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On Nobel Prizes and the APG Awards, by Rory Sutherland, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyOne Those of you familiar with Salvador Luria's "Storie di geni e di me" (Boringhieri, Torino, 1984) will recall that the Nobel Laureate had this to say about the business of scientific discovery: "Out of the three contributions that I have made to biology, the first, the discovery of mutating bacteria, was a true intellectual illumination; the second, repair of radiation damage, was the result of methodical research; whilst, the third, the phenomenon of restriction-modification, was due to pure chance." Now without wishing to sound pretentious (oops, too late), I'd like to suggest that we in the communication business can attribute our own humble breakthroughs to those same three forces: intellectual illumination; methodical research and pure chance. Where we differ from the Professor is that we don't always come clean about the role each of them has played. For us, there is always the urge to rewrite our breakthroughs to suit our discipline or our audience. "Ooh, didn't we just have a clever idea?", doesn't look too good on a PowerPoint slide, in an IPA paper or a client presentation. So often people write up insights which came about through luck, or through creativity, as though they were the product of Aristotelian logic. Anyone, Bernbach included, can do this unwittingly, particularly in the presence of clients: "We have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to say about your company except that it is number two....." is how he broached his #2 idea to Avis. Notice "we have come to the conclusion that...." as though anyone, when presented with the same set of circumstances, would quickly have reached the very same conclusion. This postrationalisation is a serious form of misattribution, even theft; for you are paying a tribute to rationality which is properly owed to imagination or to luck. More often, creatives are guilty of the opposite form of theft - an attempt to claim for the creative execution a credit which partly belongs elsewhere. You often find this expressed in the overused phrase - overused by creatives, that is - "the work speaks for itself." It's a neat phrase, and sometimes it might be true. Usually, though, it's crap. An attempt to claim that the only value created by the communications business reveals itself explicitly in the final creative product. It's very much a Cannes approach: where all work must wear all its creativity on its sleeve. Whereas the most effective creative work is just as likely to wear some of its thinking rather loose about the hips.... BT's Hoskins, Cats like Felix like Felix, The British Gas slice of life campaign, Diet Tango, Ford's work for the Transit - all of this work, good to great in any case, only reveals its entire value when the story behind it is revealed. And this is what makes the APG Creative Planning awards so very valuable, and judging them so very enjoyable. Unlike almost every other award, here is one which rewards added-value in a spirit of honesty. Every entry is presented to the jury in 30 minutes in the presenter's own style, and so each entrant can be entirely explicit about the means by which their breakthrough occurred and what its value was. It gives an opportunity to show the invisible value of planning (the lazy assumptions killed, the ghastly wrong turns avoided) alongside the more visible value - its contribution to the creation of powerful creative work The jury watches each presentation open-mindedly. It's happy to acknowledge good thinking whether it came about through luck, research or illumination and equally open to all kinds of insight: into the target audience, the product, the market, whatever. Only twice did a few jurors turn nasty - and it was for misrepresentation: once at an attempt to claim for rationality a credit which properly belonged to creativity, and once the opposite. With this award, you must do two things only: 1) show that planning contributed to a great campaign and 2) tell the truth about how. This follows the best scientific tradition: make your breakthroughs using any means necessary, but be honest about how you made them. Fleming admitted he was lucky discovering Penicillin, but he still picked up a Nobel prize. Mind you, the Nobel committee is a soft touch compared to the APG. At the end of the last awards evening, they gave Stephen King a Lifetime Achievement Award - if you ask me a rather overdue gesture of thanks for the co-creator of their entire discipline. I hear that next year the Beatles Fan Club are thinking of doing something for Paul McCartney. (c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002 |
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