The great advertising guru David Ogilvy describes in his book Advertising (Ogilvy, 1987) how he went about producing great ads:
‘You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious but there is no substitute for it.’ The first task in the creative process is to stuff your conscious mind with information and then to unhook your rational process.
Your unconscious has to be well informed or your ideas will be irrelevant.
Creativity in public relations
From my own experience as well as from talking to leading creative practitioners it seems (and this may upset some in the industry) that most ideas presented at pitches suffer from being irrelevant, unworkable, or outside the client’s value system. Most creative ideas are, frankly, of poor quality – even from those who are regarded as creative. They very rarely end up seeing the light of day.
Despite the best efforts and intentions in climbing up the learning curve, you will find most of your ideas lack the relevant experience and knowledge to be truly effective. I find that I gener-ally come up with genuinely outstanding ideas, which will work for the client, at least three to four months after working on an account.
If you have written a creative proposal for a new client, or for an unfamiliar area of activity, look back at your earlier work and check if any of the ideas were subsequently carried out precisely as presented. It is most unlikely that they were.
There is also a need to obtain as much information as possible from the production ‘coalface’. The American marketing guru Guy Kawasaki draws up in his book How to Drive Your Competition Crazy (Kawasaki, 1995) an amusing sequence of how research can be transformed within an organization and cause the original information to be significantly distorted. This sequence is shown in Table 4.1.
The creative process
Table 4.1 How information can be transformed
Person Viewpoint
Customer It is a crock of shit, and it stinks.
Researcher It is a container of faeces, and most unpleasant in smell.
Manager It is an earthenware vessel of excrement, and it is very strong.
Director It is a vase of fertilizer, and no one can resist its strength.
Vice-president It contains substances that aid plant growth, and it is very potent.
Chief operating officer It promotes growth, and it is very robust.
President Let’s implement this terrific idea because it will promote growth.
Furthermore, Regis McKenna in his book Relationship Marketing (McKenna, 1991) describes how, when researching for a client who made calculators, he watched a sales counter and observed people buying calculators. He noticed that people were weighing them in their hands and seemingly deciding that the heavier ones must somehow have more in them. His advice to the client was to add some technically unnecessary weight to their products – an insight not gained from reams of reports or expensive group interview panels but from simply hanging around a sales counter for half an hour.
The humorist P J O’Rourke describes how he accompanied a US government delegation to South America and observed how the
‘experts’ carried piles of dossiers on the country they were visiting.
He, however, chose not to read the reports, but instead opted for a more pleasurable route by checking out a number of bars, speaking to the barmen and asking them about the current state of affairs. His verdict: he reckoned he obtained a far more accurate insight into the country than the so-called experts. He also got very drunk.
On training courses, I pose the question: ‘How many people read the catalogues of ideas for public relations people, which are produced each day and contain pages of new opportunities, events and angles to use in your own work?’ Usually, I am faced with a blank response. I then reframe the question: ‘How many people read the newspapers every day?’
From my surveys of public relations practitioners, the majority will read maybe one or two newspapers a day, some may read two or three, and about one in five will read four or more, as well as magazines. Most outstanding creative practitioners read four or more newspapers a day; Gordon Forbes of consultancy Ptarmigan reads every national quality and tabloid before setting off for the office.
Most people say they do not have time to do this. Later in this book you will learn the skill of reading broadsheet newspapers such as the Financial Times in less than two minutes. Reading news-papers is an extremely important part of my working day, and it cannot be over-stressed how important this task is if you want to be a successful public relations practitioner. How, for example, in media relations can you know what type of story the Financial Times is interested in if you do not read it?
The information-gathering stage is fundamental to the success
Creativity in public relations
or failure of the subsequent creative activities. Hence the analogy in this section’s opening quote of using Lego bricks: the more bricks you have, the greater the potential to create new and different things.