Category profiling

     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.