Facts Are Not Enough

Several decades ago when a morph was the latest and greatest video post effect I was working on a television campaign where we decided to finish the spots with a match dissolve—the easier, and dramatically less expensive predecessor of the morph. The agency account director at first didn’t know the difference between the two, and then repeatedly couldn’t remember the difference. Each time we walked out of a meeting or hung up the phone after talking with the client where Steve had made a promise of finishing the spots with a morph I made it a point to explain the difference. And each time my explanation was longer and more detailed with the hope that he would finally get it right. But he didn’t.

Finally after the fourth or fifth time Steve promised a morph I lost my cool just a bit and I locked eyes with him and said, “The difference between a match dissolve and a morph is that a morph costs about ten times as much—and we don’t have the budget to do that. So when the client sees the finished spots and is expecting a morph I’m going to let you figure out how to pay for it.”

Steve never confused the two terms again. 

It was a learning moment for both of us. My mistake up to that point was thinking that explaining the difference was enough for Steve to get it right. After all, what I was telling him was factual and worth listening to—but the problem was my message wasn’t sticky enough for him to remember. Only when I finally included the context of cost, something account people often lose sleep over, and also shared that confusing the two terms might create a rather large problem, was I able to illustrate the difference for him in a dramatic, memorable way.

Speaking in a language, or a voice, or a tone, or a fashion, or whatever you want to call it—a way—so that your message becomes memorable is not a luxury, it’s a necessity if you actually want to get people to act. Putting your message in a context that makes it relevant to their lives is critical to success. As advertisers we can’t just spew facts and logic people into doing things. If that was possible there would be a lot more people qualified to work in a creative department. And we’re not wrapping facts in a foreign skin to disguise and trick people into action, we’re couching facts in a context that makes them relevant and motivating to our chosen audience.

Every once in a while when I have to remind myself of why there is a need to do this I pull out an ad that I tore out of a Cleveland newspaper. The only visual is of a graph. The headline reads: “The top line is the cost of electricity. The bottom line is the cost of gas. The shaded area in between is that Hawaiian vacation you’ve been dreaming of.” Remarkable. The last sentence of that headline could have read, The shaded area in between is $29.43 a month, or $327.13 a year and that ad wouldn’t have moved hardly anyone—because those are just numbers that don’t carry a whole lot of meaning unless of course, just saving money happens to be a guiding principle for you (Hint: for most people it’s not). But injecting the context of a vacation in Hawaii into an ad that talks to people who half the year are living under the lead-colored skies of Northern Ohio? Brilliant.

The kissing cousin of adding context is saying what you have to say in a more artful way so that your message becomes more memorable. It’s why David Olgivy penned, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise you hear in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock” instead of, “The quietest car in the world”. It’s also why Churchill said, “Never did so many owe so much to so few” instead of, “We owe a lot to the RAF”. In both of those examples there’s no added context, but there is added interest through a more artful way of saying the same thing.

If I’m given the choice though I’ll always opt for the added context—because that means I understand what motiviates my audience. Besides, adding more interest by going the route of more artful prose is usually much more difficult. After all, I would have never penned, “The days run away like wild horses over the hills” to describe the passage of time—it took Bukowski to do that.

There is No Formula for Great Communication

I was in a meeting the other day and I found myself weakly defending a concept that I had just presented—actually I rolled over quite easily because as soon as someone had challenged my thinking I knew they were right. The problem was that I had tried to use statistics to create a logic thread that I thought would move people to act. I’ve been doing what I do for longer than I would like to admit, so I should have known better. People are emotional beings and if the emotional component of a piece of communication is secondary, then chances are it won’t work all that well. And then I smiled to myself and thought of a painting.

If you’ve ever been to the New York MOMA there’s a Jackson Pollack piece just inside the entrance that will stop you in your tracks. Abstract expressionism isn’t really my thing. I’m an art director and a designer, I like hard lines and clearly defined messages. But the Pollack piece transcends, and not only does it transcend taste, but age, ethnicity, economic status, walk of life and probably every other metric you can imagine. I’ve seen people stand in front of the painting and tear up. I’ve watched people lose themselves in the moment and drop stuff from their hands. The painting is that powerful.

Occasionally I’ll reference the painting to remind a client or someone that I’m working with—or in this case myself, that we can’t break down communication into a science. Yes, we can apply science to a piece of communication, but science alone will not give us the answer or even a formula to create the answer. At the end of the day advertising, or just about any other communication for that matter, is still an art.

And here’s proof. If you analyzed the Pollack painting you could describe what you see in a scientific manner. It’s 43% white, 29% black, 11% blue, 8% yellow, 4% red... and continue until you made it to 100%. Once you’ve cataloged the color usage you could measure the canvas—width, height, even the depth if you have an inclination for detail (Make sure to include the bee and the nails stuck in the painting then.). And upon finishing, your information wouldn’t tell you a damn thing about that painting. Not one thing—OK, one important thing. If you doubt this then I challenge you to come up with a painting using the same percentages of color, on the same size canvas (because you have all the information you need to make a great painting right?) that not only is worthy of being called art, but is so powerful that it launches a whole new genre and hangs in a museum for generations to come.

Now if that doesn’t convince everyone on the planet that you can’t break down art into a science (or a formula), then I would like to put the few dissenters in a lab with the complete catalog of elements from the human body. Their task would be simple: create an animated human form. Science has given them the ingredients, and we all know the finish line so getting there should be easy, right?

Applying this argument to advertising and design means when someone tells me that a response button has to be a certain color, in a certain position at a certain size, or that a logo has to be up for a certain amount of time and it has to appear within a certain number of seconds from the beginning of a spot, then I’m not so certain that’s the case. We’re not doing a paint by number here. We’re making art. Because as much as science (or numbers, or analytics, or whatever you would like to call them) can close the gap between science and art there’s still going to be a gap. And then you’re just going to have to take my hand and trust me as we leap together over it.

A Beautiful Example

Remarkably simple. And memorable.

While traveling on business a few weeks ago in San Francisco I took advantage of a crystal clear morning in North Beach and went for a walk. Within the first three blocks I came across this building and thought, what a beautiful example of “Not Every Advertisement is an Ad.”

I mean if you're selling sheet metal, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

The Lean Startup and What It Means for Design

I don’t have a problem with the Lean Startup model, and even if I did it won't be going away. After years of beta-testing websites and software it seems the practice of not having to get things right on the first try makes a lot of business sense for other products and services. As my friends over the Atlantic would say, “Bully for them.”

When it comes to design though the lean startup can be problematic. There’s a lot of economic downward pressure on our business to begin with and now the lean startup comes along like a merry band of clear-cutting ax men and threatens to level what’s left. The conversations I used to have with clients when it came to cost of identity design were about knocking 20% off. Twice in the last 6 months I’ve been asked to (effectively) knock a zero off. Really?

I understand the way we used to do things—making everything perfect from the product to the branding and then unleashing it upon the public and standing back and holding our collective breath, hoping that we all got it right—is often not the best way. But now it seems like the only opportunities to work with some clients are either cutting your fees down to student rates or staffing yourself up to the point where you look like you can handle a six-figure branding assignment. It’s like there’s a hand squeezing the graphic identity ballon in the middle. Air is only in either end. There’s the $600 logo assignment (ala 99designs) or the $60,000 visual brand package (ala any number of high-end brand firms) with little in between. But certainly, there has to be room in between.

The danger for someone in my position is if you manage to talk someone (up) to the middle ground by cutting (down) your rates you still become the “discount designer”. Years from now when that same client grows significantly and they have a substantial budget, the chances are they will want to hire a “real design shop” and not that “discount guy” they dealt with before.

Now if you’ve read this far and you’re still with me I’m going to take a moment here to recognize that this must sound like sour grapes, but I assure you it’s not. I’m advocating for the middle ground here, on behalf of myself (because admittedly that’s where some of my business lies) but also on behalf of clients. The reason is simple. I can’t tell you how many visual brand packages I’ve seen that come with a high dollar price tag that I look at and think to myself, “I could have done that for half of the money.” I’m talking about value for your marketing dollar here.

Now if you’re the client who’s tempted to play on the other end of the spectrum and you’re thinking about settling for a logo that’s just north of what your mother could come up with, that begs a serious question. What better way is there to start distancing yourself from the other lean start ups than to look like you’re quite serious about things from Day One? Not only will you have a strong graphic foundation to build on for the future, but it’s important to remember, one of the first lessons in Marketing 101: You only get one chance to make a first impression. And that’s true even if you’re planning on pivoting your way to success.

Finding the Way Through to a Good Idea

It’s not uncommon for a friend outside of advertising to tell me they have a brilliant idea for a TV spot—and then proceed to share it with me. (The hoopla surrounding the Super Bowl ads seems to bring this out in people.) I can only listen half-heartedly knowing that they didn’t have to spin their masterpiece within the framework that almost all advertising is created.

Usually what folks outside of the business don’t understand is that creatives start with a maze instead of a blank sheet of paper. The number of walls or complexity of the maze can vary greatly depending on the number of needs and wants of the client stated in the creative brief. Added to that list are much larger forces like brand voice, budget and deadline. The longer the list, the more complex the maze. The more elegant and artful the creative team’s solution is to the maze, the better the piece of work that comes out the other end. Requirements (or walls) often come in two forms: reasoned and arbitrary. The spot needs to be 30 seconds long, is a reasoned requirement. Don’t use reverse type, is an arbitrary one unless there is a real purpose behind it. Some of the walls that are thrown up can be harder to get around than others.

Now, I could go down a rabbit hole and talk about how goofy the list of requirements, both reasoned and arbitrary, can get, but here’s the thing, instead I’m going to talk about how we can sometimes perceive the maze to be much more complex than it really is. That’s a confession that puts the onus squarely on us, the creatives. However, the best way to work through that perception of complexity is by having plenty time to grapple our way through the maze—and for the most part that puts the onus back on the shoulders of the account team, or the client, or both. In fact, the fastest way to ramp of the difficulty of any conceptual task is to cut down on the amount of time the creatives have to work on it. If it’s Monday and concepts are due next Monday, a sure-fire way to make things twice as challenging is to move the deadline up to Friday. And if you want to increase the difficulty by a factor of 10, then move the deadline up to Wednesday.

I saw a presentation once by John Stein of Stein Robaire Helm where he talked about the constraints of time. His agency was famous for doing great work with low budgets but the one thing that he said he had difficulty with was when clients came to him with very little time. Stein was proud of the creative talent that he had collected and he believed that time was needed to let their skill show. He argued that without proper time his creative staff would be indistinguishable from another less talent-laden department because they would have to pick the low hanging fruit—the first ideas that came along. He then used a great analogy to illustrate this. He said if his creative department was the Dallas Cowboys and another creative department the local high school team, in a game of only 5 minutes the score would be reasonable. But if there was a full 60 minutes on the clock then the game would be a blowout. The premise is simple: it takes time for talent to prove its value.

These days with challenging budgets, clients want more from each piece of creative—and that can mean the list of requirements is long and the maze complex. A crack account team and a well-managed client can carve out extra time and impact the level of advertising even when they may not be able to find more money. And as a seasoned creative, I know I can contribute to my own success by getting on with finding my way through the maze without spending precious time obsessing over some odd requirement, arbitrary or otherwise.

The Fine Art of Creating Universal Appeal

It’s an old axiom in the marketing business (and life in general) that if you try to be all things to all people then you won’t really have much appeal to anyone. It’s better to bite off one segment of the market and have a really sincere conversation with them than it is to engage multiple segments and say nothing—or worse, sound insincere.

Occasionally though there’s a company or a brand who runs counter to this wisdom and manages to strike the perfect chord with multiple audiences. It’s probably not fashionable for someone in my position to admit, but whenever I run across a brand that does this I feel a slight bit of awe.

In my spare time I’m a bit of a bike geek so I'm a sucker for just about anything related to the sport. But if I had never pedaled a mile I’d still be a fan of Rapha. They have managed to present their brand in such a way that they appeal to a wide variety of segments in the cycling world—and seemingly, no audience likes to segment themselves as much as cyclists.

Since they only recently have put a few Cycling Club locations in the states, the foundation of Rapha’s success no doubt starts with their website. Not only is it so rich in content that you can spend hours watching videos, looking at photographs, reading stories and blogs without so much as looking at anything with a price tag, but the user experience when you’re doing so is interesting, simple and easy. And whether they are talking to (with) the roadies, the city commuters, the hipster-fixie set, or the travel enthusiasts, they do it in a consistent voice which is almost always accompanied by a beautiful marriage of design and photography.

No matter which audience you’re coming from you get the feeling that the folks at Rapha get you, and that's a huge deal. I’m not quite sure which audience they started with but I’m pretty sure it was the road enthusiast. Then somewhere down the line someone (who probably felt that there are not enough cyclists in general) wanted to know if they could have just as sincere of a conversation with the urban cyclist. Hats off to the mastermind curator of these conversations—or more likely the road guru, the commuter guru, and so on. My sense is the brand is fostered to such a degree that if any of those conversations felt fake then they would be abandoned. 

I don’t know if the appeal to certain segments is as strong as it would be if they were only talking to that segment, but given that Rapha is having multiple conversations at the same time they deserve a lot of credit for doing it really well. Because as one of my clients said, “You have to hand it to anyone who can sell socks for $30.”