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.