An early lesson in neutrality

Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyOne Worldwide

Those of you of a certain age may remember something called a copy test. This was a series of exercises set by an agency and designed to assess an applicant's creative talent. (Back then, remember, agencies still held the crazy idea that talent might sometimes be found outside art schools.)

Anyhow, one question I saw from a copy test niggled me. "Using as few words as possible," it said, "Write a notice for your local leisure centre to place at the entrance to their swimming pool which reminds anyone who has been playing squash that they should shower before entering the pool."

Before you read on, spend a few minutes trying this one yourself.

You can't really do it as a drawing, can you? Well, I couldn't. And, hard as I tried, I could never get it below about seven words, unless you broadened your target audience to include everyone, not just recent squash players, thus diminishing its impact. What was the right answer? Was there one?

Some time later illumination came. Don't put the notice at the entrance to the pool - put it at the exit to the squash courts.

Suddenly you are exclusively addressing your target audience, and your copy has no targeting work do. "Shower before swimming". Simple as that. Easier still, you could now do it as a pictogram for the benefit of French members who might disregard English instructions, particularly on matters of personal hygiene.

It was an early lesson. In this case, as in so many, the media and creative solutions were inextricable.

It should have been obvious. But there at the top of the page was a title that said "Copy Test". So the solution had to involve copy, didn't it? And if you're an advertising agency, the solution has to involve advertising. Or PR if you're a PR agency. And so on.

You think this is silly? I think it is deadly serious. Because, magnified a million times, this is the sort of misapplication of talent which you find every day in marketing all over the world. And it comes from the foolish pretence of each discipline that the solutions to all problems lie entirely within the field of their own competence.

As I write, there are media people attempting to plan whole strategies for clients with no reference to a creative approach. This is idiocy, too.

But this stand-alone fallacy is everywhere. It happens when anyone has a job description which describes what they do (copywriter) not what they are there for (to solve our sweat in the pool problem). When they have an "advertising" budget or a "PR" department or a "media" agency.

You see, outside the artificial world of copy tests and suchlike, copywriting problems do not exist. Nor do media problems, advertising problems, direct marketing problems, PR problems or anything else. Never seen one.

There are simply business problems, that's all. And sometimes some or all of our disciplines can contribute to a solution.

It's not as though our disciplines have evolved around business problems, either. We've evolved around different suppliers, craft skills and media, that's all. (Imagine if you went to a doctor with an earache and instead of being offered an ENT consultation you were asked whether you wanted to see a Novartis doctor or a GSK doctor. That's how our sector divides itself).

Ours is a Procrustean* approach to business problems - we actually rewrite them to suit our favoured means of solution. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It is little different from those shadier corners of alternative medicine where, should you visit a herbalist with any ailment whatsoever (a headache, a missing limb) you can be pretty darn sure the solution is going to involve some herbs.

Happily most of medicine does not work like that. Processes such as triage, exploratory surgery and General Practice precede the involvement of specialists.

Yet in our business this premature lunge to specialisation is getting worse. Or it is becoming more of a problem.

As the media and brand environment gets ever more fragmented, it is now less and less easy to make lazy assumptions about where your efforts should be applied, or to stereotype the way disciplines should be used. Today you could routinely use PR as the main thrust of a launch campaign (ten years ago one would just assume it would be advertising) and use DM or electronic communications as the principal driver of awareness.

The exciting area is no longer media, nor creative, nor specific disciplines, but creative combination of all three.

Whereas a client marketing department could coordinate disciplines where their separate roles were clearly defined, now the real added-value is created not in the separate activities of disciplines but in the complex interplay between them.

Just as this was all getting interesting, media planning was pulled out of agencies to sit alongside muscular new buying operations.**

At the same time, budgets are being apportioned by discipline, and marketing departments are Balkanised into discipline groups. Frequently these groups have targets that are simply comical simplifications of their discipline's roles, so that the DM department is measured entirely on response measures, the advertising department wholly on brand measures, and so on.

Worst of all to the creative person the role of creativity is being Balkanised too, so that it is increasingly at risk of being just executional. Yet it is the wider, media-neutral, discipline neutral application of creativity and intuitive thinking which is where brand-thinking is most valuable to a business.

Is there anything we can do? I am not offering a complete answer to media-neutral thinking (that is not for me alone to do) but, as a creative, I can offer a first step. That media-neutral approaches require new thinking. And this can only happen if our business learns to prize originality as much in strategy and media selection as it does in execution.

Secondly, we need to recognise that media-neutral solutions at their most neutral need not involve media at all.

This year we pitched for the Passports Office account, to produce a communications campaign that would prevent the usual glut of last-minute panic renewals at the beginning of August.

One creative observation was that the whole problem was self perpetuating, as all passports lasted exactly ten years. The suggestion: make passports last a slightly random length of time (10 years and X months) so that not every last minute applicant spends their entire life with a passport expiring in early August.

We didn't win the pitch, but I'm more proud of that idea than of fifty ads. It's worth more, too.

* Procrustes was the classical chap who used to amputate or stretch parts of his guests so that they would better fit his bed.
** Why? Difficult to say, unless you cynically believe it is to make sure planning (where the value should be created) remains subordinate to buying (where the money is made).

(c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002