Colin Drummond seemed like a smart and pleasant man and he made loads of
sense. He's done the thing that great planners in great creative
agencies always do; make the randomness seem less random. And they've
done a better job of explaining it at Crispin than I ever did at w+k in
Portland. Though I think they're essentially doing the same thing;
creating cultural stuff that also works as selling stuff.
It made me think of another way of thinking about that which
suggested an interesting definition of inspiration. (At least it's
interesting to me sitting here in O'Hare, where I'd even read some
Proust if there was some sitting here)
The best agencies, the agencies that do great, interesting work are
basically great because they do whatever the creatives want to do. And
because those people are often smart and talented what they want to do
is often exactly the right thing. This changes the job of the planner.
In most agencies, most of the time (ie places that are average or
worse) the job of the planner is to stop the creatives doing something
stupid. That's what the typical reductive, instructive creative brief
is for. It trys to stop them insulting the audience, misunderstanding
the audience and indulgling their creative whims in some pointless
manner.
When you're working with really good creatives the task is to
harness their creative whims, not constrict them. You have to accept
that they're going to do whatever want, especially when they own the
agency, but then your task is to make what they want be the right thing
to solve the problem.
There are two ways to do this.
The first is to manipulate what they want. This is what we often
call inspiration. We have to find a way to excite them about solving
the right problem in the right way. This is often a surreptitious
activity, but it's not any less noble or difficult because of that.
The second is to reframe the problem so that the solution the
creatives have come up with anyway is actually a good solution. (Not
just appearing to be a good solution, that's easier but wrong. Actually
being a good solution.) This is one of the real dark arts of
planning, but it often leads to really striking and effective work.
There are always hundreds of good solutions to any given brand problem
but the best ones are non-obvious, using the reframing effect of
seemingly random creative intent is often a brilliant way of stumbling
on the non-obvious.
AAAA account planning conference
