Someone somewhere once said "there are no problems, only solutions". They'd obviously never worked in a traditional advertising agency.
On our last placement we were knocking around some alternative business ideas in response to an advertising brief that would normally require a print execution. When we presented these thoughts, the response we received was baffling; "This is the sort of thing that you would see an entrepreneur take on to Dragons Den. Advertising is all about communication, an ad must immediately grab your attention with a simple message or no-one will care."
This seems to be a method that most would agree with. Agencies will go to great lengths in order to grab our attention. Bruce Lee playing table tennis with nunchucks, squirrels playing football with an acorn, Diesel representatives playing with… well… themselves.
What we (as a placement team) don't quite seem to understand is this; you can throw a nunchuck-wielding Bruce Lee at a ping-pong table any time of the day, but surely, if it doesn't directly make people go out and buy the product, aren't you just wasting your time?
When advertising and marketing legend Sergio Zyman was at McCann-Erickson Hong Kong, he received this brief from Nescafe: The Chinese, who are an orderly people, drink cold things when it's hot and hot things when it's cold. Sell coffee to the Chinese in summertime.
The answer he came back with was iced coffee.
While the other ad men were twiddling their thumbs pondering over how to communicate the nonpareil wonders of hot coffee in an effective and attention grabbing way. Zyman thought, "Right, what is the real issue here? And how can we go about fixing it?"
Now, isn't this surely the best way to approach any business problem? At what point did the advertising world decide that it was going to be solely defined as a communication industry and not a problem solving one? Most clients come to ad agencies with one real objective; to make more money. With this as the task, surely a problem solving industry would fare much better than one that simply communicates?
A lot of the time, coming up with an effective and original execution utilizing traditional methods can seem like we're bashing our heads against a re-enforced steel wall. The difficulty is that the definition of 'good' by traditional advertising's very nature is open to a large amount of subjectivity. And with so many people having a say, it can seem impossible to get anything 'good' made.
The great thing about solving a problem is just that; the problem you are working on is unsolved. The answer should therefore, always be original, topical and largely above subjectivity. The question becomes "will it work?" as opposed to "do I like it?"
Of course we are relative newcomers to the industry, and as a result, may be talking utter balls. But I really hope not. We are entering the industry at a very exciting time, and the more experience we gain, the more we are damned sure that advertising is due a massive ruddy overhaul.
To keep you all updated, we've just finished Cream (many thanks to Rory Hill from the Talent Business for making this happen) and are working on some rather cool projects over the next two weeks for an exciting new product design agency. Straight after that we have a few weeks at Grey, and then we're off to Wiedens for a month. As always, we would love to hear any of your thoughts, otherwise we'll be back in 2 weeks with another post.
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