Not too long ago I read the
sequel to The Woman Who Walked Through Doors. I sought out Paula Spencer, because its heroine
became so real in the original that I wanted to spend more time with her. I
wanted to see how the once battered house cleaner in Dublin, a widow and
alcoholic was getting on 9 years later. Paula’s an amazing woman, with an
inspiring tenacity and sense of humor, and her story was told with such empathy
that it’s perhaps surprising a man wrote it. But I guess if you know the author,
Roddy Doyle, it shouldn’t be surprising at all.
For
that matter, it shouldn’t be surprising that a human being directed a movie
about an alien (ET), that Joyce Carol Oates wrote perhaps the best book ever on
the sport of boxing (On Boxing), that
Dylan could go electric, Bill Murray could play serious roles or I could write
something other than an ad.
The
typical labels of our business are just as unreliable. Personally, I have never
sought any category experience. I have gathered a bit of it, a range that some
might even consider enviable, but I don’t consider myself a CPG guy or a car
guy or a healthcare guy, a luxury goods, retail, financial or technology guy.
In the course of my career, I sought out promising assignments and somewhere along
the way discovered I was better at certain things than others, but products per
se could never define the areas that were fertile for me. When I was asked to
run another car account, I turned down the job to avoid being labeled a “car
guy.” Yet I work in a business that insists on pigeonholing us, especially in
new business pitches.
I’m
no expert, but I do have a few theories, a few categories that are probably
more useful to a creative director than anyone else, but might generally be a good
place to start.
As
I see it, there are people who are really good at producing many ideas for a
given task. Once there’s an idea, it’s like they become fluent in it. They’re
good at pooling things out. And last I heard, integration, or whatever we call
it these days, is kind of important.
Other
people are really proficient at showing shifts in thinking. They come up with a
variety of ideas. They’re flexible. They create a Gerry Graf style campaign one
day and a Hal Riney one the next. Tell me, what client doesn’t like to see a
real assortment of ideas before committing to one?
Some
people show unusual, remote and clever solutions. They’re what we call “out
there.” They might think of new uses for a particular media or come up with the
next Cannes Titanium winner. If you’re looking for attention-getting
differentiation, it’s good to have some of this.
Still
others excel at building out details. A great platform of an idea surfaces and
someone like this thinks through and crafts all the appropriate minutiae–execution,
execution, execution.
One
other quality comes to mind. In our business, creativity works most effectively
when it is channeled through empathy, creating communication that touches
people to their core. In the same way that, say, Dickens could put himself in
the shoes of a hundred compelling characters, someone else could succeed on
Mercedes-Benz one minute and chewing gum the next. Some people just get a kick
out of putting themselves in various consumers’ shoes, whether Timberland or
Manolos.
I’m sure there’s deeper and better thinking than this. I’m sure there are, for
instance, educational studies about the nature of creativity and approaches to
identify creative individuals. Regardless, we need something to reevaluate what
is too often a superficial criterion for new business, consultants being way
off the mark here and supplying a disservice to their clients. No wonder the
work portion of a pitch has so much baring, given there’s so little else to go on. I
guess I just don’t see enough science being applied–sadly, very little
discipline for a task upon which, especially in this economy, so much is at
stake.
Those
are my thoughts on the matter. Now, if it’s all the same to you, I think I
might go write an ad.
