perhaps call creativity for creativity’s sake or more clumsily non-obviousness for non-obviousness’ses’sesess’ses sake, we are not looking for the single best way in. We are looking for interesting ways in, provocative ways in, creatively fertile ways in, but we don’t have much supporting logic behind them except to say that they’re at least not logically wrong.
The Always “Like A Girl” video above is an example of this. The client’s objectives might have been to increase brand awareness or drive awareness of the brand’s support for empowering women and girls. Maaaaaaaybe some research pointed in the direction of, say, learned internalised self-image as the biggest limiter for women. Maybe. That’s probably what the awards entry said.
But realistically, the idea probably came from some provocative interesting observations that were no more logically right or wrong than any other. Maybe a strategist stumbled across a research paper about gendered perspectives changing radically during teen years, and challenged Creative to bring that to life. Maybe the strategist just challenged Creative to connect the Always brand with empowered self-image and a creative stumbled across the research paper. Who knows.
But it was just a super interesting truth to bring to life, a really cool way of dramatising it, and it was at least not wrong for the brand.
As I said above, things can get confusing for everyone involved if you’re not consciously aware that you’ve set aside the question of “what is the best way to solve this challenge?” in favour of “what is an interesting way to do something that’s at least not off-brand and off-message?”
You don’t want to be in a position where you’re scrambling to explain that your interesting approach to the communications challenge is somehow the logically best way in. You looked for a best way in. Nothing was apparent. But given the general usefulness of non-obvious creatively good ideas, you decided to find an interesting inspiring creative prompt to direct the creative team.
These are also situations where collaboration with a creative director or creative team is particularly useful. As a strategist, your bread and butter is colour-by-numbers argumentation for the best way in. When you switch gears to being as non-obvious and interesting as possible, the biggest difference between one creative prompt and another is the creative fertility of that prompt. And the best people to judge the relative creative fertility of a range of ways in are the people who are going to have to come up with ideas from them.
Yes, “from them”. Plural. Because here’s the thing. When you’re freed up from trying to find the best way in, you can play a range of hands. Come up with five or six ways in you think are interesting. Put them in front of the creative director or creative team. You’ve done the due diligence in ensuring that they’re at least on-brand and on-topic kind of territories. None of them are wrong. Which is “best” will ultimately come down to creative fertility, rather than logical/rational rightness.
I’ll say it a different way. When you arrive at a direction from colour-by-numbers strategy, following data and logic, you’re explaining to Creative that this is the direction and why. When you arrive at several directions from exploring for non-obvious approaches to a challenge, you’re asking Creative if these are creatively furtile.
So go for it. But realise that’s what you’re doing. Don’t try to do a song and dance later on about how this is the best way in. It’s one not-wrong way in, but it’s interesting enough that people will pay attention. And for an awful lot of creative challenges – especially in brand building – good and interesting is better than trying to find the logical data-led best way in (when you’ve already tried and nothing stood out).
Finally, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Colour-by-numbers strategy can narrow down the focus, but within that scope you can explore for possible non-obvious inspiration and direction. All that means is you’re now having both conversations with Creative – firstly, explaining the logic and data behind the initial direction; secondly, asking which of several non-obvious approaches to that narrow direction are most creatively fertile.
The combination of the two make the best creative springboards in creative briefs. Sometimes that’s not possible – there’s no data to support a logical narrowing or you haven’t been able to find interesting insights for a non-obvious exploration. Just be aware of the difference and what you’re doing. (Don’t just follow recipes, understand how different kinds of cooking work.)
The above applies only to creative communications, including activations, events, etc. In almost any other strategic/creative context, if you aim for purely interesting over finding what’s logically best, you will strategically fail.
Consider the development of product innovations based purely on cool non-obvious interestingness with no regard for what creates the most value for customers, what meets real needs and desires.
What you end up with is the very definition of a gimmick. And great gimmicks can be great for creative comms ideas, but are terrible for products.