The Fisherman's Guide

3. abrupt; curt. 4. scanty: a brief bathing suit.

~ n. 5. a short and concise statement or written item...

(source: Webster's)

The propaganda of many agencies suggests that in the process of developing advertising, there is a pivotal moment where the rational left side of the agency's collective brain completes its work of data collection, analysis, and synthesis, and hands that information, relay baton—style, to the right side, where it can be molded by the forces of intuition and imagination into interesting and unexpected new forms. The delivery of a written creative brief, usually in conjunction with a verbal briefing, is a sign that the intellectual foreplay is over.

Let the creative juices flow.

In its simplest terms, creative briefing is the bridge between smart strategic thinking and great advertising (advertising that involves consumers on both a rational and emotional level, and which is capable of affecting a change in both their thoughts and behavior) and is the key tool with which planners and their account management partners can unlock the talents and imagination of their agency's creative people.

Different creative people will argue about the relative importance of this briefing process, although most will tend to agree that if a brief is informative, well argued, and insightful, then their chances of creating better advertising are increased and the process of doing so is made considerably easier. Unfortunately, they are also likely to point out that such insightful briefs are relatively few and far between. Often, they say, briefs are of little help and occasionally even seem to act as a barrier to great advertising.

The main task of a creative briefing is not to say "okay, it's finally time for you creative folks to start work," but to inform the creative team, and most important, to inspire them. To reduce all the information that has been gathered from the client, from consumer research, and perhaps many other sources besides, funnel it down to a single, potent idea, and from that idea to create a sense of possibilities, of great advertising just waiting to happen. So it is at the same time an exercise in synthesis and expansiveness. An interesting, and at times awkward, juxtaposition.

Jeff Goodby, speaking at a conference of account planners in New York in 1995, described creative briefing using a fishing analogy. The brief, he said, is the equivalent of a fisherman's guide — a person who takes you to the best place on unfamiliar water, shows you where to fish, and has some ideas about the best flies to use. The guide doesn't do any fishing but makes sure that the fisherman (the agency creative) has a more enjoyable and successful time than he or she would have had on their own.

In simple, factual terms, a good brief should accomplish three main objectives. First, it should give the creative team a realistic view of what their advertising needs to, and is likely to, achieve. Second, it should provide a clear understanding of the people that their advertising must address, and finally, it needs to give clear direction on the message to which the target audience seems most likely to be susceptible.

You will probably have already noticed that I use the terms creative brief and creative briefing almost interchangeably, although strictly speaking, the two mean different things. The creative briefing, in many agencies, is a meeting where a planner and/or account person will outline the nature of an advertising problem for a creative team, and start to suggest ways of solving it. The creative brief is a document that summarizes the content of that meeting. But as I have never worked in an agency where a brief is delivered in a single meeting, or for that matter slipped surreptitiously and anonymously under the creatives' door, I prefer to think of both the brief and the briefing as equally appropriate names for a longer, less formal process of communication, whereby planners, account people, and creatives work together to mold the direction that the advertising will take. The boundaries between what is written and what is spoken, in brief or briefing, themselves blur as ideas constantly evolve and expand.

The longer and less formal this process becomes, the less likely it is that there will be a single, neat transition from logical analysis to lateral interpretation and creation. And to me, that's probably just as well. Where the planning and creative briefing processes work best, creative thinking and interpretation commonly precede the official creative briefing stage, and information gathering never really ceases, as one stage of campaign development merges imperceptibly into the next.

One last general point. Many agencies believe that briefing is the sole province of planners, and that others should not participate in the process, except as recipients of the planners' wisdom. I disagree. Creative people should be involved not as passive recipients, but as active participants, as their thinking at an early stage will improve the quality of the brief and act as a catalyst for the process of creative development itself.

Throughout the chapter you will also notice that I seldom mention the planner alone when I refer to the process of creating and implementing the brief. I regard creative briefing as a responsibility that is shared by planners and their account management partners. To exclude account management from that process, as many agencies do, is not only elitist nonsense, but counterproductive to the development of great advertising.

The Brief Is a Means to an End

There is only one reason for anyone to write a brief or engage in briefing a creative team, and that is to help make their advertising better (and easier to create) than it would be if they were left to their own devices. As such, it is a means to an end: the creation of a distinctive and relevant advertising campaign.

There are, however, many common misperceptions (abuses might be a more accurate term) of creative briefing that tend to position the brief more as an end unto itself and thereby prevent it from achieving its full potential.

In the first chapter of this book, I made the point that the best advertising represents a partnership between clients, agency creatives, and consumers. All three parties need to be involved throughout, and advertising strategy should incorporate all of their perspectives. That point is fundamental to the main message of this book, and what I am about to say should not be interpreted as a contradiction of that point of view.

The balance between those different perspectives will necessarily vary at different stages of the process. For example, in setting business objectives for the advertising, clients have the central role; in exploratory research, the focus may be on consumers; and when ads are being developed, the agency creates take the front seat. That's an oversimplification, but at some point, clients, creatives, and consumers (and their planning representatives) will, albeit temporarily, take a seat on the bench and watch someone else do the work. Creative briefing, I believe, is one of those moments.

1. Clients should not participate in creative briefing. A brief is a piece of communication between, usually, a planner and account person on one hand, and a creative team of art director and copywriter on the other. For this to work most effectively, it is important that clients take a back seat.

I realize that many people, clients especially, may raise their eyebrows at this idea. Exclude clients from the creative briefing? Surely that's heresy?

First, let me clarify exactly what I mean by suggesting that clients do not play a direct role in the briefing process, because it is not really as subversive as it may sound. I think that they should always contribute to the thinking that provides the brief's foundation, in the ways described in earlier chapters, and should also be in full agreement with the load-bearing pillars of campaign objectives, proposed target, and the broad idea that the creative team will be asked to communicate. Beyond that, however, they do not need to participate in the verbal briefing of the creative team and should not need to see a written brief at all. As long as they have agreed to the general direction, then the detail should not concern them.

2. If it's not relevant to the consumer, it's not relevant to the brief. Throughout the strategic development process, the agency's (and arguably the planner's) most important task is to filter information received from both clients and consumers, and boil it down to the few most useful nuggets. Clients may have a vast amount of information to impart relative to their products, their design, manufacturing process, competitive context, previous communication, and so on, but as important as it is for the agency to be exposed to this information, it is equally important that not all of this information finds its way into the creative briefing.

For a start, not all of it will be relevant to the people who are the target of the advertising; and if it's not relevant to them, it should not be included in the brief. But apart from that, too much information can be as damaging to a team as not enough; it creates confusion. Even though it may contain elements that may potentially be very useful to the team, those elements will not be useful if they are hidden under a pile of interesting irrelevancies.

In Chapter 3, I described some of the problems that arise when clients spend more hours each day with their products than with their spouses. They become very attached to them (their products, that is), assume that everyone else feels the same way, and will not hear a bad word uttered about them. In many ways, this is a good thing.

It is, after all, very important for most clients on a day-to-day basis. How can they possibly exhort others to sell, buy, and consume their products if they themselves do not appear to love them like their firstborn? Conversely, how could someone get up and feel good about going to work in the morning if he or she thought that their product sucked?

But as essential as this affection and belief is to clients' abilities to motivate and to their own personal sanity, it is a serious liability when it comes to guiding advertising communication.

3. The purpose of the brief Li not to praise the product. If left unchecked, the natural client desire for others to share their belief in their product would manifest itself in a creative brief that reads like a speech at a sales convention. All chest thumping and unrealistic expectations of the way that product x will kick the sorry ass of product y.

There is no place for rhetoric in a creative brief, which has to be truthful to both the capabilities of the product and the expectations of the consumer. This, in turn, means that in the process of briefing, one of the key tasks of the planner and other team members is to begin to translate client language for the benefit of those who are writing the ads and those who will ultimately be addressed by them. And nowhere is this more evident or important than in the area of complex technology, where there is often a yawning chasm of technological sophistication between those who sell, and those who buy, the products.

I once had to brief a creative team at B.M.P for a campaign for a new Sony camcorder. Prior to doing so, I was taken through a three-or four-hour technical briefing at Sony's office on the new features that the advertising needed to highlight. Two of these features in particular seemed to differentiate the camera from its competitors. It had a very powerful zoom lens and also a new C.C.D imager with many thousands more pixels than any other nonprofessional camcorder on the market. The pixel discussion alone took more than two hours. For those of you who are wondering, a pixel is a dot of light or color that makes up a video image on television or in print. Pixels are like the dots that make up pictures in newspapers; the greater the number of dots in a given space, the sharper the picture.

I had to find a consumer-friendly way of describing or showing how that worked. In an attempt to make both the zoom lens and pixels merge into one overall benefit, I said:

The powerful zoom lens allows you to spot a bee's balls from ten paces. And the x-

thousand-pixel C.C.D imager gives you a picture so sharp that you can't just see his balls, you can count the number of hairs on them.

Okay, so it was a little irreverent, but my client, who always insisted on signing off on the brief before I spoke to the team, was horrified that I could be so frivolous with this sophisticated, innovative piece of technology that was the cornerstone of Sony's video strategy. The bee's balls had to go.

Now I don't even know if bees have testicles, but that's hardly the point. I was using them as a metaphor, which the creative team, incidentally, felt explained what the camera did very simply and graphically (yes, I had broken the rules by already discussing it with them). I had also pointed out that Sony's advertising required a certain tone and intelligence that would, of course, have been inconsistent with such testicular references in the advertising itself, although I knew from previous conversations that the team understood that without my having to tell them. The sole purpose for the analogy was to explain the technology to them in as interesting (and entertaining) a way as possible. They knew that it was up to them to find another example more suitable for mass-market consumption.

4. Creatives write from a brief, not to it. The client, however, believed that nothing should appear in the brief that would not ultimately find its way into the advertising, and this flies in the face of the way that many creative people actually use briefs. John Webster once told me that if I were to spend 2 hours briefing him, he would bet that at least 1 hour and 59 minutes of that time would not be directly useful to him in writing an ad. (In fact, I believe that irrelevant and useless were the words he actually used.) In the remaining one minute, though (which could appear at any point within the two hours), I might be lucky enough to utter a single word or sentence that gave him an idea. That, he said, would be a great briefing.

Many clients are made extremely nervous by the apparently random nature of what Webster describes. They don't like surprises, and if the inspiration could come from anywhere in the brief, that adds an element of unpredictability that to many is simply unacceptable. In a perfect world, many clients would prefer a creative brief to be a list of instructions to the agency, or a checklist against which to grade the advertising. Whom to talk to, what to say, how to say it, how many times to say it, how much time to devote to the product shot, and even which spokesperson to use. Nothing left to chance. And, as a consequence, little, if any, room for creativity.

A few years ago, I presented a creative brief to a company chairman and founder, who listened to stone-faced throughout. When I had finished, he told me that what I had presented was all very fine, but he had a "better idea." That better idea, he went on to elaborate, was to use the popular football coach and commentator, John Madden, as his company's spokesman. "That's the brief," he said. "Use Madden." Please forgive me for not revealing the client's identity, but rest assured that John Madden was about as relevant to this particular product as Michelle Pfeifer would be to a campaign for tractor parts.

Fortunately, the arrival of a new, enlightened company president averted that particular crisis (the ensuing Madden-free campaign helped grow the company's business, won gold awards at all the major creative shows, and a gold Effie for effectiveness, and ultimately attracted a rich buyer for the company that allowed the founder to retire), but not all agencies (or friends of John Madden) are so lucky.

A planner at G.S&P, Andrew Teagle, once commented that he had often heard clients say that creatives write ads "to a brief." Wasn't that the wrong way to look at it, he asked? Surely a more accurate description was that creatives write ads from a brief? In other words, the clients' phrase described a process where the brief was designed to limit the creatives, whereas our own process was designed to Liberate them. It's not that we set out to give the creatives absolute freedom — far from it, if we are true to our aim of making advertising relevant to its target — but if their advertising is to be distinctive enough to stand out and be noticed, it is vital that they are at least able to explore the possibilities without having their hands tied behind their backs.

5. The brief is not an opportunity to show off how hard you've been working. If you are a planner or account person in an agency, it is easy to develop an inferiority complex relative to copywriters and art directors, because they are the only ones who actually have something tangible to show for their efforts, in the form of a piece of advertising. However hard or effectively a planner or account person may have worked, they do not have their name on an ad, and because both jobs require a great deal of informal maneuvering, it is a very worrying situation when the annual performance review comes around. "Tell me what you did in the development of the campaign for _ _ "your boss might say, and of course it is often very hard to define exactly what you did do.

There is a solution to this problem, which is for planners and account people to be judged on the quality of the advertising, and assume that the end justifies the means. Many agency managers unfortunately don't see it that way, and planners and account people are left to find other ways to justify their existence. Assuming that the advertising itself is off-limits because someone else actually wrote or designed it, they will focus instead on the next best tangible thing that they can own, and that is the creative brief.

The creative brief, at least in its written form, may thus become a kind of diary of the planner's or account person's activities over the weeks or months leading up to the creatives first putting pencils to paper. I know how tempting this is, because I have been in situations myself where I have done so much work that a half-hour-long discussion and three pages of letter-sized paper hardly seem to do it justice.

When I knew so much about a product that I could write a dissertation on the subject, I sometimes succumbed to the temptation. I presented an in-depth analysis of a region's economy and history, or explained manufacturing processes in mind-numbing detail, all because I had worked my ass off to unearth this information, and Goddammit, I was determined that it would not go unnoticed.

As I said at the top of this section, "There is only one reason for anyone to write a brief or engage in briefing a creative team, and that is to help make their advertising better," not to prove a point to yourself or to others. Because attempting to do so will invariably make the creatives' jobs even harder.

The Brief Is an Ad to Influence the Creative Team

I once heard a planner ask John Hegarty, the creative director of the top London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, what he looked for in a creative brief. He replied that he looked for a very simple, single-minded idea, which is usually expressed in the part of the brief that many agencies term the proposition. (I prefer a different descriptor, which I will explain later.) Hegarty said that it was his habit to take that one sentence and write it on a large piece of paper, above or below a picture of the product, almost as if the line from the brief were a headline. Then he would pin it up above his desk and ask himself first whether the juxtaposition of that line and that product made some rational sense, and second, whether it also started to suggest something interesting on an emotional level. If so, then he would think, "There's the first ad in the campaign. It's my job to create something better."

I don't know whether Hegarty really goes through the process of writing out the line, pasting on or drawing a picture of the product, and physically pinning it up as a standard that he needs to surpass, but it really doesn't matter.

What is important is that he sees the brief as a piece of advertising, albeit crude, and tries to react to its main idea as if he were seeing it on a billboard.

In an article in Campaign magazine in September 1996, Andrew Cracknell, the chairman and executive creative director of Ammirati Puris Lintas in London, agreed that the brief needs to represent the first creative thinking. "Planners," he said, "take the first leap in imagination." While I disagree with Cracknell's view that planners alone should be responsible for briefing, and for that matter for any leaps in imagination, I believe very strongly that whoever is doing the briefing should have the first creative ideas.

For anyone preparing a brief, writing your own ad is a very useful exercise. As Hegarty said, it doesn't have to be a great ad, or even a good ad, but it does have to be interesting on both a rational and emotional level. If the writer of the brief finds it impossible to manifest his or her own thinking in an advertising idea, then it will likely be an uphill struggle for the team assigned to create the actual campaign.

A brief tends to succeed in direct proportion to the level of creativity present in both its ideas and presentation. If the creative brief is not itself creative, if it does not suggest solutions to problems, present information in an expansive and interesting way, and interpret that information with imagination and flair, then its authors and presenters have no right to expect anything different from their creative team. Superficial information will spawn superficial advertising, and a dull, unenthusiastic presentation of the possibilities will become a self-fulfilling prophesy in the final work. A creative team has to believe that a great campaign is possible before they can begin to create it. Perhaps the most important task of the brief, arguably more influential than the strategic and creative direction itself, is the creation of the belief in the team that they will be able to do their very best work on this one assignment.

Great Briefs: Triumphs of Simplicity Over Complexity

While the physical presentation of the brief obviously plays a key role in raising the expectations and confidence of the creative team, it should not be regarded as some kind of pep rally. Many of the best briefs I have ever seen (as defined by the thinking and presentation of the brief itself, and by the quality of the resulting advertising) avoided the temptation to sell an idea altogether, persuading instead through the use of honesty and simplicity of thought and expression. Such simplicity may seem innocent, or even naive, but it is devastatingly effective, not only in communicating the basic truths that are the foundation of so much effective advertising, but also in disarming its audience and preparing them to accept ideas that they might otherwise resist.

The ascendancy of simplicity over complexity is evident in almost every field of human endeavor, although strangely people's perceptions are almost exactly the opposite. They expect that the best solutions must come from the most sophisticated and difficult analysis, and it is rare for anyone who actually achieves these breakthroughs to attempt to dissuade them from this point of view. After all, what great achiever wants to have people think that what they do is easy?

One of the pleasures of living in San Francisco in the 1980s and early 1990s was the opportunity to see Joe Montana play for the San Francisco 49ers. One of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, Montana won four Superbowls and was legendary for his ability to bring his team back from deficits late in the fourth quarter of the game. Tom Junod, writing in G.Q magazine in September 1994, said of Montana, "For a long time, I thought of Joe Montana as a 'thinking man's quarterback,' a 'cerebral athlete' whose game—a greedy, hungry, gobbling thing, based on patience, restraint, even passivity—was an expression of some kind of Zen mastery." His impression, shared by many, I am sure, was that Montana must have a mind like a chess master, capable of computing all possibilities, calculating move, countermove, and counter-countermove, all in a fraction of a second.

The G.Q journalist asked Montana if at those moments of crisis, with only seconds left on the clock and his team trailing, "he tries especially hard to complete his first pass, because then he knows that the defense starts thinking, Oh no, here conies Joe. . . . And Joe answered that no, he tries to complete his first pass because it's always better to complete a pass than not to complete a pass. He feels the same way about the second pass, and the third."

"His simplicity," says 49ers president, Carmen Policy, of Montana, "is his genius. . . . He is able to operate on a simplistic level and come to decisions that others would think of as very complex."

"The Joe Montana of brief-writers." Now that's something to aspire to.

The Briefing Itself

Many agencies use a format for creative briefing to ensure that the essential information is included. This format may even extend to a specially designed form, with sections to be filled in by the person preparing the briefing. I personally detest filling in forms of any sort and for that reason have never introduced one in my own agency, but I do suggest a number of questions that I think every brief should attempt to answer.

This is important for two main reasons. First, the very act of posing these questions forces the person preparing the briefing to come up with answers to them. It is important that any briefing at least attempts to find solutions, as opposed to simply listing problems that the creative team needs to overcome. Second, a set list of questions does provide focus and discipline, and ensures that the team is given all the basic information they require to do their job.

In the following sections, I go through these questions one at a time, giving examples of the kind of response that is expected and how this information has in turn found its way into advertising campaigns. You will notice one thing about these questions (which I have adapted only slightly from a set first developed by my former colleague, Ewen Cameron, at B.M.P), and that is that they are all written in plain English. No "marketing-speak" to be seen in any one of them. That is significant because if, as previously suggested, a brief is really an ad to influence a creative team, then it needs to use their language (within certain limits of decency, of course), and not that of marketing executives and management consultants.

Words and phrases like strategy, positioning, and proposition, that commonly pepper creative briefs, are defined and understood in different ways by different people. Too often, time that should be devoted to solving an advertising problem is wasted in needless semantic arguments about the difference between a strategy and a proposition. The process is hard enough without creating unnecessary problems, and by removing jargon, the path of creativity can be greatly eased. Furthermore, if a question is asked in plain, everyday English, it is more likely to be answered in the same kind of language. In the spirit of engaging and involving consumers, that can only be a good thing.

Why Are We Advertising at All?

Surprising as it may seem, this is often a very difficult question to answer. "Because we always have," "because our competitors do," "because we have a budget and we need to spend it before September," and "for a tax write-off" may all have some truth in them, but are unlikely to inspire a creative team, because they treat advertising as a simple object or commodity. "We have an empty page in a magazine, please fill it," is not likely to excite anyone, and is even less likely to lead to an interesting advertising campaign.

Instead, the question begs a succinct description of the client's current business situation, and the problems that advertising needs to overcome, along with a clear sense that advertising can help.

When American Isuzu Motors hired our agency in 1991, our first advertising task was to launch a new version of the Trooper (which had been completely redesigned, taking the price from $13,000 to over $25,000, and taking Isuzu into previously uncharted waters), and to relaunch the Isuzu Rodeo, which had entered the market in the previous year, but with limited success. Increased sales of the Rodeo were critical to Isuzu's business, and very aggressive objectives had been set for 1992.

To develop a campaign for Rodeo, two important questions needed to be answered. First, why had Rodeo not performed particularly well in terms of sales in its first year? And second, why did the people who had purchased a Rodeo choose the vehicle in preference to others?

The way most car purchases work is that at some point, an individual decides that they need a new vehicle. Perhaps their old car broke down one time too many, maybe they were in a crash, or maybe they're just bored and want a change. Whatever the reason, they decide to go check out some dealerships. Their choice of which dealerships to visit tends to be defined by the brands and vehicles they know, and most of us carry around such an informal list in our minds, based on vehicles we have seen on the road, things that friends and colleagues have told us, and, I hate to admit it, advertising that we have seen. Generally speaking, people narrow this list down to three or four vehicles, visit the relevant dealerships, and after considering what the car has to offer, how it feels on a test drive, how helpful/sincere/unpleasant a particular dealer may be, and of course, how the "deals" compare, a purchase will be made.

The important thing to realize about the role of advertising in all of this is that, while it may ultimately reinforce someone's decision to buy, its primary purpose is to draw people to the dealership. After they get to the dealership, a whole lot of other factors come into play, which advertising cannot directly influence.

Industry data on the number of dealerships visited by purchasers of import sport utility vehicles (S.U.V's) revealed a very interesting fact, which was that the people who had bought either the Nissan Pathfinder or the Toyota A Runner, the two leaders in the category, had almost all shopped both vehicles in the course of making their decision, yet very few had also shopped the Rodeo. Rodeo buyers, on the other hand, had shopped both Pathfinder and 4Runner, and some other vehicles besides; only after that had they shopped Rodeo. In fact, Rodeo buyers tended to visit more dealerships than any other sport utility buyer.

Focus groups elaborated on this issue. Owners of competing S.U.V's told us that they had simply not heard of Rodeo, which of course would explain why they didn't visit the Isuzu dealership. Some also admitted that they didn't regard the Isuzu brand very highly—Isuzu's own research confirmed this, with 42 percent of intending S.U.V buyers indicating that they would be "less likely" to purchase a vehicle if it was made by Isuzu. "Poor guy. Maybe next time he can afford a Pathfinder," wrote a respondent when asked in one of our focus groups to imagine the thoughts of a driver stopped next to a Rodeo at the lights. The Rodeo driver's imagined thoughts were defensive. "Well . . . well at least I have four wheel drive. ..."

But when we showed these people the vehicle, which we had taken to every focus group location, they were very surprised. Its appearance, they said, was very similar to their 4Runner or Pathfinder, and it had almost all of the same features, at a slightly lower price. If they had known that when they were shopping for a car, would they have shopped the Rodeo? Most answered yes.

Meanwhile, Rodeo owners described a purchase process that went something like this. "I really wanted a sport utility vehicle. I was particularly attracted to the Pathfinder and the Toyota — the 4Runner — because they were sleeker, more sporty looking.

But when I went to see them, they were too expensive, and I checked out some of the domestics, but either they were too expensive or I didn't like the look, and then I wandered into the Isuzu dealership and found the Rodeo. It had the same look as the 4Runner and Pathfinder, and all the same features. And it was a great deal."

These owner focus groups had begun almost like therapy sessions, with Rodeo owners quiet and even a little embarrassed, when I asked them to tell the group what vehicle they owned. "I, er, have ..." mumbled the first respondent, eyes lowered, "an Isuzu Rodeo." Others raised their own eyes. Did they hear him right?

The second respondent looked at the first and said, almost puzzled, "I have a Rodeo, too." And around the table it went, like the scene at the end of Spartaciw where everyone claims they are Spartacus. "I have a Rodeo!" "I have a Rodeo!" Laughter filled the room (I'm not exaggerating) and conversation, energy level, and body language were all transformed as the respondents realized they were not the only ones. They were delighted to share their sense of discovery, and their intelligence and discernment in having made a smart choice.

The reason we needed to advertise Rodeo was clear — to let people know that the vehicle existed. But advertising also had to begin the task of rebuilding Isuzu's reputation. And it dawned on us that while most advertising sets out to say that a product or company is different from its competitors, this advertising should start, as strange as it might seem, by trying to convince people that the Rodeo was the same. The same as 4Runner. The same as Pathfinder. Because we were confident that if we could get Rodeo onto the lists of people shopping 4Runner and Pathfinder, the combination of Rodeo's comparable features and lower price would win customers.

So at the same time, this description was both an outline of the problems and a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. If advertising could successfully position Rodeo in the right competitive context, then Isuzu would have a very good chance of achieving its objectives.

What Is the Advertising Trying to Achieve?

In other words, the objectives. And here it is important to be realistic, because advertising cannot achieve everything. It can't sell a product that's not there (actually, advertising can rarely sell anything at all—with the exception of direct response advertising, as just noted in the Isuzu Rodeo example, the most it can do is interest someone enough to go visit a store), and it cannot make up for inherent product deficiencies.

It is vital to be clear about the desired effect, and if it is effects, plural, that are being sought, it is important to prioritize. Advertising that seeks, say, to increase frequency of usage of a particular product is different from advertising that is trying to generate trial of the same product. The first objective involves talking to existing users and persuading them to use the product more often, which means changing habits. The second requires addressing nonusers and persuading them to use it for the first time; and that means not only establishing new habits, but maybe even overcoming prejudice and misperception.

For the Isuzu Rodeo, the objective was very clear and single-minded:

The advertising needs to persuade shoppers of competing sport utility vehicles to include Rodeo on their shopping lists.

In other words, to persuade potential buyers to visit the Isuzu dealership. After that, it was up to the dealer to close the sale.

The only desired effects that should be listed in this part of the brief are the ones that advertising itself can directly affect. For example, it might have seemed like a reasonable objective to say of Rodeo, "We want the Isuzu Rodeo to be the nation's biggest-selling import sport utility vehicle," which, if Isuzu achieved its rather ambitious sales volume, it had every chance of becoming. But that is a business objective, and the briefing needs to recognize that advertising is only a means to that end. To become number one (which Rodeo did within only a few months of the campaign's launch) required a coordinated offensive at every point of the purchase process, so that if advertising succeeded in attracting people to the dealership, the dealers were also equipped to sell the car against the key competitors we had identified.

They would need cars on the floor, the right promotional events, and the right lease programs and financing options to close the sale. In other words, it would in theory have been possible for the advertising to succeed in meeting its objectives while Isuzu failed in meeting its overall business objective. Fortunately for us and for them, that did not happen.

While the Rodeo brief had just one major objective, many others may contain more than one. For instance, in developing a new campaign for Polaroid, the objectives were twofold:

1. To get people who already own a Polaroid camera to use it more often

2. To inspire nonowners to consider buying a Polaroid camera

Here, a clear order of priority was being set. Our primary aim was to stimulate increased usage among current owners, but, if our message was compelling enough, it could also interest people outside Polaroid's current customer base. If that happened, it would be an unexpected bonus, and we would be happy. We simply wouldn't try to make it happen.

A final example comes from the "got milk?" campaign for the California Milk Processors, where the order of priority that was established, for three separate objectives, was not one of importance, but of sequence. Without achieving the first, we reasoned, the second would be unreachable. So, too, the second and third were mutually dependent, although in that case the order could conceivably have been reversed:

1. To persuade Californians to think about milk

2. To persuade them to use more milk, by creating additional milk occasions

3. To link usage patterns to purchase patterns so that they will buy more milk (because if you don't buy more, you can't consume more)

Who Are We Talking To?

This question is designed to provide focus; it will rarely, if at all, provide any inspiration. Generally, the answer is a simple demographic description, and while its primary role is to define as precisely as possible the group that needs to be addressed by the advertising, it is equally important for the discipline of deciding whom to exclude.

There is an obvious temptation with any advertising campaign to want it to address as many people as possible, and there are some products, like milk, that are so ubiquitous that a target of "everyone" does not seem unreasonable. Even there, though, it should be possible to narrow it down.

Even though milk is present in almost every home, we decided to aim our message only at those people and households that use milk on a regular basis. This decision was driven by the need to obtain immediate results, and the assumption that it would be easier to persuade people who were already happily and regularly consuming milk to consume more, than it would be to persuade nonusers or very light users to effectively start from scratch. Such nonusers and light users were thus excluded from consideration. The "regular user" audience was then subdivided further into those who consume the lion's share of milk in the home and those who buy it (clearly, they are not always the same person).

These two subsets were subsequently targeted by different media, in different places, with slightly different messages. The full story of this campaign can be found in Chapter 7.

In its final execution, of course, the advertising may well have an impact beyond the precise target stated in the brief, but I believe that to be much more likely to happen if the brief is tightly focused than if it sets out from the start to appeal to everyone. While a milk campaign designed to address users and nonusers alike may have seemed on paper to be broader and more expansive, the need to find a message relevant to both groups may well have resulted in something that is acceptable to both, but motivating to neither. The old "milk is good for you" messages worked that way—everyone knew it (because everyone's mother had told them ad nauseam), very few people disagreed with it, but no one was in the slightest bit excited by it.

Even though the answer to the question "Who are we talking to?" may be expressed in very simple terms (for example, for Sega video games, "boys aged 12 to 17," or for Porsche cars, "mostly men, aged 35 plus, with a household income of over $100,000 a year"), finding this answer requires a great deal of thought and may still only represent a part of the true solution. For example, at the risk of stating the obvious, there is a great difference between a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old boy. For that matter the transition from junior high to high school means that there is a very large difference between 13-and 14-year-olds. And "men aged 35 and over with large household incomes" includes Bill Clinton, Billy Graham, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, all of the partners at G.S&P, Donald Trump, Bob Dole, the San Francisco police chief, and a large number of successful drug dealers. While all these people might have the financial wherewithal to purchase a Porsche, they probably don't share a common interest in, or desire for, a Porsche. Consequently, the description needs to be qualified by the kind of psychographic and behavioral description covered in the next section.

Sometimes an advertising campaign may need to address two quite different groups simultaneously, because resources do not allow for a separate campaign to each. In this case, the solution is not as simple as deciding which group represents the higher priority, because both may be equally important. Instead, it is necessary to find a common denominator that either explicitly unites the two audiences under one thought, or is at least capable of interpretation by each group, in its own way, that leaves each feeling it has got what it is looking for.

A case in point is a campaign G.S&P created for Bell Helmets, which simultaneously needed to address the children who in many states today are legally required to wear bicycle helmets, and the adults who buy the helmets for those children. On the surface, the differences between those two groups might seem to represent too wide a gap for advertising to bridge. But in answering the next question, a careful analysis of their motivations, and some clever lateral thinking on the part of the planner and creative team, did reveal an opportunity for a single message.

What Do We Know About Them?

The answer to this question stems from a real understanding of the target's lives and minds, and should provide the creative team with an intimate understanding of what makes these people tick. If the demographic description in the previous section is the skeleton of the brief, then this part represents the body and soul. It should take the description down from the relatively abstract definition of a group of people to the tangible level of an individual, with whom the writer and art director will be asked to relate as they create their advertising.

The portrait of these people (no longer a number or an average) will be qualitative, descriptive, emotional, and creative. As it is revealed, the team should come to understand how they relate to the particular category or product in question, whether they care about it, how it fits into other parts of their lives, whether it's a product that they use where other people can see them, how they feel about it, whether it is easy or difficult for them to talk about it, and what language they use when they do. Personal experiences and anecdotes described in research can be enormously useful in this part of the briefing, because not only can they often make complex issues easily understandable to the creative team, but they may, if played back in the advertising itself, make the same point quite powerfully to the end consumer.

Such personal experiences and anecdotes proved particularly useful in developing a new advertising campaign for Bell Helmets. Advertising for bike helmets is a complicated business, because a very large proportion of helmets purchased are not worn by the people who pay for them; they are purchased by parents to be worn by their children, and a message that resonates with one of these groups will not necessarily resonate with the other. The situation is further complicated by legislation: A number of states have passed helmet laws that require children under a certain age to wear helmets at all times while riding, and this has led to an increasing commoditization of helmets for children. Increasingly, they are sold by mass-retailers, at very low prices, the aim being to enable parents to meet the letter of the law at the lowest price. For Bell, whose distribution had never extended outside specialty bike stores, and whose helmets retailed at much higher prices, this meant talking to an audience who were largely unfamiliar with the company and its credentials, and persuading them that it was worth paying the extra money for a Bell helmet.

Planner Mary Stervinou set up exploratory focus groups so that on the same day she could talk to groups of children who ride bikes and own helmets, and also to groups of their parents. The aim was to explore how attitudes toward bike helmets differed, if at all, between the groups, and if so, what that implied for the purchase process and role for advertising.

In one group, a mother talked about her nine-year-old boy and her obsession with his safety. She told how she bought him a helmet long before any legislation required him to wear one, and that she always insisted that he wear it before leaving the house on his bike. When making her decision about what helmet to buy, safety had been her number one concern, and for a safer helmet she had been willing to pay more money.

In another group, that woman's nine-year-old son told us his side of the story. He described how, as he left the house to go ride his bike, his mother would always check to see that he was wearing his helmet. No helmet, no riding. That was the rule, just as his mother had told us previously. But then the stories diverged dramatically.

The boy told us how much he hated the helmet. It looked dorky, and his friends made fun of him when he wore it. So, he would wear it out of the house, down the driveway, and around the corner where, out of his mother's sight, he would hide it under a hedge. Then he would ride, unprotected but looking cool, and finally retrieve it to ride back up the driveway at the end of the day.

This contradiction, between, on the one hand, parents obsessed with their children's safety and, on the other, kids who were more interested in not looking dorky than being safe, was replayed time and time again in the groups. So advertising clearly had two roles to play. First, it had to convince parents that a Bell helmet was worth the price premium, which our discussions suggested could be accomplished by stressing the company's strenuous research and record of protecting the heads of Indy car and Formula One drivers, motorbike racers, and other such high-speed people. As one parent put it, "I guess if they can figure out how to protect someone who drives into a Avail at 200 miles per hour, they can figure out how to protect my ten-year-old at 5 miles per hour."

Once the parents were persuaded, though, the advertising also had to work on the kids, to predispose them toward a Bell helmet as opposed to competitors' helmets, and most important of all, to persuade them to wear it.

"Think of it this way," said Mary. "The mother can buy the safest helmet in the world for her kid, but if he won't wear it, then it's not very safe, is it?" So, she reasoned, while Bell's reputation for safety would be a powerful message for moms, on its own it would not be enough.

Strangely, the company's heritage in auto racing that had been persuasive to adults in demonstrating Bell's commitment to, and record for, safety, also had an impact on the children, albeit for different reasons. For children, a conversation about helmets in the context of the Indy 500, or motorbike racing, or the Extreme Games, seemed to have a much greater impact than a conversation about helmets in the everyday context of bike riding. And they found it infinitely more interesting than a discussion of research into helmet safety.

The reason was that the people who wore Bell helmets in these faster, riskier pursuits were seen as cool. They were not wearing helmets because their moms made them. And the fact that they were wearing Bell helmets seemed to make Bell's bike helmets seem cooler.

Different strategies were adopted in different media as a result of these discoveries. Print was used to directly target adults with an explicit safety message in an environment where children would be unlikely to see it. Here, Bell played on its heritage of protecting the heads of race car drivers, et al., and in one execution showed "The 40-year history of Bell helmets, in 2.3 seconds." Beneath the headline were three pictures of various stages of a racing car crash. The first shows a race car hitting a wall and bursting into flames. "00.1, Guy hits wall." The second shows the car exploding into several pieces. "01.2, Car explodes." Finally, the wreckage comes to rest. "02.3, Guy O.K." Interwoven in the telling of the story of Mark Dismore's survival in this apparently horrific crash is information about research and testing, and the news that of the top 33 Indy car drivers, "22 ... request and wear Bell helmets."

Two other print executions shown here (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) are very simple human stories that require little explanation. In one, a man lies in traction with every part of his body in a cast except for his head. The headline: "Another satisfied customer."

Figure 5.1 summary: A black and white advertisement for Bell Helmets featuring the headline "ANOTHER SATISFIED CUSTOMER." accompanied by a high-contrast image and body text. It is a promotional image used to demonstrate a marketing campaign, with no data or analytical result to report.

Figure 5.2 summary: A vintage advertisement for Bell Helmets featuring a child wearing expensive-looking shoes with the provocative headline, Does your kid have hundred dollar feet and a ten dollar head? The ad uses this contrast to advocate for the importance of investing in protective headgear for children, serving as a historical marketing example rather than a data-driven chart.

In the other, a young girl is pictured wearing an expensive new pair of sneakers, beside a headline that says: "Does your kid have hundred dollar feet and a ten dollar head?" As with the "40 Year History" execution, both of these focus on the research and testing that led to the choice of Bell helmets by more race car drivers and pro cyclists than any other company's helmets. "Because nobody makes a better helmet than us."

A slightly different message appeared on television, where kids were more likely to see the advertising. Here, the idea was to use racers of cars, motor bikes, and bikes alike as role models for the wearing of helmets, and the mes- sage was deliberately kept very simple. The first commercial shows a series of appalling race car crashes, crashing motorcycles, and falling bike riders, all silent, except for the haunting sound of a person whistling. All the unfortunate victims of the crashes are wearing helmets.

These scenes are intercut with text pointing out that "humans are the only species with the ability to reason. And sometimes," it concludes, "they actually use it." A human brain is shown, and a Bell helmet attaches itself to the brain with a squelching noise that any child would enjoy. "Bell Helmets," a voiceover says.

"Courage for your head." In another, we see footage of a kayaker capsizing in raging white water, with, once again, only whistling for sound. "Here are the possibilities," a card reads. "1. You could hit your head on a rock." The kayaker is underwater. "2. You could drown."

Still underwater. "Or ... 3. You could hit your head on a rock, then drown." Bell Helmets.

The message? Smart people, who could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as nerdy, wear Bell helmets.

Another example of a multiple-audience approach is found in the campaign for Isuzu where, as already noted, separate campaigns had to promote the new, upscale Trooper and the more mass-market Rodeo. Aside from the obvious differences in necessary financial resources between potential buyers of the two vehicles, qualitative research revealed two quite different types of personality and motivation among sport utility vehicle owners and intenders. One seemed to lean quite heavily toward the type of vehicle represented by the Trooper, while the other tended to gravitate in the direction of Rodeo and its key import competitors, the 4Runner and Pathfinder. These descriptions of the "Trooper person" and "Rodeo person" appeared in the creative brief:

Trooper

The Trooper buyer is somewhat wiser than other buyers. But wiser isn't necessarily the result of age; it is more the result of an inquisitive attitude. Trooper buyers are the kind of people who like to discover things for themselves. They are process-oriented, meaning they are just as interested in the process of how a decision is made as they are in the actual decision itself. They like knowing all the details before they buy; they don't just buy. They don't buy things for what they say, but instead for what they do. They want to know the features and functions. One of the dealers said, "These are the kind of people who when asked why they bought a Trooper could list about a thousand reasons, where other buyers would be hard pressed to list more than a few."

These people are outdoorsy. And while they don't take the "guided tour," they're not trail-blazers either. They've just seen more

and like to be prepared in any eventuality. They are looking for an S.U.V that can handle anything that might be thrown at them.

Rodeo

Rodeo buyers see themselves as different. They are cooler, more adventurous, fun, and "in the know" than most buyers. While they certainly aren't as studied as Trooper buyers, they know their stuff... and know what they want. They want their vehicle to be a sort of a tool, to help act out and express their active lifestyle....

These people are doers, so their vehicle has to work. It has to be able to be pushed, and they will push it to the limits. These are the kind of people who will want to get their vehicle covered in mud on the first day they own it.

In summary, we said, Rodeo was the vehicle for people who wanted to find adventure. Trooper was for those who wanted to be prepared whenever adventure came looking for them.

What's the Main Idea We Need to Communicate?

This is the part of the brief that many agencies call the "proposition," and an important point needs to be made about the precise phrasing of this question. The emphasis should be firmly on the message that should be communicated to people, rather than on what the advertising should directly say. In other words, the focus should be on what people take away from the advertising, as opposed to what the advertiser puts in.

Of all the questions in the brief, this is the most important, because its answer should encapsulate everything else that appears and represent the first creative leap that John Hegarty and Andrew Cracknell spoke of earlier. Ideally, it should be a single idea that is expressed in a single sentence. If it is any more complicated or lengthy than that, the chances are that it will lead to advertising that is equally ponderous.

What is this one idea? The one thing that is most likely to make people reconsider their views on an existing product or form new opinions about a new product, and take some action as a result. It can be based on the product, on an observation about the consumer, or even an attribute of the category (although in this last case, unless the execution of the idea is exceptional, the idea is in danger of being generic).

The Cuervo example I cited in Chapter 5, "Good drinks, fun times, real people," attempts to capture product, consumer, and category attributes simultaneously. It is not a main idea, but three main ideas. By comparison, "A party waiting to happen," which was the main idea in our preferred brief, is single-minded, and arguably much more true to both the product and its core users.

The mam idea of the Isuzu Rodeo brief previously discussed comprised more of a lifestyle benefit that puts the vehicle firmly into the sporty context of Pathfinder and 4Runner, while playing off the audience's clear desire for adventure:

The normal restrictions don't apply with an Isuzu Rodeo.

The resulting advertising interpreted that idea in a way that presented the Rodeo as a kind of escape vehicle for people who still held on to the spirit of their youth. In one T.V commercial, a seventies mom is hanging out the laundry in a suburban back yard and harnesses her small boy to the clothes line by a long cord. As she turns to hang the clothes, he takes off, popping pegs off the line as he runs. She is oblivious as he dyevs head-first into a large mud puddle and begins to throw mud all around. "They say our personality traits are formed at an early age," a voice-over says, as the boy covers both himself and the camera in mud. The music then cuts to a pounding rock track, and the picture to a Rodeo tooling through the mud on a mountain trail.

We realize that it's the boy, now grown up, but still enjoying getting dirty. The voice-over says, "Introducing the 3.1 litre V.6 Isuzu Rodeo. So growing up does have its rewards..." as the Rodeo disappears down the trail.

In another spot (see Figure 5.3), a man is wheeling his young son around a toy store in a cart. "Okay," he says as he selects a potty, "we're out of here." Easier said than done, as the boy is oohing and aahing and making grabs for toys that take his fancy as they pass within his range. "No, please keep your hands in the cart. . . . We'll come back for that later. . . . That one needs batteries. . . . No, you're gonna get daddy in trouble. . . . 'Scuse me. . . . No, that one definitely has too many parts. . . . We gotta go. ..." He's almost home free, but as he rounds the corner and enters the last aisle, we see the kid point at something new and let out an appreciative "ooooh. . . ."

Figure 5.3 summary: A series of four black-and-white images depicting a sequence from an Isuzu Rodeo commercial titled Toy Store. The panels show a person in a toy store, followed by a shot of the Isuzu Rodeo vehicle, and concluding with a screen displaying the text, The Rodeo. Grow up. Not old. This figure serves as a visual record of an advertisement and contains no analytical data.

Dad is frozen in his tracks. His eyes widen, and his jaw drops.

We see a full-size Isuzu Rodeo, packaged like a toy car. It looks huge, and Dad has clearly fallen in love.

"Ooooohh .. ." he murmurs.

As he continues to ogle, a line appears on screen that says, "Isuzu Rodeo. Grow up, not old."

Trooper, not surprisingly, went in another direction. Knowing that potential buyers would be interested in a vehicle like Trooper for more defensive reasons (that is, if they had a problem while driving, Trooper could deal with it), we decided to focus on the features of the vehicle that gave it its practicality and ability to deal with those problems. The Trooper had been designed with the specific needs of S.U.V drivers in mind, and in the original design brief, written by a Japanese engineer, we found an analogy that we were more than happy to appropriate. He described his vision for Trooper as a "Swiss Army Knife of S.U.V's," and our brief focused on that very thought:

Trooper is exactly the right equipment for

life's great expedition . . . it's the Swiss Army

Knife of S.U.V's.

A campaign was developed based on what we called "the unwritten laws of driving," automobile equivalents of Murphy's law that were universal observations on the problems of driving, parking, and indeed any part of life that related to the use of a vehicle. And for each of these unwritten laws, Trooper had a feature as the antidote to the problem.

The 5th unwritten law of driving was "if there's a hole in the road, you will hit it." With that in mind, Isuzu had developed a double wishbone suspension system for Trooper that would absorb the impact of potholes in the mountains, or in this case, on decaying city streets.

"The attraction of shopping carts to automobiles is one of the strongest forces in the Universe," stated the 9th unwritten law, before presenting a unique, nine-coat paint treatment that among other things was "grocery cart-proof" (see Figure 5.4). And law number eight, over a picture of a baby with all the paraphernalia that accompanies a child on even the shortest journey, raised the eternal truth that "the smaller the person the more space they will occupy." The solution was, of course, a "cavernous" 90 cubic feet of cargo space.

Figure 5.4 summary: A photo of an Isuzu Trooper vehicle parked in front of a structured background, presented as part of an advertisement titled "Grocery Carts." The image serves as a product showcase for the vehicle.

The main ideas of the briefs for both Rodeo and Trooper remained at the hearts of their respective campaigns for a number of years. Even as new models have appeared, the market and consumer have changed, and the campaigns for both vehicles have evolved accordingly, the aforementioned ideas have stayed central to the way we have all thought about the two models. Even if advertising has had slightly different tasks to accomplish, it has remained consistent with those first ideas.

What Is the Best Way of Planting That Idea?

Some call this the strategy, or the how part of the message, as opposed to the what of the main idea. Even when a mam idea has been honed in the way demonstrated in the preceding section, there are many possibilities for different ways to execute it. Four different teams, given the exact same brief and main idea, will invariably interpret it in different ways, and four quite different campaigns may result, all anchored on the same basic idea, but coming at it from different angles. When I write a brief, this is always the part where I am most likely to experiment and include a lot of ideas that I know may be immediately rejected, in the hope of one sticking and providing some inspiration.

Here I will give just one example, and again it represents the continuation of a story whose earlier parts have been told in other places in the book. This is Polaroid, whose brief, based in large part on the unique ability of an owner to take one picture at a time and use it for immediate effect, had as its main idea:

With Polaroid, the picture is only the beginning.

What's the best way of planting that idea? Planner Kelly Evans-Pfeifer had several thoughts, only some of which are shown here:

- Maybe highlight innovative or unusual ways that people are using Polaroid—at home and at work.

- Show Polaroid as a participant ... a means, not an end.

- Perhaps focus on the effects of a Polaroid picture . . . the chain of events that it sets in motion.

I took the picture so something would happen, for a certain reason, to achieve a particular objective.

- Think about how Polaroid is a tool for communication, how the pictures can be a language in and of themselves.

Note the use of language like, "maybe," "perhaps," and "think about." These are suggestions, not instructions.

The resulting "See What Develops" campaign built on many of those ideas. "See What Develops" itself is a line that is simply a much more interesting (and, given the way a Polaroid picture does appear before your eyes, relevant) version of "the picture is only the beginning." It's one of those moments that defines who in the agency is creative and who is not, because it says what we (the noncreative ones) really wanted to say in half the words and with far more style.

In print (see Figure 5.5), the victim of a neighbor's dog's indiscriminate toilet habits is able to catch the dog in the act with a Polaroid picture and prove to her neighbor that his dog isn't as well trained and behaved as he thought. And the unfortunate head of a company called "Wow" productions (Figure 5.6) is able to send a picture to a company to show them that they screwed up when hanging his building sign. The sign, upside down, reads, "Mom." His letter is succinct. "Dear Hung-Rite Sign Company. You Morons."

Figure 5.5 summary: A high-contrast, grainy Polaroid photograph of a dog. The image is a a simple visual depiction of a dog, with no data or analytical results to report.

}}Figure 5.6 summary: A side-by-side display of a Polaroid photograph and a formal letter. The photo depicts a building facade with the word "MOM" visible, while the letter is on "WOW Productions" stationery. Together, they illustrate the "Mom/Wow" conceptual pairing.

On television, one spot (Figure 5.7) opens in the middle of a tense meeting in an architect's office.

>→</Figure 5.7 summary: A series of three black-and-white high-contrast images. The top two frames show distorted, abstract patterns of architectural shapes and grids, while the bottom frame features the Polaroid logo and text against a black background. The result is an artistic presentation titled "Architect."

"That's right, that's exactly right," says one of the group, placing his pencil on the plans to emphasize his words.

His partner isn't satisfied. "How am I supposed to explain that to the client?"

The phone buzzes, and the first guy picks it up, as the fourth member of the group, a woman, protests, "We have no time!"

"This is Jeff," he says, tersely.

Hi, it's me," a woman's voice purrs.

"Hi. Er, what's up?"

"How's work?"

His colleagues roll their eyes, gesture at their watches, and exchange frustrated glances.

He moves as far away in the small office as his phone wire will allow, and in a low voice answers, "It's busy, very busy. What's up?"

"Well, do you want to meet me at home for lunch?"

More impatient glances from his colleagues.

"No … no … I … I … I can't do that right now. I'm in the middle of something and I can't get away. It's a big meeting. Big meeting." He gestures to his colleagues to indicate that he'll be right there.

"Have you looked in your briefcase yet?" the voice on the phone asks.

"You're killing me," he mutters, as he reaches for his briefcase, phone tucked under his chin. Our point of view is from inside the briefcase, as he rummages impatiently. "Come on, come on...."

"I left you something this morning," she continues, as he pulls out a Polaroid picture. We only see the back of it, but his eyes widen, and he lets out a gasp. As the Polaroid logo and "See What Develops" comes up on screen, we hear him mumble, "I'll be ... I'll be home in ten minutes."

Only a Polaroid can do that.

And in a second spot (Figure 5.8), a dog is being scolded by his owner for upsetting the trash. "Very bad dog," she admonishes, wagging her finger, and the doleful dog, powerless to defend himself, takes his punishment quietly. "Bad, bad dog." Meanwhile, an evil looking cat sneers from the other side of the kitchen.

Figure 5.8 summary: A series of four vertically stacked frames depicting a sequence of events where a dog and cat are photographed, followed by the appearance of a Polaroid print and the Polaroid logo. It serves as a visual narrative of a Polaroid capture process with no analytical data to report.

The owner goes out, and the dog goes to sleep, but he is awakened by the sound of the cat advancing across the counter toward the trash. The dog, knowing he'll be blamed again, has a flashback. He imagins the finger wagging in his face and hears the angry words, "Very bad dog," as the cat starts to root for food. He's desperate and looks around in panic for ways to stop the cat.

A rolling pin is tempting, but out of reach. So too a meat cleaver. Then his eyes alight on a Polaroid camera, and "ping!" he has an idea. "See What Develops" appears on screen, and we return to the dog, sitting in the hallway as the door opens and his owner returns. In his mouth is a Polaroid picture of the cat, astride the trash with a chicken bone in its mouth. "Oh dear," we hear her say, as the picture fades.

Polarized Gas Catalyst

How Do we know we'RE right?

Where's the evidence? Is there any support for the points of view that have just been expressed? If there is, then be sure to at least refer to it (actually, that may be covered in earlier parts of the discussion, if you like to name your sources as you go), but if not, and if the brief reflects only guesswork, then be sure to admit it. If you're wrong, the creative team won't thank you if they've already spent two weeks working on your spurious hunch on the assumption that your direction was really based on solid fact.

A Good Brief Cannot Be Prepared in a Vacuum

I can say with complete confidence that the best briefs I have ever written have really been written by my creative colleagues.

Whenever possible, I like to discuss any half-baked ideas I may have with the team, or at least one of the team, who will ultimately have to write ads from my brief. There are several reasons why I like to do this, foremost of which is that they are invariably much better than I at finding the right words to express the all-important main idea. While planners may say, "The picture is only the beginning," creatives might say "See What Develops." Our words sit on the page, logical but passive, while theirs invariably crack like a whip and command attention.

It is also important to gauge whether the direction that I am leaning toward makes sense to the team. It's all very fine for me to come up with impressive abstract ideas, but if they turn round and say, "We can't write an ad to that," then I have wasted both my time and theirs. They have to be intrigued by the direction, and an immediate and most reliable test of its potential is whether they are able to add ideas of their own.

When G.S&P pitched the Sega business in 1992, the research among gamers described in Chapter 4 had revealed an interesting insight into the relative appeal of the Sega 16-bit system and its better-established rival from Nintendo.

While the majority of kids owned and played only Nintendo, a few had played with both systems. And those who had played both felt that in many respects, Sega's was the superior system. The differences were subtle, but if they had to choose which had the best graphics, they would say Sega. The fastest gameplay . . . Sega. The best colors . . . Sega. And many described how once they had tried the Sega system, there was "no going back."

Somehow, Nintendo seemed to pale by comparison. I told this to creative director Dave O'Hare and added that my first, half-assed idea for a brief was that moving from a Nintendo system to Sega was like "getting called up to the majors." Sega was "The Show" to which all gamers could aspire.

O'Hare was quiet for a moment, then said, "If you were to put that in gamers' language, it wouldn't be 'The Show,' would it? It would be the zone. The next level. How about 'Welcome to the next level?' " Dave really knew how to piss me off. I had been trying to figure that out for, oh, about two weeks, and he nailed it within 30 seconds. "Welcome to the Next Level" became the core idea of our brief.

The advertising wasn't about getting there, but being there, being at the next level of games, of graphics, of colors, of speed, and of attitude. It was not just a "Congratulations, you've arrived," kind of phrase, but a challenge. A challenge to the advertising to find and retain a new level within each execution, and between each execution and its predecessor. Not only did it become the main idea of our brief, but it also became the tagline for the campaign itself. Generally, I am very nervous when a line from a brief finds its way directly into the advertising, but on this occasion, given that it was a writer and not I who had come up with it, I didn't feel so bad.

I don't know why so many planners and account people toil over briefs alone when it would make their task so much easier (and the end thinking probably much better) if they were to solicit the ideas of others at an early stage. Don't get me wrong — I'm not suggesting that they should let the creatives do their work for them; rather, that once they have a solution in sight, they should expose it to the creative team both to assess its potential and to see if the initial thinking can be expanded and enhanced. If it does make sense, and if they can enhance it, it gives them a powerful stake in the strategy and the brief. They are less likely to feel backed into a corner by it, and it also gives them a considerable head start in terms of thinking time.

On the other hand, I have seen both planners and account people deliver previously undisclosed briefs to creatives as if they are carved in tablets of stone, and the results are often not pretty.

"We have spent weeks figuring this out, and the logic is irrefutable," I once heard a planner say in frustration to a team who were questioning his lengthy creative "brief" — the result of his 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, conducting and analyzing research, and creating what he thought was a watertight intellectual argument.

"The logic might be irrefutable," the art director replied, irritably, "but I'm sorry to say that this particular piece of irrefutable logic isn't going to help me write a fucking ad."

In a situation like that, the only option may be to start over, and in that case it won't just be the creative team who are upset. The client's deadline may also be in jeopardy, and missing an airdate is never high on a client's list of favorite things. But talk to a team early on, and such an appalling situation is much less likely to happen.

Can We Have a Good Ad, Please?

As noted above, planners and their account management partners need to begin these discussions with creatives with at least some ideas of their own, to set the ball rolling. But I have to admit that there have been occasions where despite access to all the data I required, the opportunity to craft my own research, and the time and money to ask all of the questions I wanted to ask, I have still found myself standing pathetically in front of a creative team, admitting that I don't have a clue what the answer is.

On some of these occasions, I had only myself to blame. The answer was there, but I was simply looking in the wrong place, or just wasn't thinking properly. There were other times when I don't think I could have found a great insight if I had looked for ten years, because in the end, the only thing that could have truly differentiated the product was a great creative execution.

In doing our homework for a campaign for Foster Farms chicken in California, we looked at Foster Farms' product — California-grown fresh chicken—from every conceivable angle. We talked to the people who buy it, the people who eat it, the people who decide which brands to stock in stores, the people who deliver it, and even the people who breed, feed, and process the chickens. And here's what we found out: People who buy fresh chicken think that the most important attribute of that fresh chicken is ... (wait for it) its freshness; phrases like "corn-fed" and "natural" connote freshness; and fresh chicken is better than frozen chicken.

Foster Farms fresh chicken has two chief competitors — another California-grown brand called Zacky Farms, and out-of-state birds that are usually sold under stores' own brand labels. As most stores stock only one California-grown brand, Foster Farms and Zacky Farms rarely compete directly in any one store: Their battle is at the distribution level. In the stores where it has the distribution, Foster Farms tends to compete in the display case with the store's own brand.

Advertising thus had two tasks, the first of which was to help Foster Farms in its battle for distribution with Zacky Farms. Foster Farms and Zacky Farms were similar in many respects—both were California brands, both had similar feeding regimes for their chickens, which both delivered to stores within 24 hours, and both had described themselves as "fresh and natural" in previous advertising. Key grocery chain buyers could perceive no significant point of differ- ence between the two, and we have yet to meet a consumer whose store preference was outweighed by his or her preference for a brand of fresh chicken. Advertising needed to give Foster Farms an edge over its rival to get it into the store.

Once there, the second task for advertising was to persuade shoppers to purchase the usually more expensive Foster Farms chicken over the own-brand/out-of-state alternative. Even this was difficult, because people generally do not think that there might be any differences between the two. Fresh chicken is fresh chicken is fresh chicken.

In the absence of a clear, tangible tie-breaker, we realized we had to create a perceptual advantage.

We had to suggest, to paraphrase George Orwell, that all chickens are created fresh, but some fresh chickens are fresher than others. And the only way we could do that was to ask for our advertising to talk about freshness in a more interesting, distinctive, and compelling way than our competitors. As I said, "Can we have a good ad, please?"

Writer Bob Kerstetter and art director Tom Routson came up with the idea that instead of talking directly about what Foster Farms' chickens were, they would show what they were not. They were not frozen. They had not taken advantage of some legal loophole that allowed them to describe themselves as fresh even though they had been kept, let's say, "very cold" on a long journey from Arkansas to California. Bob and Tom imagined Foster Farms as a kind of elite among chickens, in the same way as the Marines in the military: "The Few, the Proud, the Foster Farms chickens...."

Creative director Jeff Goodby and the creative team invented two chicken characters named, for some reason, Bob and Tom, who had traveled from out of state with the express intent of becoming Foster Farms chickens. Like their namesakes, these chickens were not exactly well-groomed, and their diet certainly left a lot to be desired, but they lacked nothing in enthusiasm. They would do anything to become the best of the best—Foster Farms chickens.

The first T.V spot (see Figure 5.9) began with a car passing a sign saying, "Welcome to California." Inside the car, an old clunker, are the ragtag chickens, who cheer, "Foster Farms, here we come!" The words are scarcely out of their beaks when a siren sounds, and they see a cop's flashing light in their rear-view mirror. "Stay cool," advises Tom, the driver.

The cop's flashlight illuminates their Arkansas plates, and he walks slowly to peer into the car's interior (I suppose you could call it the cockpit). "Hi officer," says chicken Tom.

"Identification, please," says the officer.

"We're just heading home, back to Foster Farms," says Tom, as the cop and his flashlight examine the debris on the dash: half-eaten pizza, doughnuts, empty soda cans, burger wrappers, and the like. Bob, shaking behind his bag of potato chips, adds, "We're not from out of state or anything!"

The cop's flashlight catches Tom's wing.

"Foster Farms chickens are never frozen," he says, sternly. "This looks like freezer burn to me."

"No, no ..." Tom starts to protest, and again Bob interrupts: "It was a curling iron accident!"

"Would you mind stepping out of the car, please?" asks the officer, at which point we see Tom's foot hit the gas. As the wheels begin to spin and dust kicks up, we see a beautiful plate of chicken, and a voice-over says, "Foster Farms. Always natural, always fresh."

Then we cut back to the impostor chickens, who are in full flight, with the cop car in pursuit. "Argh!" screams Tom as the picture fades, "we'RE Fugitives! Argh!"

In other executions, the "Foster Impostors" try to hijack a Foster Farms truck, attempting to trick the driver into stopping with the offer of free doughnuts, and to convince an old lady in the parking lot of a grocery store that they are Foster Farms chickens. Both the truck driver and old lady are too smart for them, and their quest to become members of poultry's chosen few continues. And just in case you were wondering, the campaign was extremely successful, both in gaining retail distribution for Foster Farms and in building sales.

Did the planners and account people shirk their responsibilities? I don't think so. Planners and account people are only human and cannot possibly come up with the right answer every time (is there a creative team that has never failed to come up with an idea? Never failed to come up with a good idea? If they exist, I would love them to come and work at our agency). But aside from that, the parity between so many products in so many different categories makes it inevitable that the advertising becomes the point of difference, and that difference is as likely to be executional as strategic. Which in turn perhaps means that a solution is more likely to come from a creative person than from a planner or account person.

I agree that in an ideal world it would be terrific for every brief to provide a clear and compelling creative direction. Last time I looked, though, it was not an ideal world. If after all the analysis, interpretation, and interdisciplinary discussion is done an answer still does not suggest itself, isn't it better to be honest about the fact that you don't have a clue, than try to fashion an irrelevant point of difference out of nothing?

Always natural. Always fresh.

No brief at all

One of my partners at G.S&P, Harold Sogard, recently asked me for copies of the original briefs that were written for eight successful agency campaigns, most of which appear at some point in the pages of this book. The campaigns covered a period of several years and a wide variety of types of clients.

I was only able to find four of those briefs. There was a simple reason I could not find the others — there was no such thing as the "original" brief. They had never been written.

Looking back, the four "missing" briefs were all for campaigns that had been presented as part of G.S&P's new business pitch to the client. Briefings had taken place in the frenetic atmosphere of the previous days and weeks, but all as informal conversations. No one had written anything down.

At some point, all the different agency departments had coalesced around a simple idea—like Sega representing "The Next Level" of video games, or people only thinking milk was important when they didn't have any — and executed that idea without pausing to worry over the nuances of words in the description of the target audience. Having agreed on the broad direction and idea, all their energies, quite rightly in my opinion, went into creating advertising.

Subsequently, the clients also bought into that general direction and idea and ran the advertising. They also never asked to see the creative brief. And the results of all four campaigns have been outstanding.

The briefs that I did find had all resulted from a lengthier process, where both inside the agency and between agency and client, almost every sentence of every section of those briefs had been the subject of lengthy discussion. Single words were haggled over and revision after revision negotiated, presented, and represented, until they were honed to perfection. Sometimes, however, this process of finessing had taken so long that by the time the brief was finally approved, the creative team had already written the campaign. They had been party to the key thoughts contained within it, but while the semantic discussions raged, they went off and turned those thoughts into advertising. And that advertising, consistent with the ultimate direction and idea of the brief, was both creatively distinctive and commercially successful.

The reason I prefer the former over the latter process is that it more closely reflects my belief that the brief is a means to an end, while in the more formal, discussing-the-brief-to-death approach, the brief really seems to take on a life of its own. Until the day comes when we put creative briefs in consumer magazines or run them on the Superbowl, I think that the time spent noodling over detail in a brief is wasted time. Well, perhaps not entirely wasted, but it could at least be better spent.

The bottom line is, you don't have a good brief until you have a good ad.

Ten Housewives in Des Moines The Perils of Researching Rough Creative Ideas

We don't (ask consumers what they want. They don't know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make Jure we're there, ready.

Test It

Akio Morita, Sony Corporation

The planner has completed the exploratory research. The creative team and account director have taken the factory tour. An account executive has spent a week on the road with a salesperson. Industry analysts have been consulted. Numerous meetings have been held with the client's marketing group. The target audience has been identified, advertising objectives agreed on, and a strategy defined. The brief has been carefully crafted. The creative team has come up with a campaign, which seems to be "on strategy," and which everyone on both the client and agency teams likes. The rough scripts have been sent to the first-choice director, who says that the campaign is the most exciting new material he has seen all year. Everything's looking good.

"It's very good," the client says. "Let's test it."

"Absolutely," says another. "Let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it."

The creative team's faces drop. They think that they have already "run it up the flagpole." They ran it up in front of their creative director, who, for the first time in recent memory, saluted their work.

They ran it up again in front of the account team, and they, too, raised their fingers to their foreheads. And here they are once more, running it up in front of a roomful of clients, and the room is standing firmly to attention. It's been saluted by their boss, their peers, and the people holding the purse strings, so what is the point of going through yet another stage?

The usual answer to this question is both predictable and logical. "Well, we all love the idea, but what we think isn't really important. The only opinion that really counts is that of the consumer."

To this, the creatives may rightly point out that consumer opinions have already been heavily solicited. The strategy was based on consumer input, the creative brief was inspired by consumer input, and the resulting advertising seems, at least to everyone gathered in the marketing conference room, to reflect that consumer input. So, they conclude, what is there to be gained by talking to them again?

Having learned everything there is to be learned about consumers in this category, isn't it time for us to make some decisions? Aren't we experienced and highly paid marketing and advertising executives? Surely, based on everything we know, we can judge for ourselves whether it will resonate with consumers?

"Why the hell," a creative once asked me, "should I be told how to write or produce a T.V commercial by ten housewives in Des Moines? They don't know what they want. . . they have no idea from a script or a storyboard what I really mean . . . they can't see what I see . . . there's an art to this thing that they just won't get until they see the finished spot." He laughed derisively. "And probably not even after the spot is finished."

While not all art directors and copywriters feel that way, I do understand why some do. After all, there's a gestation period for many advertising campaigns that is at least as long as the period between the conception and birth of a human baby. The process is sometimes just as painful. And after going through all that, who wants to take their new baby to a focus group of nonparents and listen to them saying that it's ugly, it makes too much noise, and it smells bad?

On only one or two occasions have I encountered clients who actively avoid asking consumers what they think of newborn advertising ideas. One such client is Scott Bedbury, who in a previous life directed Nike's worldwide advertising, and who is now senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks Coffee Company. He regards "traditional research" as the first enemy of creativity (I agree). While he accepts that research can play a useful role at the front end of the process, in strategic development, he considers the exposure or testing of embryonic creative ideas to be tantamount to a criminal act. In an article about Starbucks in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, in September 1996, he talked about the way that he had used (or, more precisely, not used) research to evaluate creative ideas in his days at Nike. "We never pretested anything we did at Nike, none of the ads.

Wieden (Dan Wieden, founder of Wieden & Kennedy) and I had an agreement that as long as our hearts beat, we would never pretest a word of copy. It makes you dull. It makes you predictable. It makes you safe."

Nike's advertising over the years has been anything but dull, predictable and safe. It has constantly been among the best, if not the best in the world. Even so, there are very few other clients who would buy the argument that conducting research on rough creative ideas is a bad thing.

Most of them do not deliberately set out to be "dull" (even if their words and the appearance of their advertising suggests otherwise), but they tend to regard "safe" as good. Even "predictable" has a positive ring to it. A television advertising campaign can cost millions of dollars to produce, and running it may cost tens of millions more. Clients want to be able to predict how con- sumers will react to it. So, in their minds, a few thousand dollars spent on a series of focus groups, or even a hundred thousand dollars spent on an extensive quantitative copy test, is a small price to pay, even if the research results turn out to be hunky-dory and simply confirm everything they already thought. On the other hand, if the research surprises them and exposes some problems, then it may be the best few thousand dollars they ever spent.

The desire to test rough creative ideas in part reflects the natural desire on the client's part not to make a mistake. I am sure that if / were responsible for signing a multimillion-dollar production estimate, or committing to a media budget greater than the annual expenditure of 50 percent of the world's governments, I too would want to have at least some evidence that I was doing the right thing.

But it also reflects the sad fact that many clients do not fully trust their agencies. Some fear that the agency desire to be creative and win awards far outweighs the desire to do the right thing for the clients' business. As previously noted, creativity does have a vital role to play in "doing the right thing," but the more distinctive and original the advertising idea, the more nervous many clients become, not only of its potential for failure, but also of the agency's underlying motivations.

Research conducted on rough creative ideas thus becomes as much of a test of the agency as of the campaign. Is the agency recommending the right thing? Is it trying to go further than necessary in the search of a more creative approach?

Is it more interested in awards than in meeting the client's business objectives? Testing advertising ideas, with consumers enlisted as allies, may provide the client with the means to curb creative excess and keep the agency in check.

Rough Creative Ideas?

Before I explore some possible ways of resolving the conflicting views and expectations of clients and creative people relating to research conducted on rough creative ideas, let me pause to provide some clarification on what exactly I mean by "research conducted on rough creative ideas."

Rough is the key word. And by rough, I largely mean advertising in any one of a number of forms that is not produced. In other words, big money will not have been spent to film a commercial, photograph a print ad or billboard, or record a radio commercial. This is important because it means that the advertising could be affected in some way by the research. (Affected in a way that is less dramatic and painful than throwing away a commercial that costs a million dollars to make.) If the research can have no possible effect because all the money has been spent, time has run out, and it is too late to change anything, then there is no possible reason for doing it.

The rough forms of advertising of which I speak cover a very wide spectrum of cost, complexity, and degree of finish, from ideas scribbled on the back of napkins to videos that look to the untrained eye much like finished commercials. Apart from some general points about the degree of finish that is desirable for eliciting the best consumer response, however, I do not spend much time debating the relative merits of presenting ideas in the form of scripts, narrative tapes (with or without key frames), ammatics, photomatics, or videomatics. I have used all of them on many different occasions and have had success with every one. The choice of stimulus material should be based on the nature of the idea being exposed, the instincts of the creative team for which method will best communicate their idea, the precise nature of the research methodology, the preference and skills of the person conducting the research, and, of course, time and cost considerations.

Given all those variables, it is hard to make any general rules. The only thing that is important is that whatever form the stimulus material takes, it should be capable of communicating the idea. Sometimes that means, in addition to exposing the idea itself, that it is necessary to show addi- tional stimulus material, like photographs, or clips from movies, or even other advertising, to establish a mood, or a particular visual style, or to flesh out characters.

When multiple ideas are exposed, there is often considerable pressure from clients to "compare apples to apples," and ensure that each individual idea is exposed in exactly the same form. Thus, it is argued, all will have the exact same chance of success or failure, and none will enjoy an unfair advantage over another. I see the point, but I do not agree with it, because the same form of stimulus material will often give an unfair advantage to some ideas and unfairly disadvantage others.

To create a truly level playing field, it is necessary to find the form of stimulus material that gives each individual idea its best chance of being understood. If that means different material for different executions, so be it. Any advertising idea that does not have the benefit of beautiful film, actors' performances, professional editing, and sound design has a tough road to travel, and it should be given all the help it needs to communicate. The shortcomings of the stimulus material should not be allowed to act as yet another barrier.

Someone to Say No to Me

My main interest in writing this chapter is not to discuss the minutiae of what is exposed and to whom, but to explore the larger issue of why and how research on rough creative ideas should be conducted in the first place.

First and most important, I do not believe that rough advertising ideas should be "tested," or put through research whose sole aim is to give them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating. In fact, I never refer to this kind of research as testing at all. I prefer to call it creative development research, where the aim is not to attach an absolute value to a piece of advertising (or, more accurately, to a rough representation of a piece of advertising), but to elicit a response to it, understand why people are responding in that way, and explore possible ways of improving it.

It is in this area of understanding people's relationships to an advertising idea and exploring that idea's potential for improvement that the real power of creative development research lies.

When Stanley Pollitt wrote of the beginnings of planning in his Campaign article in 1979, he stated as fundamental a "commitment and a belief that you can only make thoroughly professional judgments about advertising content with some early indication of consumer response." It is fundamental not only to the planning philosophy that he inspired, but to the structure and process of any agency that is serious about advertising effectiveness. And it is fundamental to the central theme of this book, that if consumers are involved throughout the process of developing advertising, then better advertising will result.

Consumers cannot be involved only up to the point where a brief is delivered to the creative team, because however solid the strategy, however smart and inspiring the brief, and however closely the planner is involved as the creative team gives birth to advertising ideas, mistakes can still be made. And they are often made not because the agency is deliberately setting out to be naughty, but because people in agencies are in most cases different from the people who represent the target for a particular advertising campaign. They know and understand different things; they laugh at different things; and in the course of developing an advertising idea, they may slowly and inexorably drift off course. It may only be a degree or two, but just think about the difference that a one-degree mistake in navigation would make for a plane crossing the Atlantic. Passengers who had bought tickets from London to New York would not be happy disembarking in Canada.

A 30-second T.V commercial may represent the distillation of several weeks or months of thought, and occasionally some wrong choices can be made about what information to include or leave out. Thinking that was fundamental to the creation of the idea itself may come to be taken for granted and excluded, but without it, members of the viewing public may find the idea hard to understand. Conversely, the best-intentioned attempts to explain an idea may result in information overload and, once again, consumer detachment from the advertising.

In Chapter 4, I spoke of the need for open minds in the process of designing and conducting research. Nowhere is this more important than in creative development research, because it is here that clients, creatives, planners, and account people are most likely to encounter points of view that conflict with their own. A campaign that seemed so right in an office in the creative department, or in a client conference room, may after only one night of consumer research seem so wrong, and the reasons for its failings so obvious. An idea that had seemed so simple to its creators may be mired in confusion. The ironic humor that everyone enjoyed so much in the first client presentation may go completely over the heads of the target audience.

The execution that the client thought captured the essence of their brand so perfectly may be rejected as irrelevant or boring. And on the other hand, an idea that the client thought too creative, too complex, or too peripheral to the product, may be enthusiastically endorsed by real people, for whom the desired message is communicated in a very involving way. Sometimes, creative development research reveals that everyone, agency included, was being too conservative, and that consumers can be pushed a whole lot further than even the creatives thought possible.

The "on the other hand" scenarios just described provide, for me, the most powerful argument with which to persuade creative people that such research can help make their work better. If the advertising gets produced, then it's presumably better than if it doesn't.

The Foster Farms campaign described in the last chapter was first presented to the client in G.S&P's new business pitch. The day after the meeting, Bob Fox, Foster Farms' president, came by for a second visit. He had enjoyed the meeting, he said, and felt that both the chemistry and our understanding of his key business issues were powerful reasons to hire us. The one thing that gave him pause for thought, though, was the campaign that we had presented. He felt that it was not appropriate for the company and said that he would not feel comfortable even presenting the Foster family with a campaign featuring delinquent "puppet chickens" whose sins included smoking and drinking alcohol. If he hired us, he asked, would we be prepared to develop other campaign ideas?

His comments were fair. Looking back, the chicken characters in their original incarnation were not unlike the character Nicholas Cage later played in Leaving Las Vegas.

We developed three new campaign ideas, all of which Bob Fox considered more appropriate. But at the same time we revisited the "puppet chicken" campaign and tried to make the characters less down-and-out. Instead of alcohol and nicotine abuse, their weakness would be junk food. It would be their poor diet that prevented them from ever being Foster Farms chickens. Bob was still not convinced, but indicated that he was happy for us to at least expose the revised campaign alongside the new ideas.

In the research, all three of the new campaigns were well-received, but all on more of a rational than an emotional level. People understood what they were saying, felt that the message was right for Foster Farms, but never got excited by them. Meanwhile, every group went nuts over "those damn puppet chickens." Having seen the same response in several different groups without any prompting from the agency, Bob Fox said that he thought he had been wrong. He now saw the power of that campaign and had decided that he should run it. It would have been much easier to stick to his guns and say, "Listen, I told you not to show that campaign, and I'm not changing my mind . . .," but he chose not to.

Ultimately, I believe that it is the ability to face up to one's mistakes that separates the best agencies and clients from the rest. Agencies and clients who have more of a stake in finding the right solution than in bang right themselves are much more likely to produce more effective advertising campaigns.

My partner, Colin Probert, often annoys me by suggesting to prospective clients that the most important role played by the planners at the agency is to take out all creative work in embryonic form, gather consumer opinion, and make recommendations based on that feedback. It annoys me, not because I disagree with the level of importance he attaches to creative development research, but because it implies that planners don't do anything else that is important. I believe that it is at the front end of the process, through exploratory research, strategic development, and creative briefing, that a planner can routinely exercise the greatest influence over the outcome of a campaign. But in the final analysis, he's absolutely right, in that all of that front-end work is worthless if the creative team then go off on their own and execute an idea in a way that does not, for whatever reason, connect to target consumers.

When I met Jeff Goodby for the first time in the summer of 1989, we talked a lot about the effect that the introduction of planning would have on an agency like Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein. As far as I could see, there wasn't exactly anything that needed fixing. I thought that the agency's advertising was both distinctive and smart; it was winning new business; and, although I didn't know it at the time, Advertising Age was to name G.B.S "Agency of the Year" for its 1989 performance. But Goodby thought that planning could help him and Silverstein and their creative department do better work. How? By giving them more information and insights than they could come up with on their own. And most important of all, he said, by letting them know when they had crossed the line and produced advertising that was not communicating what it set out to, that did not make sense, or that was more appealing to us on the inside than to real people on the outside.

"I want someone to say no to me," he said, and went on to explain that it was important for any agency that was serious about effectiveness to have a built-in control mechanism in its own philosophy and working method. And this mechanism, he believed, would be more effective if it was led by us than if it was imposed from the outside, because we could develop our own system, not only for doing the research, but for implementing its findings and adapting our work accordingly.

"Planners," he has said since on many occasions, "have a black ball in the process, a right of veto," so that if they discover an idea is not working, they can stop it in its tracks. As a creative director, he says, he may not always be happy about that, but as an agency principal he knows that it is in the agency's long-term interests for advertising to 'work. It's really quite simple — if a campaign works, an agency can enjoy a long and fruitful relationship with a client. If it doesn't, the agency will get fired. Therefore, any opportunity to hone the advertising and increase its chances of effectiveness should be embraced."

In July 1992, an Adweek feature about account planning, embarrassingly entitled "The Knights of New Business," told the story of our agency's pitch for Sega video games earlier that year. The opening paragraph read as follows:

Less than two weeks before Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein was due to make its presentation to Sega of America, Jon Steel, the agency's director of account planning, called the principals into a meeting and said flatly, 'We can't show this work.' For weeks, G.B&S planners had visited and practically lived with close to 100 kids to understand their passion for video games. Armed with those insights, Goodby roughed out some commercials for Sega ... but the kids G.B&S had studied so assiduously found the ads a total bore. Only after quickly recasting the

campaign did Goodby win the $65-million account.

It was a dramatic start to the story. The planner's right of veto being exercised in a showdown with the agency principals, right in the heat of a new business pitch (which, coming as it did on the heels of Andy Berlin's departure from the agency, represented even more pressure than usual). It was gripping stuff, but it was not exactly what had happened.

It was true that planners had spent weeks living the lives of teenage gamers. In the course of those interviews a clear picture had emerged of the video game as a world that was the exclusive preserve of kids and teens. Inside the game was a place where they could escape from the pressures and influence of adults and for once be in control of their own destinies.

Kids had their own language, their own codes, and their own hierarchies, and adults tended to understand none of it. While a kid could spend hours going through the different levels of a game, an adult would be greeted by the game over message within minutes. The game was the only place where the kid was the master.

We thought that was interesting and developed a television advertising campaign based on the idea. In one commercial, fast cars race across the screen, and a dry voice says, "They can drive cars." (Odd words appear in the corner of the screen: "Speed . . . babes . . . can . . . bite . . .") The voice speaks again. "They decide how much ice cream goes on their cake.

They decide when they go to bed ..." (More words: "can . . . midnight. . . dawn . . . can . . . sex . . .") The scantily clad body of a woman gyrates in silhouette behind a leveler blind, and the voice says, "They can go to R-rated movies. ..." Loud music cuts in, and we see game footage from Sonic the Hedgehog. "... But it will be a chilly day in hell," the voice continues, "before an adult gets this far on Sonic 2. Sega. Welcome to the Next Level."

In another, a young boy called Mitch is playing Sonic 2 and has just realized his ambition of reaching level seven.

His dad, a nerdy-looking guy, tells him that if he doesn't shape up and do some work instead of playing video games, then Mitch will not grow up to be like his dad. As a result of this advice, we are told, Mitch's new ambition is to reach level eight. Sega. Welcome to the Next Level.

We shot both of these spots on video and were very pleased with the results. The clients from Sega who saw them thought they were "right on," and we went optimistically into consumer research.

Focus groups with teenage gamers were organized. On the first night, while another planner, Irina Hierakuji, moderated, I sat in the viewing room with Jeff Goodby Rich Silverstein, and a bunch of agency creatives who had worked on the campaign. The first words out of the mouth of one of the respondents on seeing the video were not encouraging:

"That sucks." (Isn't it great how kids will always tell you exactly what they think?)

An avalanche of criticism followed, which was almost exactly replicated in subsequent groups. The advertising, they thought, was slow, boring, lacked enough game footage to give a full impression of the game, and contained no new news.

"We know our parents don't know how to play the games. Tell us something new."

"Sega shouldn't be insulting our parents."

"That footage you showed wasn't from Sonic 2—it was from the original Sonic, and it was from level two, which isn't hard at all..."

And then the lowest blow of all:

"Those commercials look like they were written by adults."

"The guys who made it weren't good enough to get to the difficult parts!"

At some point, behind the mirror in the viewing room, Goodby and Silverstein concluded that they had better start over.

Other creatives nodded their assent.

Only then did they ask for my opinion. I said I thought they had already decided what was right, without me.

That's what happened. No fist pounding. No veto. The planners had simply created an environment where the creatives could see and hear for themselves how their campaign was being received. And when they realized that they had missed the mark, they made up their own minds that they had to do something different.

So they did start over and came up with a campaign that I will not even attempt to show in storyboard form or describe, because they decided that if kids thought their original ideas were too slow, they would speed them up. A lot. If there wasn't enough information or game footage, they would cram in more. Sixty seconds' worth into fifteen seconds in some cases. Which meant that in some commercials there were more than 70 different cuts. The ads would make no mention of the "kids' world" idea, but their frenetic pace, volume, and language was designed to exclude adults in the same way as the games themselves.

Each ad would represent the next level of speed, noise, and in many instances, bad taste. And in subsequent research, while both we and the Sega clients, as adults, hated it and found it offensive, the kids loved it.

We were hired, and within months Sega, on the back of their anarchic new advertising and hot new Sonic title, had overhauled arch-rival Nintendo and taken the number one spot in the expanding video game market.

To Group, or Not to Group?

If creative-development research can be defined in the way I outlined at the start of the previous section — namely, as a means of eliciting consumer response to advertising ideas, understanding that response, and seeking ways to improve the response of future viewers or readers—then I believe that only research that is qualitative in nature and almost always in the form of focus groups is suitable for the task.

I know that many in the industry have different preferences. Focus groups, they assert, are "too unreliable." Respondents are too easily led by others for a group's individual and collective opinions to mean anything.

If one person loves it, they'll all love it (and vice versa), is the general criticism. Such criticisms are, of course, quite justified if the focus group in question is being moderated by an idiot. My preference is based on the assumption that the moderator will be of a higher caliber. (I talk more about exactly who should moderate later in this chapter.)

Even among those who agree that qualitative methodologies are better (than quantitative methodologies) for creative development research, a significant difference of opinion exists on the relative merits of focus groups and one-on-one depth interviews.

Why Focus Groups and Not One-on-Ones?

A depth interview, I have heard many people argue, is likely to yield a much more "pure" response than a focus group, because the respondent is not influenced in his or her reactions by the opinions of others. It is just the moderator and the one respondent, alone in a room. Alone, except for the 23 observers who are hanging on their every word from behind the viewing mirror.

If I were conducting a research project that sought to find out about people's sexual habits, illicit drug use, or criminal activities, I would probably use one-on-one interviews, figuring that some degree of privacy (video cameras, tape recorders, and observers notwithstanding) was going to be an important prerequisite for extracting the information I needed. If I needed to interview a bunch of heavy-hitting chief executives, I would most likely do so one at a time, to avoid the inevitable clash of egos in a group setting and to overcome the probably insurmountable logistic difficulties of getting ten C.E.O's in the same room at the same time. And if all I wanted to do in creative development research was to gather opinions on what people think of an advertising idea, then one-on-one interviews might again seem like a good idea.

But to understand those opinions and figure out ways to shift them by manipulating the advertising, I prefer to have more than one person's opinion to play with at any one time. I am not suggesting that neither heightened understanding nor improvements to ideas are attainable using one-on-one interviews, but that both can be taken to a higher level, much more rapidly, in focus groups, by using the very group dynamic that many researchers fear.

One of the mistakes that many people make when thinking about creative development research, especially if they adhere to the previously described theory of "research-as-test" is to think that objectivity is the only legitimate method of inquiry and analysis. While objectivity, in whatever impure form it really exists, may play a role in assessing how closely an advertising campaign meets its objectives and identifies problem areas, it is very unlikely that it alone will uncover a deeper truth or begin to suggest solutions. The same points that I have made about objectivity throughout this book become most acute in the area of creative development research, where the planner or other person conducting the research has to be at once a logical, analytical researcher, and a lateral, intuitive, creative thinker. This requires a significant amount of subjectivity and flexibility on the part of the moderator, and a research environment that is conducive to creative thinking and expression.

Almost all the best ideas that I have extracted from focus groups have come from people who would not have made the profound comments they did, if they had not been stimulated by the comments of others. If a conversation in a focus group is allowed to run free with a minimum of moderator interference, then respondents will build on each other's comments and, if the moderator is lucky, become ever more inventive as they go. The "Fresh T.V" campaign for Chevys Mexican Restaurants, included later in this chapter, and the "got milk?" campaign featured in Chapter 7, both benefited from this type of free-ranging, self-stimulating conversation in creative development research. While it is not impossible that the same answers and ideas could have come out of one-on-one research, I consider it very unlikely.

One of the main advantages of focus group research, in the hands of a skilled moderator, is that high energy levels are much easier to create and sustain than in one-on-one interviews, and higher energy levels are necessary if respondents are to feel comfortable in expressing their opinions. They are especially important if respondents are going to be creative, whether by accident or design. I have conducted many depth interviews, and observed many more, and on the whole the experience has been about as interesting as watching paint dry. That is less true of interviews that are conducted in the respondent's natural habitat. But in my experience, while most clients are happy to embrace such anthropological research at the strategic stage, their desire to keep an eye on the agency at the creative development stage almost always means that they want to be able to observe, and that means going to a facility.

The last point that I'll make about one-on-one interviews is that they are a logistic nightmare. Whereas 60 different respondents can be spoken to in six focus groups over two or three days, it will take weeks to meet that many if they are brought in one at a time. The sheer quality and quantity of information that can be extracted from focus groups makes them more productive than one-on-ones in an absolute sense. And when cost and time considerations are added in, they are also more efficient in a relative sense.

Why Not Quantitative?

Many of my readers may take issue with my earlier point that only qualitative research is useful in eliciting and understanding the response of consumers to rough creative ideas, and in finding ways to improve the response of future readers or viewers. I have already touched on my reasons for preferring focus groups as a medium for creative development research, namely, the flexibility, energy, and opportunity for creativity that they offer. I would, however, be negligent if I did not say a few words on the subject of the quantitative research that may be done at this stage, generally known as copy-testing. As with several other areas that I cover in this book, copy-testing is a huge subject, and a great number of books and papers have already been devoted to it by authors much better qualified than myself (references to some of these are included in my bibliography). I do, however, want to make a few brief but important points.

The use of quantitative copy-testing is the source of much controversy and friction between clients and agencies. While many clients insist on copy-testing their advertising for reasons of risk-management and efficiency, seeking to remove the possibility of human error from their decision making, their agencies often regard such tests as counterproductive to the aim of producing distinctive advertising.

It may appear from my earlier statement that my opinion lies on the copy-testmg-is-counterproductive side of that argument, but that is not so. Qualitative and quantitative research at the creative development stage are useful for different reasons and at different times, and I believe that treating them as alternatives is not particularly constructive. It is necessary to distinguish between true creative development research, where the aim of understanding and improving response is best met by qualitative research, and creative evaluation, where the desire for hard facts and numbers to give confidence to decision makers is probably best provided by some form of copy-test.

Copy-tests tend to fall into one of two types, although some techniques are all encompassing. The first measures the ability of an advertising execution or campaign to shift attitudes or "persuade," and it is based on the assumption that any change in attitudes or claimed propensity to buy a product around the time that a respondent is exposed to the advertising is predictive of later behavior in the marketplace. In the most common tests, respondents are asked, under some pretext, to make a choice between a number of products, one of which is the test product. Then they view a T.V program (which they have been led to believe is the sole reason for their being in the research), in the course of which they see a commercial break that includes the test commercial. After the show, they repeat the product-choice exercise, and the difference between their pre-advertising and post-advertising choices represents the advertising's ability to persuade.

I have worked with a number of clients who live and die by these persuasion scores, and it is easy to see why they are regarded as such a critical measure. Unfortunately, there is a growing body of opinion, led by Gordon Brown of Millward Brown, that such measures are not really predictive of anything, as changes in attitudes toward brands occur over a much longer time period than these tests typically measure, and are influenced by a number of indirect factors, not least of which is real-world contact with the product itself. If Brown and others are correct (which I, for one, believe them to be), then the founding principles of these persuasion tests are fatally flawed, and so too the results that emerge.

The second type of copy-test is multidimensional. It is less concerned with persuasion, focusing instead on the ability of a commercial to break through clutter, to be remembered (and linked to the brand), to communicate a message to its target, and to be understood, liked or disliked by respondents. Typically, it will also include a battery of diagnostic questions that explore detailed attitudes to the message and executional style of the advertising. This type of copy-test, by the nature of the questions it poses, is clearly more open to interpretation than the pass/fail persuasion test. But once again there is considerable disagreement over the absolute and relative importance of its various measures. Some companies and authors place great importance on recall measures. Others champion brand linkage. Many recent studies have concluded that the degree to which viewers Like the advertising eclipses all other measures in terms of its ability to predict success in the marketplace.

There's certainly no easy answer, although common sense suggests that the more people notice and remember the advertising, link the message to a specific brand, and like what they see and hear, the better the ad will perform. The question that I have yet to see satisfactorily answered is whether the environment and methodology of the tests themselves provide a truly accurate representation of the way people really feel about the advertising ideas. If finding the truth depends, as I have suggested, on establishing an intimate relationship with consumers, then most copy-testing methodologies are the exact opposite of what should be done.

Paul Feldwick, the Executive Planning Director of B.M.P D.D.B in London, in an excellent, concise paper for the United Kingdom's Account Planning Group (A Brief Guided Tour Through the Copy-Testing Jungle), writes:

This type of research, if done well by an experienced and sensitive advertising researcher, can be enormously rich and helpful. But it can also turn into a depressing and frustrating experience for the advertising agency as sloppy questions, poor coding, and nonsequiturs of interpretation based on invalid models of advertising, misrepresent the reality of consumer reaction.

Almost all of G.S&P's large clients copy-test their advertising prior to it going on air, some of them having a particular bias toward persuasion testing, while others favor the more multidimensional, diagnostic approach. I have often asked myself whether, if it were my money, I would spend it on these copy-tests; and I have always concluded that I would not, because I have yet to learn anything from a copy- test that I could not divine for myself (directionally at least) using qualitative methodologies. Of course, it is not my money, and never will be, and while I do not enthusiastically recommend copy-tests, I certainly do not fear them or feel that they get in the way of good advertising. In the tests that I have experienced, exceptional advertising ideas have always scored well on most of the key measures, and I thus regard copy-tests as a kind of benign force that neither helps nor unduly hinders the process.

The reason I tend to feel better about copy-tests than most of my industry peers is that all of my clients who copy-test do so in addition to earlier qualitative strategic and creative development work, and the material they put into the quantitative test is generally a pretty advanced rough-cut or finished commercial. So the earlier research has informed and shaped the advertising, which greatly reduces the possibility of problems of comprehension, relevance, and appeal, and the test material has the added benefit of production values. If everyone has done their jobs properly earlier on, it is rare indeed for the copy-test alarm bells to sound.

Who Should Conduct Creative Development Research?

The subject of who should actually conduct creative development research is the source of considerable debate between agencies and clients, and once again, the argument hinges on the issue of objectivity. Many clients, looking at the research as a simple pass or fail exercise, may wish to have it conducted by an objective, independent researcher. That person, they say, will be detached from any emotional issues surrounding the campaign's development, and as an independent, his or her opinions will have more influence on senior management than those of an agency planner.

I have heard these arguments from many clients who are more than happy to let an agency planner conduct exploratory research but who say that "this type of research is different." I disagree. The same barriers that stand in the way of consumers revealing their true feelings, as described in Chapter 3, can be as problematic in creative development research as they are in strategic research. The same methods of opening minds and generating ideas, described in Chapter 4, may be applied with equal success, whether the aim of the research is to test a strategic hypothesis or to gather reactions to a creative idea.

If creative development research is different at all, it is so only in requiring, more than any other type of advertising research, a moderator who is not only well versed in the realities of the client's business, but who also has an understanding of, and sensitivity to, the creative process. This is the principal reason that agency planners should conduct all creative development research.

Most planners have developed their research skills in the environment of an advertising agency. This means that besides their abilities as researchers, they ideally have highly developed creative skills. It is their job to learn creative ways of thinking, creative ways of interpreting, and creative ways of applying the results of their work to the process of developing advertising ideas.

Most people who work as independent researchers, on the other hand, developed their research skills in research companies. While technically they may be superior researchers to their planning counterparts, many do not have the creative training to fully understand the intricacies of many advertising ideas, and most important of all, do not themselves have the creative skills to begin to suggest interesting solutions to problems.

In an excellent chapter on creative development research in the United Kingdom's Account Planning Group's book, How to Plan Advertising, Leslie Butterfield makes the point that the planner's job is to be the representative of the consumer within the agency.

As such, the most vital part of their job is the understanding of the consumer. The best way to understand consumers is to talk to them —and the best way to talk to them is first hand. If a planner is not good at talking to consumers first hand, he probably is not a very good planner. Therefore, a good planner ought to be a good qualitative research moderator.

The planner is the person closest to the brand and its advertising on a continuous basis; he understands the context within which the advertising has to work better than anyone else. Thus, by definition, no outsider will ever be as well briefed to tackle creative development research, since no briefing can substitute for the accumulated knowledge of the brand that resides in the planner.

I think that Leslie's logic is flawless, and I couldn't agree more with what he says.

On the subject of objectivity and detachment, this may be useful, as previously noted, in the area of creative evaluation, but not in creative development research. Again, Butterfield notes that "qualitative research is about participation and ideas, not distance and observation." My own experience has shown that an inverse relationship often exists between the degree of detachment exhibited by the moderator, and the usefulness of the research.

A planner doing his or her job properly has lived at the heart of the creative development process and understands as well as the creative team themselves its core ideas, executional nuances, and desired response. They are therefore better placed than anyone to identify weaknesses and to suggest changes and improvements.

This brings us to the area of implementing the research findings, both within and outside the agency. Influence does not come automatically with independence; it is more often wielded by those with the most knowledge and the commu- nication skills to make that knowledge seem important. That, too, is the job of agency planners: to have all the information at their fingertips that key decision-makers need to make their decisions, and to communicate a powerful point of view that leads them in the right direction (note: I said the right direction, not the agency's direction). Planners are much more likely than outsiders to be able to work with a creative team to implement findings from creative development research, because they work together, they know each other, and they see each other every day. A successful debrief on this type of research does not take place in one meeting and a document, but in a series of (usually informal) conversations that are obviously not possible if the moderator and creatives work for different companies.

Some agencies and clients will argue that if the planner is present at the research, then it doesn't matter who is moderating. I reject that notion, for the same aforementioned reason that Leslie Butterfield described and for the reasons outlined in Chapter 3 when I spoke about the O. J. Simpson trial. If you are not in the room, talking to consumers yourself, you will never be able to truly understand them.

Keeping a Great Idea Alive

The campaign that G.S&P produced for Chevys Mexican Restaurants in the early 1990s is an excellent example of the advantages of intimacy with the development of a campaign idea when conducting creative development research. Albeit on a regional scale, the Chevys campaign was one of the most effective campaigns the agency ever produced, driving a dramatic increase in sales, attracting outside investment to finance the chain's expansion, and garnering numerous awards for both creativity (gold lions at Cannes and gold pencils at the One Show) and effectiveness (gold Effie). Yet the campaign almost died in the first stage of creative development research. And I remain convinced that it would have died in the hands of a researcher who was not familiar with the genesis of the campaign, and who was not empowered to take liberties with the creative ideas in attempting to understand people's negative reactions.

Chevys was, at the time we were hired, a chain of around 30 restaurants in Northern California. A colorful, lively place with singing servers and free sombreros for guests celebrating birthdays, walls fashioned from Corona cases, and floor-to-ceiling Cuervo posters, it promised the freshest food of any Mexican restaurant. On its menu it featured a "Fresh Mex Pledge," a list often guarantees to its diners.

There will be no cans in our kitchen.

Chips will be served warm at your table within two minutes of your sitting down.

Our guacamole is made from fresh avocados. If you don't believe us, we'll bring you a pit to plant.

And so on.

The creative team had come up with an idea that the advertising itself should reflect the freshness of the food at Chevys. A T.V commercial would be shot on video and aired on the same day, after which it would be thrown away and never used again. The next day, another "Fresh T.V" commercial would be made. Each commercial would focus on a particular aspect of the fresh food at Chevys. It would also contain some proof that the commercial had actually been made that day — maybe a newspaper headline, perhaps a reference to some breaking news. Whatever it was, it had to be something that could not possibly have been prepared in advance.

Everyone, both at Chevys and the agency, was excited by the idea, particularly because we could imagine that same-day commercials might have enough news value to generate some P.R, and hence additional exposure for our very small budget. Both of us, however, wanted to run it by some customers for two reasons. First, we obviously wanted to see whether they were as turned on by the idea as we were. But most important, we also wanted to know whether it could actually be done, because it looked as though it was going to be a logistic nightmare. Part of each spot could be shot beforehand, namely, the food in the restaurant, with tomatoes being sliced for a spot about salsa, tortillas rolling off "El machine," sizzling fajitas being delivered to tables, and people generally having a good time. But the bulk of each commercial, the part that proved the freshness of the commercial itself, would have to be shot starting at around four in the morning.

Shooting would wrap by eight, and the spot had to be edited by ten, when the client would arrive at the studio to approve it or request changes. By noon, the finished spot had to be delivered by hand to San Francisco T.V stations, and sent by satellite to the stations in Sacramento.

Focus groups were set up for the evening of May 15, 1992, in Sacramento. Steve Simpson, the copywriter, and Tracy Wong, his art director partner, would shoot and edit the commercial as described above, only instead of delivering it to a T.V station, they would give it to me, and I would drive to Sacramento and show it to two focus groups.

This pilot commercial is shown in storyboard form in Figure 6.1. It was dated, interestingly enough, by that day's San Francisco Examiner, whose headline carried the news of the indictment of some Los Angeles Police Department officers for the videotaped beating of an African-American named Rodney King.

Figure 6.1 summary: A series of four black-and-white film frames depicting a pilot commercial for Chevys Mexican Restaurant. The frames show a document, a text overlay reading 'this commercial', a handwritten menu board listing specials, and the restaurant's logo. This is a visual storyboard for a promotional advertisement with no analytical data to report.

"Friday, May 15, 1991," said an Examiner employee, as the newspapers rolled off the presses. A title card announced that "this commercial was made today." A second added, "just like everything at Chevys." As the specials board was shown, a voice-over said, "Lunch at Chevys. The fresh fish today is thresher shark.

That's served with a pico de gallo sauce." Quick cuts showed steaming food being brought to tables, waiters weaving their way through the crowded restaurant, and diners enjoying their meals. "Well, since you've already missed lunch," the voice-over continued, "maybe you can try it at dinner. If you come early enough." The spot closed with another scene of piles of newspapers rolling along a conveyor belt. "Chevys Fresh Mex. There's hardly anything fresher."

It was finished according to schedule, and I drove safely to Sacramento. Everything was going as planned, until respondents in both groups told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was the worst advertising idea they had ever seen. They hated it.

"It's boring."

"It's insulting."

"Who gives a damn about thresher shark?"

"What did all those newspapers have to do with anything?"

"Have the people who made that everbeen to Chevys?"

"They said it was made today, but I don't believe them."

"Where did it say that? I didn't see anything about 'made today.' Isn't that impossible?"

"The quality's awful. It's all shaky and blurry. The food looks terrible."

"I hate that guy's voice."

The voice on the tape belonged to Steve Simpson, the copywriter, who I knew was watching from behind the viewing mirror. I imagined him trying to hang himself, using his belt and shoelaces.

Most of the respondents had clearly not gotten the message that the commercial had been made that day. The typed card, reading "This commercial was made today," seemed to have escaped the notice of the majority.

The few who had seen that card did not believe it. Some thought it physically impossible. Others thought it had been faked in some way. (Presumably they thought Chevys had orchestrated the beating incident, released the video to the press, and waited until indictments were issued before releasing their previously prepared advertising. Not even Oliver Stone would buy that one.) While many criticized the rough video style, some cited the typed cards as evidence. that the commercial was "too polished" and must have taken longer than a day to make.

If they didn't know, or didn't believe, that the commercial had been made that day, then the only explanation for the rough video style was that Chevys simply didn't care about the quality of its commercials. Which was in turn taken to mean that Chevys probably didn't care about the quality of its food. In other words, it seemed to be having quite the opposite effect to that which was desired.

In the second group, reactions were so vehement that after about a half hour, I told the respondents that I had gotten their message loud and clear, removed the tape from the V.C.R, and dropped it into the wastebasket.

"Let's talk about something else," I said, and gave each of them a copy of the "Fresh Mex Pledge" from the menu, which most of them had surprisingly never seen. (We later realized that the reason they had never seen it was that it was positioned on the back part of the foldout menu, where nobody would ever look, except by accident.) This got a much more positive reaction than the advertising.

"That's cool."

"Why don't they talk about this in the advertising?"

"Yeah. That's what the advertising should have said. This 'fresh' stuff is great."

I asked them whether anyone thought that the advertising that they had just seen might have been trying to say that. No. No one had gotten that message.

Was it the thresher shark that was the problem? Wasn't there a point in the pledge list that they had read that mentioned fresh fish specials? The specials were a good thing, they agreed, but thresher shark ... they weren't sure.

I asked how many of them had ever tried thresher shark. None of them had.

The pledge points that they all wanted to talk about were the ones relating to salsa, chips, tortillas, and guacamole: the universal appetizers that many regarded as the real test of the quality of a Mexican restaurant.

"If this stuff about the tomatoes and the warm chips is true, then that's real good," said one respondent. "I can taste it just thinking about it."

"If the advertising people were to do a commercial about salsa, or about chips being delivered warm to your table within two minutes of sitting down," I asked, "would that be more interesting?"

Everyone agreed that it would.

"But I still don't see what it has to do with those newspapers," said a devil's advocate. The others agreed. Pretending to be made that day? What was the point?

My office at the agency was just across a small corridor from Rich Silverstein's, and as our doors virtually opened onto each other, we could always hear every word of the other's telephone conversations. A few days earlier, I had overheard Rich talking to a friend about an idea we had for a new campaign for Chevys. He was clearly very excited, and he told his friend that "for the freshest food, we're going to do the freshest advertising." Now, as respondents began to attack the irrelevancy of the advertising idea again, I realized that Silverstein's description, which was so succinct and interesting, did not currently appear in the advertising. Perhaps that was the missing link.

"I'm not sure about this," I told the group, "but I think what the advertising people meant to do with this commercial was show that for the freshest food — the pledges you all said you liked so much — they would create the freshest advertising. So for fresh salsa, they would do a fresh T.V commercial."

"Why didn't they say that?" asked a respondent.

"That's much better than what they did."

"They should say that. Hike that a lot better."

"So is that why they had the newspapers?"

When I say that planners should spend more time listening, perhaps I really mean that they should spend more time eavesdropping on other people's telephone conversations.

That would be difficult for an outside researcher.

On May 9, a commercial aired in the Bay Area and Sacramento that opened on Steve and Tracy, armed with a video camera, in hot pursuit of early morning joggers on San Francisco's Marina Green (see Figure 6.2). A lively Mexican mariachi track played throughout. "Scuse me! Scuse me!" shouts Simpson in a vain effort to attract a lady jogger's attention. One male jogger does stop.

Figure 6.2 summary: A grid of four high-contrast, grainy black-and-white images containing distorted text fragments from a commercial for Chevys Mexican Restaurant. These distressed frames serve as visual examples of the "Salsa" commercial.

"Could you tell me today's date?" Simpson asks.

"It's ... er ... it's the ninth of ... er ... May."

A voice-over speaks as we see the date on the man's watch — "5 to 9." It is circled as if with a bright, vibrant green marker pen. "We made this commercial a few hours ago. We call this fresh T.V." The words fresh T.V appear on the screen in the same shaky, vibrant style.

A funky red-and-green border emphasizes the words. Now we see tomatoes and onions being chopped.

"At Chevys," the voice-over continues, "we made our salsa just minutes ago. We call this Fresh Mex." The words fresh Mex appear on screen.

"Fresh T.V," repeats the voice-over, as Steve and Tracy run after yet another jogger. "Fresh Mex. I dunno, so far we're a lot better at the Fresh Mex part than the Fresh T.V."

The lady jogger we saw at the start of the spot disappears into the distance. "Don't be frightened," Simpson shouts, as he and Tracy fall behind. "I just wanna ask you a question."

On June 20 (Figure 6.3), another spot opened with the same mariachi music, and Simpson shouting, "free he detector test, one day only!"

Figure 6.3 summary: A series of high-contrast, grainy black-and-white photographs depicting the exterior and signage of Chevys Mexican Restaurant. The images show distorted views of the building and text reading "Fresh Mex," serving as a visual record referred to as a polygraph.

A man, shown being hooked up to a polygraph, is asked by Simpson, "can you tell me today's date?"

"June twentieth," he replies, and a bell rings to show he's passed the test.

"This commercial was made today," says the voice-over.

Now a nun is hooked up to the machine. "June twentieth," she says with a smile, and the bell rings once more.

"We call this Fresh T.V," says the voice-over, and the words fresh T.V appear on screen. Now we see guacamole being made from fresh avocados, with juice being squeezed from a lemon. "At Chevys," the voice-over continues, "our guacamole is made fresh every day. We call this Fresh Mex." fresh Mex shimmers on screen. "At Chevys, we make everything fresh every day. Hey—would we lie?"

A priest is now connected to the machine and is asked, "Have you ever cheated at golf?"

"Yes, I have," he replies, sheepishly, and the bell rings. The interviewers laugh.

"Do you usually cheat at golf?"

"No. Rarely." His response is greeted by the sharp sound of a buzzer, and a big, red cross on screen highlights his sin.

Creative-Development Research Is a negotiation

At a convention of packaging designers in 1963, Robert Pliskin observed that "Market research can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the egg is a sad and sorry product and that it obviously will not continue to sell. Because after all, eggs won't stand up by themselves, they roll too easily, are too easily broken, require special packaging, look alike, are difficult to open, and won't stack on the shelf."

However good a product, it is always possible to find something wrong with it. The Chevys campaign is only one of a number that I could have used to make the point that a bad consumer response in creative development research isn't necessarily the end of the world. It is rare for any advertising campaign, however great, not to attract negative comment. The real skill of the planner is in distinguishing between those negative comments that are relevant and need to be addressed and those that are either irrelevant to the ideas as they currently stand, or that can easily be dealt with in production.

The late Akio Morita, founder and chairman of Sony, writing in Made in Japan about the launch of the Walkman, made the argument that a company whose strength lies in innovation does not wait for consumers to tell it what they want. "The public does not know what is possible," he wrote, "but we do." The same argument he makes in the context of technological innovation can also be made about consumer response to creative innovation. Most people have a frame of reference that extends only as far as their existing experience. Their ability to predict how they might feel at some time in the future, about a piece of advertising that they are seeing only in embryonic form, is often severely limited.

In creative development research, advertising ideas are frequently exposed to consumers in a form that bears little resemblance to the way they would look, sound, and feel as finished advertising, and the consumers who are expected to pass opinions on them often have neither the experience nor the imagination to fill in the gaps. Their responses are thus likely to be as incomplete as the creative stimulus material being exposed and must be tempered with creative vision and client confidence if they are to be useful. And like any negotiation, this isn't always easy.

I recently put together a reel of advertising from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners that contained many of the T.V commercials featured in the pages of this book: "Aaron Burr" and "Heaven" from the "got milk?" campaign; "Architect" and "Dog and Cat" for Polaroid; "Mud" for the Isuzu Rodeo; "Laws" and "Fantasy" for Norwegian Cruise Line; and many others besides. With the benefit of hindsight, I know that all of those commercials stood out, not just in their respective categories but from the body of advertising in general, and all were extremely effective in building the client's business. Yet all could easily have died in creative development research had consumer comments been listened to literally, creatives not been allowed to express their differing opinions, and the client in each case not had the courage to say, "I hear what they are saying, but I will not change my mind about running this advertising as a result."

In the case of "Aaron Burr" (Figure 7.5), consumers were very hung up on "other people" not knowing who Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were. We (agency and client) simply decided that it didn't matter. The point was, lack of milk prevented the character from answering the big money question that he'd been waiting for all his life, and the more esoteric the question, the better.

Figure 7.5 summary: A series of three high-contrast, grainy, black-and-white images showing abstract, distorted shapes and patterns. According to the caption, this is a television representation of "Aaron Burr," with the phrase "got milk?" appearing below the images. The figure is a piece of artistic or conceptual imagery with no analytical data to report.

Many of those who saw "Heaven" (Figure 7.13) in rough form were horrified that someone actually got killed in the commercial. It's hard (especially when the idea is being presented in script form) for respondents to imagine someone getting run down by a truck and it being funny, but all along, Jeff Goodby, who directed the spot, knew that he would shoot that scene in a way that was almost cartoonlike. The client trusted his judgment, and I never heard a single person complain about bad taste on seeing the finished spot.

Isuzu's "Mud" commercial raised all sorts of parental concerns about encouraging kids to be disobedient and suggesting that it was a good thing to dive face first into mud puddles. Polaroid's "Dog and Cat" (Figure 5.8) was criticized by some because "dogs can't take photographs." Really. And the "Architect" spot (Figure 5.7) attracted a lot of early criticism because in its first iteration, we described the actual picture that the architect drew from his briefcase.

While the "Mud" and "Dog and Cat" comments were largely ignored, the issue of the picture in "Architect" was taken a little more seriously. The picture being used by the architect's wife or girlfriend to get him home was central to the story, and without it the whole idea would have been dead, but there was a simple solution — to show only the back of the picture and let the architect's face and the viewers' imagination join up the dots. In the end, people tend to imagine something far more raunchy than we could ever have shown, but that, we thought, was their problem and not ours.

Hey, it could have been a picture of his favorite tuna sandwich. What sort of minds do you people have?

The Norwegian Cruise Line campaign was a negotiation from start to finish. G.S&P had worked with N.C.L's parent company, Kloster, for several years, first on Royal Viking Line and more recently on N.C.L. But N.C.L had just appointed a new president, Adam Aron, and as anyone in advertising knows, a new president usually means a change of agency.

On his first visit to the agency, his opening words did not augur well.

"Why the hell do I have an agency in San Francisco when my office is in Miami?"

Before anyone had the opportunity to offer an opinion, he said that he would cut to the chase and say that although he thought the campaign that was currently running was okay, he had a better idea for a new campaign, which he would like us to produce for him. In a previous job at Hyatt hotels, he had been responsible for the "Hyatt Touch" campaign, my own recollections of which revolve mostly around sensual music and naked women having suntan lotion applied to their backs. The idea of the Hyatt campaign, Adam said, was to show the hotels as places of more than business, as places where couples could go, relax, and rekindle relationships. If that had worked at Hyatt, he said, he was certain it would work at a cruise line.

"All people want to do is go on a cruise and have sex," he said to the stunned team from the agency. He wanted a campaign that captured this thought, and imagined the way that Calvin Klein might advertise a cruise ship.

"Could it be about other things, too?" asked Steve Simpson, the creative director. "You know, maybe the sexual thing you are talking about could be wrapped up in a larger idea?"

"Are you the planner?" responded Adam. "You talk like a planner."

Over the next two weeks, Simpson and his partner, Steve Luker, as well as the real planner, Mary Stervinou, took the cruise mentioned in Chapter A and found the larger idea that Simpson had postulated at dinner with Adam. Cruising, as they saw it, was in a larger sense about freedom and escape, about having a weight lifted from one's shoulders and feeling lighter, as if the rules of gravity no longer applied. Simpson captured this idea in a line of copy, "the laws of the land do not apply," and a tagline that said, simply, "It's Different Out Here."

A video was produced in an attempt to capture this idea, both to present to Adam and to show to focus groups. The script was very similar to that which eventually appeared on the "Laws" commercial: "There is no law that says you can't make love at A in the afternoon on a Tuesday ... that says you must pack worry along with your baggage ... that says you must contribute to the G.N.P every day of your life ... because the laws of the land do not apply ... it's different out here." This was spoken over beautiful, sexy black-and-white imagery of relaxed and amorous couples. At one point, we even saw writhing bodies and bouncing bedsprings.

"You've gone too far," said Adam Aron.

"You've gone too far," said the focus groups. In fact, some respondents were absolutely appalled.

But while the bodies and bedsprings were enough to prevent some people seeing anything else in the spots, others were able to see beyond them to the bigger idea that Simpson had been trying to communicate, and they loved what they saw. This campaign polarized people as much as any campaign we have ever exposed. Because it was so different visually ("can't you make the sea blue instead of black and white?"), the characters depicted were not typical of cruisers, and the overt sexuality was off-putting to many. In many ways, I have come to believe that a campaign needs to polarize people if it is going to be effective. It has to elicit an emotional response, for good or for bad, if people are going to notice it and think about it. I would much rather, as was the case with N.C.L, have a couple people in a group loving it, a couple more hating it, and some in the middle who are uncomfortable because they're not sure which way to jump. At least it's moving them so they know they're going to have to jump. That kind of advertising will be much more successful than a campaign that ten respondents mumble is "okay," or "good." It will be acceptable to all, and exciting to no one.

In the end, the sexuality was pared back so that the feel of the campaign was more sensual than sexual, which felt right to all parties concerned, but the beautiful models and black-and-white imagery remained. They, it was felt, along with the wonderful Cowboy Junkies' version of "Blue Moon," were vital to the feeling of beauty, nostalgia, and fantasy (see Figures 6.4 to 6.6). In the end, people could read into it whatever they liked.

A few months later, I took my first cruise, on the Norwegian Cruise Line Windward to Alaska. My wife and I emerged from the dining room at about 10 p.m. on the Saturday night and observed two couples, both in their sixties, standing by the elevator. One of the couples was obviously ready to retire for the evening, and the others were trying hard to change their minds, with appeals like "the night is still young . . . let's go gambling" and "what about the midnight buffet?"

The others would have none of it and stepped into the elevator. There was time for one last appeal from their friends outside:

"Come on, it's much too early to go to bed."

Inside the elevator, the 60-year-old woman looked at her elderly husband and then back at her friends. She raised an eyebrow suggestively, and purred, "It's Different Out Here."

The color drained from her husband's face, and the doors closed.

Serendipity "got milk?"

That is the essence of science: Ask an impertinent question, and you are on your way to the pertinent answer. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973

Introduction

So far in this book, I have discussed a number of different advertising campaigns, but always in parts and always to illustrate a certain broader point. Thus a particular campaign may have been used to illustrate a particularly insightful approach to strategic research, or a specific aspect of creative briefing or creative development research, or maybe even all three. But nowhere, so far, have I attempted to tell the whole story of a campaign from start to finish. The simple reason for that is that I didn't want this to be a book of case histories.

It would take up far too much space to provide a full story of several campaigns. I also know from both presenting case histories to existing or prospective clients and acting as a judge for effectiveness awards that the more case histories you hear, the less interesting they become. For obvious reasons, there's a fairly standard content and order to these things, with a standard sequence of background information, campaign objectives, strategic insight, creative solution, and results (that hopefully meet or exceed the objectives), and that, after a while, can become very tire- some.

I did, however, want to include just one full story, which will hopefully illustrate a number of the different observations and suggestions that appear in the preceding chapters. I do not belabor any of those points as I go, preferring simply to tell the story as it developed, and allowing you to make the connections for yourselves. That assumes, of course, that you have read some of the previous chapters.

The campaign that I have chosen to feature is "got milk?" for the California Fluid Milk Processors' Advisory Board (C.F.M.P.A.B). In case you are wondering, I am not presenting it as an example of advertising perfection (I am convinced there is no such thing), but rather as a fortunate alignment of a number of unrelated factors: a client who was prepared to fly in the face of industry experience and wisdom; some hunches that proved to be more right than wrong; research that walked hand-in-hand with hypotheses and proved that neither expense nor sophistication are necessary to make a profound contribution; a powerful creative idea that gained its momentum from the ideas of several different people; and perhaps a healthy dose of good fortune besides. On the subject of good fortune, though, an old sporting adage asserts that "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." So maybe any luck that came our way was not entirely accidental.

Crying Over Spilled Milk

In May 1994, Bruce Horowitz began an article in the Angeles Times with the statement that "There are just two things in the world more boring than whole milk: low fat and skim. While Pepsi has its own generation, Milk can't muster one palpitation . . . Milk — is even on its best day — a real yawner."

About a year before that article appeared, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners had received a visit from a man named Jeff Manning, the executive director of the newly formed C.F.M.P.A.B. He was looking for an agency to advertise milk in California. Although he came with a very large budget, some $25 million to spend in the first year alone, many in the agency would have agreed with Horowitz, feeling that whatever he and his board were considering spending, milk was a lost cause, and "there is nothing that advertising can do to help." Many were of the opinion that this was a review in which the agency should not even enter into contention.

There was much evidence to support their case. As recently as 1980, the average Californian (yes, the Californian with one breast and one testicle) was consuming 30 gallons of milk a year. By 1993, that figure had declined to 24.1 gallons, a loss of 20 percent. In most categories, such a decline would be almost catastrophic, but the Californian farmers and dairies had been fortunate enough to be protected by California's steady population growth. In other words, even though individuals were consuming less milk, the absolute number of individuals was climbing fast enough to keep the state's total milk consumption constant.

By the late 1980s, though, the decline in per capita consumption was steep enough that even population growth could not keep pace, and total milk consumption began to shrink. Two percent one year. Three percent the next. From 1992 to 1993, 3.6 percent less milk was consumed by Californians.

It was this decline that had brought Manning to the agency. An experienced advertising man, he had worked on a number of commodities accounts in previous lives at J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, and Ketchum Advertising, including campaigns for national boards representing eggs, beef, raisins, prunes, bananas, and potatoes. (At Thompson, he also had the distinction of playing first base on a softball team whose third baseman was Jeff Goodby. A losing, error-plagued softball team, I suspect.) This extensive and diverse experience had qualified him uniquely when the C.F.M.P.A.B had started its search for an executive director.

The board itself had been formed out of dissatisfaction with the results of advertising expenditure from other bodies representing the dairy industry — bodies to whom they were contributing their own money, yet who seemed to be providing very little return. All of the C.F.M.P.A.B's members owned or ran dairies. They got the raw milk from the farmers, processed it, and then sold it on to retailers. In forming their board, they pledged three cents for every gallon of milk they processed to fund an advertising campaign that they hoped might halt the decline, and they gave themselves two years in which to make a difference. If in that time they had failed to make any impact, they would disband the board and stop wasting their money.

"That makes for a pretty unique situation," observed Jeff Manning on his inaugural visit to the agency. "It means that I'm only interested in one thing, and that's selling milk. Because if we don't sell more milk, the board will disband. If the board disbands, I will no longer have a job. And if I don't have a job, neither do you."

A Wide-Open Brief

A long-running Gallup survey has tracked attitudes toward milk and milk purchase and consumption behavior on a national basis and has consistently highlighted three key reasons people are consuming less milk, both in California and the rest of the country. First, many people are concerned about milk's fat content. I have heard many express their fears that milk may be unhealthy; when asked to elaborate, they have pointed out with great conviction that even with semi-skimmed milk, half of what you are drinking is fat. I'm not sure what they think is left in nonfat, or skimmed milk, when all the fat has been removed, but one can only assume that it isn't milk. The second problem is that milk is often regarded as a "kids' drink." Perhaps our mothers spent too much time telling us to drink it because it was good for us, with the unhappy consequence that once we had our driver's license, we figured we didn't have to drink it any more. Industry data shows a very steep decline in consumption as kids move into adolescence, and again as they transition from adolescence to adulthood. Perhaps associated with this is the third problem, which is the feeling that by comparison with other beverage choices, especially sodas like Coke and Pepsi, milk is boring.

In summary, the industry had concluded, milk had an image problem. And to correct that problem, a number of advertising campaigns had been developed over a number of years that attempted to directly refute people's concerns and misconceptions. "Milk is good for you," we were told in a variety of ways, and healthy, good-looking people of all ages with lustrous hair, perfect teeth, and fine muscle definition jogged with milk cartons, danced with them, and sang to them. Milk was healthy, milk was for everyone, and with its lively music tracks and jingles it certainly wasn't boring.

The Gallup survey showed that this advertising had been successful in shifting attitudes toward milk. For example, in 1982, 40 percent of Californians had agreed with the statement: "I should drink more milk than I do." By 1992 that number had risen to 52 percent.

"All that shows," said Manning, "is that image means nothing. Because as milk's image has improved, its sales have declined." It was true.

A chart on which both key image dimensions and consumption were plotted on the same axis showed a classic scissor shape. As image went up, volume seemed to go down.

So I'm not interested in image. If all we do is affect image, we will all lose our jobs. We need to affect behavior. People have to buy more, and they have to consume more.

That's the objective. And I don't give a damn how we get there. If you think that persuading people to take baths in milk will get them to buy more, and you can persuade me that you're right, I'll go with it. I'm not going to tell you that you have to do anything like the milk industry has done before. Because whatever they have done, it hasn't worked. I don't know, maybe we don't even have to see milk in the advertising.

If you want to spend all the money promoting cereal sales in California, getting people to eat more cereal, maybe that's the answer. That may sound weird, but what else are they going to put on their cereal? What I'm saying is that it's wide open.

There can be no better brief for an advertising agency than one that says, essentially, start from scratch. Assume that there are no rules. And if Rich Silverstein is right when he says that clients get the advertising they deserve, here was a client who deserved something very good. If he didn't get it, then we would have no one to blame but ourselves.

Fishing Where the Fish Are

A study of milk consumption habits commissioned by the C.F.M.P.A.B showed that 70 percent of Californians claimed to use milk "frequently," while 30 percent did not. It also seemed that the majority of previous milk advertising had been aimed at the 30 percent who, for whatever reason, were not using milk at all, or at least using less than they used to. In any category, persuading people who are not doing something to do it, whether again or for the first time, tends to be a much harder task than persuading people who are already doing it to do more of it, or do the same thing more often. If a company, for whatever reason, wanted people to run three miles a day, they would undoubtedly have the most success initially among people who are already running one or two miles a day. For them, the change is merely one of degree, while those who do not run have to learn a whole new pattern of behavior, and anyone who has ever started running for the first time will know how difficult (and painful) that can be.

As we talked about this in the agency, we quickly arrived at the conclusion that if our task was to influence behavior quickly, then trying to amplify existing behavior, by persuading people to use more milk, or use it more often, gave us a much greater chance of success. Those who were not using milk, or using less of it, were often doing so for reasons that were quite deeply ingrained, and it seemed to us that advertising was not likely to make a difference, at least in the short term.

If we were right to talk to the user group, then the immediate question we had to answer was "how do they use milk?" Again, Jeff Manning had an insight that he wanted us to consider.

"A few years ago at Ketchum, I worked with creative director Ken Dudwick on a speculative campaign for one of the milk industry organizations, and we had this notion we called '__ _ and milk.' If you think about it, you hardly ever use milk on its own. The '__ _ ' part is brownies, or cereal, coffee. ... those things taste so good with milk, and you can't imagine eating them without it." At the time, he said, the clients had not been willing to buy into the idea, but he remained convinced that there was something powerful in a food and milk story.

A tracking study designed to investigate this particular hypothesis and conducted by Marc research, revealed that almost 88 percent of milk is consumed in the home, a figure that makes advertising images of people chugging from milk cartons while jogging in the park seem somewhat ridiculous. Marketing people often look at the absence of consumption among a particular group or in a particular location as an "opportunity," but in this case there were very good reasons people didn't take milk with them on their travels. Like the fact that it spills once opened, and if not refrigerated it smells and tastes really bad.

Not only did the research confirm that most milk was consumed in the home, but it also showed that very little milk is consumed in isolation. As Manning had postulated, it is usually a complement to a food item, and as such is rarely the center of attention implied by much previous milk advertising. Cereal, not surprisingly, accounted for the lion's share of occasions where food is consumed with milk (some 45 percent), followed by breakfast pastries, cookies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, graham crackers, and brownies.

In focus groups, we asked people to talk about milk in relation to these foods. In some groups we showed respondents a beautiful photograph of a glass of milk and asked them to talk about the first things that popped into their heads. Their resulting imagery was very diverse, and not all of it positive. Many people didn't really know what to think at all, feeling that it was, "Uh, just milk."

There really wasn't that much to say. In marked contrast, other groups were shown beautiful shots of chocolate chip cookies and brownies, and the response was almost unanimous. They were attracted by the food and immediately imagined a glass of milk alongside it.

"I'm hungry!"

"That cookie and a glass of milk would be pretty good right now."

Importantly, though, it was clear that people wanted the food first and the milk second. The food was always more interesting and emotive than the milk, but the milk was still an essential accompaniment. In a way, the two were independent, in that most people could not imagine consuming that particular food without milk.

But it had to be "__ _" and milk." "Milk and __ _" just wouldn't be the same

Milk, it seemed, could not create its own desire. On the other hand, these appetizing, sometimes naughty companion foods (with the exception of cereal), seemed capable of cre- ating a powerful craving that could only be satisfied with milk as part of the equation. With milk, respondents told us, these foods were perfect. Without milk, they were ruined. And this, we discovered, was the only time that people even seemed to think about milk at all—when they wanted it, and it wasn't there.

A theory began to emerge, stimulated by threads of evidence from research, by the hypotheses that Jeff Manning had brought to the table, and by our own experiences as milk consumers. Perhaps, we thought, the companion food items mentioned above could be used in advertising to stimulate desire for milk. With the exception of cereal, these food items had largely been ignored by years of milk advertising, because the industry — not surprisingly—considered them to be unhealthy. But if they were the sole reason many people consumed milk, we reasoned, why should we shy away from them?

Moreover, when people described situations where they had the food but not the milk, we were intrigued by the level of emotion in their descriptions. It wasn't merely inconvenient; they were angry, upset, frustrated; and it showed not only in their words but in their hand gestures, their posture, their facial expressions, and even in their artwork. We asked them to draw pictures depicting running out of milk, and many showed themselves screaming, tearing their hair out, and trying to hunt down the culprit who had drunk the last of it.

As any one individual described such a scenario, others could clearly relate to it. You spent most of your life not giving milk a moment's thought, then along comes a moment when you really need it, and it's not there. "It's traumatic," one person told us, and their fellow group members pursued their lips and nodded sympathetically. So beyond the simple food association (something that Jeff Manning was later to describe, jokingly, as "milk and food—yum yum—half a good idea"), maybe there was something in these emotional reactions relating to not having milk that we could exploit.

To explore the full potential of this area, an experiment was conducted with some standard focus groups. People were recruited for the groups with the offer of the normal 50-dollar respondent incentive, but with an additional 25 dollars if they would agree not to use milk for the week immediately preceding the research. Most agreed with alacrity. "No problem." An easy 25 bucks, they assumed.

One week later, we held focus groups in both Northern and Southern California. The respondents brought with them a diary we had asked them to keep, detailing everything they ate or drank over the previous week, as well as what they were doing, who they were with, and how they were feeling on each such occasion.

"When you offered us the extra 25 dollars," said one middle-aged woman, "I figured it wouldn't be difficult, but I guess I was thinking about glasses of milk. It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't be able to get my latte on the way to work."

"No kidding," added her neighbor. "I forgot about coffee, too. I hate coffee without milk."

Another, a single mother, described a terrible day at work. She had been inundated with problems, her boss had shouted at her, the commute was awful, and to cheer herself up she had bought two decadent chocolate chip cookies on the way home. When she got home, she had to deal with the kids, who were behaving badly, but finally, around nine o'clock, she had got them to bed and settled down in front of the television with her cookies. She needed something to drink with them, and instinctively made for the fridge to pour herself a glass of milk. The carton was in her hand when she remembered the promise she had made, not to consume milk for that week. "It was awful," she remembered. "I didn't know what to do. I thought about drinking some and coming here and lying, but that wouldn't have been right. So then I thought maybe I should come clean, but then perhaps you'd throw me out and I wouldn't get paid. So I put the milk back. And the cookies just weren't the same. Actually it was a bad end to a bad day."

What only half an hour earlier had been a normal research group now came to resemble a support group. Other respondents nodded gravely as the lonely cookie scenario was described, and other, similar experiences began to emerge. All agreed that the last week had greatly heightened their awareness of milk, and that their experience had been like every previous time they had ever run out of milk, only worse because this time it had lasted for seven days. Some indicated that they would be stopping at the store on the way home from the group to make sure that they were stocked up. After all they had been through, they agreed, they didn't want it to happen again for a while.

We wanted Californians to think about milk in a way that they did not normally do, and this experiment had certainly shown that to be a possibility. Somehow, advertising had to affect their minds in the same way, but more than affecting their minds, it also had to affect their behavior. From what we had observed in our initial research, where simply talking about food items like brownies and chocolate chip cookies made people want to eat them and wash them down with milk, we thought that it might be possible to create more milk occasions, so that people would *Me* more milk. But that on its own would not be enough. Usage patterns had to be linked to purchase patterns, so that people would not only use more, but also buy more. Drawing a distinction between the two may seem like splitting hairs, but in fact there is a logical reason for doing so. If people were to use more milk without buying more, they would simply run out faster, and the industry would have gained nothing. Both sides of the equation needed to be affected simultaneously.

Convergence

The strategy consequently went beyond the combination of food and milk to suggest combining complementary foods and no milk. In other words, a deprivation strategy. We wanted to find a way, in advertising, to feature a food with which milk was the perfect complement. Desire would be created for the food, and in turn for milk. The twist was, there would never be any milk, and as a result both the food and the moment would be ruined.

In both creative and media terms, a number of separate ideas began to converge. The first, which somewhat unusually came up in isolation from an overall campaign idea, was a rather unusual tagline. A few weeks before the proposed strategic direction was even agreed with Jeff Manning, the subject of deprivation had come up in a conversation with Jeff Goodby. Some agency team members asked Goodby if he could come up with an interesting phrase that captured this deprivation idea, that they could put on a presentation board for a meeting. He came back with a line that to him "seemed kind of weird"; and by his own admission, he didn't really know what to do with it, but it seemed interesting. If copywriters were to be paid by the word, Jeff wouldn't have gotten rich with this one, because it was only two words:

got milk?

Goodby remembers that when he first showed this phrase to the account team, certain (unnamed) individuals felt that it lacked clarity. Shouldn't it say "have you got enough milk?" Fortunately, he ignored them.

As the evidence began to mount in favor of a deprivation strategy, "got milk?" began to take on a life of its own. Another writer, Scott Burns, had some ideas for television commercials that were like small streams of consciousness, celebrating certain moments when one might need milk, and the foods with which milk was the perfect companion. In every one of these poetic pieces, expectations are raised and then dashed as it is revealed that there is no milk. All finish with the flat question, "got milk?"

He hadn't thought much about the visuals, but we agreed we would expose them to people in focus groups anyway. To get around that problem,

Convergence

we simply asked people to shut their eyes, listen as the scripts were read aloud, and use their imaginations. It would be interesting to hear the images that they conjured up as a result of our stimulus material.

Night

The earth turns its back on the sun. Sirens sing lullabies, and the heart asks questions of the head that send you tossing and turning for answers. And you wrestle doubt from one room to another until you stand face to face with the refrigerator asking it for something to make morning seem a little closer. Something like a glass of milk which usually does the job, unless you don't have milk in which case, well, you better hope you have friends on the other side of the world you can talk to on the phone. got milk?

Coffee

Steamin' Joe. Java. A bit of the bean. Coffee is proof of civilization every bit as much as government or professional sports. Charged with caffeine like a race car, or made peaceful as a pup, it's there for you in the morning with the paper, and it tells you that dinner's done—let the conversation begin.

And nothing improves coffee like milk. Cuz, without it you're just staring down at hot brown liquid worrying about burning your tongue.

got milk?

Brownie

There's not a lot that can go wrong in your life that a brownie can't fix. A bad relationship, the loss of a job, a rainy day or a minor illness are

Serendipity

each and all burdens lightened by a chewy brownie fresh from the oven. Store bought or home-made, just the word "brownie" is usually enough to bring a smile to young and old alike. Unless of course you don't have any milk, in which case a brownie is likely to lodge in your throat and send you stumbling around the room wishing you were someone else instead. got milk?

Cereal

Hot or cold, day or night, a bowl of cereal is a great way to celebrate having a mouth that connects to your stomach. There must be over a hundred kinds of cereal, each one made out of wheat, corn, sugar, granola, oats ... just about anything mankind can put in a box and make up a name for. Best of all and not to be forgotten, all you need is a bowl and spoon ... and that means not much clean up for a whole lot of food fun. And of course you'll be needing milk, or else you're just holding a bunch of dry seeds in a curved dish wondering what stores are open.

got milk?

Reactions to these ideas were fascinating. All seemed very evocative, and most respondents in our groups said that they could relate in some way to each one of the scenarios. Everyone has a sleepless night once in a while, they said, and everyone knows what a brownie tastes like without a glass of milk to wash it down. In the latter example, people told us they could imagine someone staggering around blowing brownie crumbs out of their nose in panic, an amusing prospect indeed. Coffee was somehow a less effective tool, perhaps because many people like to drink it black anyway, and somehow the cereal scenario seemed, well, almost too rational. Perhaps it was because cereal, and coffee too, are more matters of habit than the kind of craving or treat represented by a brownie, or the kind of food that satisfies the late night munchies. Unlike the brownie scenario, people couldn't feel the deprivation in these other descriptions; and if they couldn't feel it, we concluded, they were unlikely to take any action as a result. It still felt like even in the most powerful brownie scenario, people were in a sense observing someone else's pain. We needed to find a way to draw them into the scenario themselves.

The first clue to an answer came from the agency's media department. This may come as a surprise to people in many agencies where the media department generally plays little part in the creative process—the media and creative departments live on separate floors and do not communicate with one another on either a strategic or creative level. On this occasion, while the agency creatives were firing off their first, exploratory idea salvoes, the media people were trying to figure out ways to talk to people at times, and in places, where they were most likely to be able to take some action as a result of seeing or hearing the advertising.

Given that most milk is consumed in the home, it was not difficult to figure out that for the consumption part, at least, television was the most likely medium through which to talk to people within easy reach of their refrigerator. A media plan was presented to Jeff Manning that consisted of a simple floor plan of a house. A circle was drawn, centered on the refrigerator, to represent a 30-foot diameter. Advertising, we said, had to reach people within 30 feet of the fridge if they were going to be able to take any action as a result. Television ads would run to coincide with particular meal or snack occasions, with executions selected to air at specific times based on a particular food that was featured. For example, if a commercial contained a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it might appear at morning or afternoon snack time, or late at night, in the hope of setting off a craving; the same with brownies, cupcakes, or chocolate chip cookies. Instead of traditional media dayparts, the "got milk?" media plans continue to define their dayparts as "breakfast," "snack," "dinner," and so on.

The same logic that suggested people were most likely to be persuaded to consume milk when they were within easy reach of the refrigerator, also applied to the purchase process. If we wanted to set off a craving for a chocolate chip cookie, it made sense to do so in a place where people could conceivably buy one. So why not, the media director suggested, strategically position billboards around grocery stores and near freeway exits, to make people crave our foods and act as a reminder to stop, shop, and avoid the horror of running out?

A very simple creative idea brought this poster idea to life. A beautiful, appetizing, chocolate chip cookie was photographed with a bite taken out, and in the space left by the bite appeared the words, "got milk?" A tray of brownies, fresh from the oven, a succulent peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a pair of cup cakes all got the same treatment (see Figures 7.1 to 7.3). These new executions were once again taken out to focus groups, along with some new T.V scripts. Among them was a hastily written script from Scott Burns, which more than a few people thought would go nowhere. It was about a strange guy who collects memorabilia relating to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. His big chance to translate his obsession into riches comes with a big-money question on a radio show, to which he alone knows the answer. Unfortunately, when he receives the call, his mouth is filled with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he has run out of milk. He cannot talk, and as a result, blows the chance to win $50,000.

Figure 7.1 summary: A highly distorted, high-contrast black and white image depicting a chocolate chip cookie with the text "got milk?" on the right. It is an advertisement image for the California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board, with no data or analytical result to report.

"People won't know Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr," said the naysayers (who will again remain nameless).

"It's too esoteric."

"It's too contrived. I mean, it's a hell of a coincidence that the radio show just happens to call the biggest Aaron Burr freak on the planet. People won't believe it."

They did more than believe it. They loved it. We presented the idea to the groups using just a script (see Figure 7.4), making use of a mouthful of cookie which I, as moderator, was able to spray over the respondents for dramatic effect. Their response, once we had cleaned up, was very encouraging. First, their body language showed that they were completely sucked in by the story. They laughed, and at the moment our hero was desperate to talk but couldn't, you could almost see their mouths filling up too (like when you are really involved in a movie, and someone's underwater and you find you're trying to hold your breath as long as they do).

Figure 7.4 summary: A text document presenting the first draft script for a project titled Aaron Burr. The script describes a visual scene of a man in a cluttered apartment obsessed with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, featuring a dialogue between the man and a radio DJ regarding a giveaway question about who shot Hamilton. It depicts a comedic sequence where the man struggles to answer the question due to a peanut butter sandwich.

They related to the feeling of peanut butter in your mouth without milk to wash it down; they related to the feeling of knowing the answer to a prize question on the radio (and not getting the chance to answer it); and they also enjoyed the absurdity of the whole situation. Far from distancing people through its potential logic flaws, as had been feared, it had engaged them on a visceral level. It was a powerful metaphor for the agony and frustration of running out of milk.

What did it say to people?

"Don't let this happen to you," said one man. "Let this be a warning!

Others began to talk about experiences in their own lives that felt like the one they had just "seen" through the script rendition. Almost all their descriptions involved frustration, and they were doubly painful because they were avoidable. "All you have to do is stock up, and it won't happen." It seemed like they were getting the intended message.

Some respondents mentioned the way that running out of milk "brings out the worst in you," and makes you do things, or at the very least think things, of which you are later ashamed. One man started to tell a story from one day the week before, when, as was his routine, he stumbled downstairs at 7 AM to have his morning cereal. He got his plate, poured in the cereal, sliced up a banana on top, then went to the fridge to get milk. The carton was empty. A murmur rose up from the other respondents. Heads shook. Eyes rolled. They'd been there too.

"Someone had drunk it and put the damn carton back empty. I was so mad ..." More sympathetic nods.

They all had such a "someone" in their lives, too. The victim had been forced to eat the banana slices, encrusted with dry granola, had thrown the bowl of cereal away, and got to work hungry. It had, he said, ruined his day, because he had started in a bad mood that just never went away.

In a situation like that, offered another group member, "it (feels) so bad that you'd even steal it from your kid." The others laughed. Yes, it was that frustrating that you would go to almost any lengths.

You were capable of bad things. "Never mind stealing it from your kid," said another. "I'd steal it from my cat." (The creative people watching the group from behind the mirror agreed that this scenario, conjured up by the respondents themselves, was pretty terrific.

It was later to form the basis of a very popular T.V commercial. See Figure 7.6.)

Figure 7.6 summary: A series of high-contrast, black-and-white frames from a video titled "Baby & Cat." The images are heavily processed and fragmented, appearing as distorted silhouettes and patterns. This is a visual sequence used for demonstration, with the final frame displaying the text "got milk?"

The groups were next shown the billboard ideas, and their appetites were seriously piqued. Almost universally, they were upset that I had none of the featured foods and glasses of milk available for immediate consumption.

The combination of the television ideas and poster executions seemed to be very powerful. Overall, the message that respondents told us they got from the incipient campaign was that they should check their refrigerators to make sure they didn't run out of milk. If there wasn't enough, they should go buy some. If there was, well, maybe they should have some right now. If I had wanted to cheat and pay respondents to say the right things, I wouldn't have dared to ask them to play back our strategy so closely.

Jeff Goodby put his finger right on the way that the campaign seemed to be working. "The food and milk together is pretty interesting. Then you take the milk away, and it gets even more interesting. But you give someone a mouthful of that food and no milk, then you've really got their attention."

A week after the focus groups, we conducted a small follow-up telephone survey among the respondents. We wanted to see what, if anything, they remembered from the discussion, and more important, whether they had done anything differently in relation to milk in the six or seven days that had elapsed since they were exposed to our first advertising ideas. It was the first time I had ever done anything like this, and I was somewhat nervous about establishing a very dangerous precedent. (Clearly, their responses could not be regarded as anything more than anecdotal, or directional, and I was concerned that not everyone would take them that way.) The feedback we got, however, was both surprising and encouraging.

First, individual executions that had been presented were recalled with incredible clarity and detail, especially the "Aaron Burr" T.V idea, and the outdoor campaign. And second, more than two-thirds of those respondents we were able to contact claimed that their milk-related behavior had deviated from the norm over the past few days.

One woman told us that she had surprised even herself. "Before I came to that research," she said, "I don't think I'd had a glass of milk in, oh, probably 15 years." She did use milk, but only as an ingredient in coffee and on cereal. "But on the way home," she continued, "I stopped at a Seven-Eleven and bought some chocolate chip cookies and a gallon of milk, and I actually drank a glass. And I've had one every night since." Hers was the most extreme conversion, but others noted that they had bought extra milk on normal visits to the store, "just in case," and a number of respondents reported unusual consumption of the featured foods, like brownies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and cookies, as a result of cravings that they attributed directly to our discussion.

Even though we could make no projections based on what we were hearing, one thing was very clear—the idea was having some effect, on both consumption and purchase. Jeff Manning and his board were delighted and gave their blessing for the campaign to go to the next stage. For the first year's production and media, it was a 25-million-dollar decision, and they made it based in part on the evidence of the agency's focus groups, but largely, I believe, on gut feelings. As people whose entire professional lives had been spent in the dairy industry, but also as family men, the idea simply felt right. Which is even more remarkable considering that the 25 million dollars they were spending was their own money.

The outdoor campaign was produced almost exactly as concepted, the only difference being that the food shots became even more appetizing. It was supplemented by drivetime radio commercials, designed to remind people on their way home from work to stop off and stock up, just in case.

The majority of media dollars, though, went to television, where four commercials launched the campaign. The lead spot was the "Aaron Burr" story (Figure 7.5), rewritten and extended to 60 seconds in length, and with a depth of detail brought by director Michael Bay that made an already strong idea quite remarkable. In another 30-second spot, "Couple," a young man finds his partner in the kitchen late at night. "What's the matter, couldn't you sleep?" he asks. She gives him an icy stare in return. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?" she responds, icily.

He knows he's been busted and makes the fatal decision to save himself by coming clean. The problem is, he doesn't know what he's supposed to have done. "Is this about the ring I gave you?"

No response. "Listen, cubic zirconia looks just like a real diamond." She stares at her ring and glares at him. "Is this about my time in prison?" Now he's really in trouble. Another moment's silence, then she finally speaks. "You drank the last of the milk."

He notices the bowl of dry cereal in front of her and smiles weakly (as if smiling's going to do him any good) as an announcer's voice says, "got milk?"

Another of the opening spots, "Baby and Cat" (Figure 7.6), was a tribute to the experience and wit of our deprived focus groups. A bleary-eyed man arrives at the breakfast table, greeting his baby, who is drinking milk from a bottle.

"Hey, boopy!" The family cat, drinking milk from a bowl, watches the guy as he pours out a bowl of cereal. He goes to pour on the milk, but all he gets is a trickle. He's desperate. He eyes his child's bottle, as the music to the gunfight in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly begins. The baby returns his stare. The guy looks at the cat and her bowl of milk. The cat stares back. He has to do something, and his arm stretches out toward the baby's bottle.

The baby leans back, protecting his milk, and under his breath mutters, "I don't think so, baldy!" The voice-over asks, "got milk?" and as the visual fades to black, the last sound we hear is the indignant hiss of the cat.

Closing the Deal

The relationship between milk and its companion foods also gave rise to some ideas outside the realm of mass media that gave the campaign a much greater presence than advertising alone could have achieved, and most important of all, brought the message right into the stores, where advertising usually cannot reach.

The first element was a promotional campaign, which was based entirely on companion food items, the logic being that if people would use more of that food, they would also be sure to use more milk. A number of national advertisers entered into joint promotions with the C.F.M.P.A.B, including General Mills, Kraft General Foods, Nestle, Nabisco, and Mother's Cookies. Both General Mills and Nabisco cooperated on joint "got milk?" T.V advertising with their Trix and Oreo brands (see Figures 7.7 and 7.8). In addition, General Mills allowed a poster to run with "got milk?" in place of its Wheaties logo (Figure 7.9), printed "got milk?" on millions of packs of Wheaties, Cheerios, and Total, and on-pack promotions on a variety of brands allowed customers instant redemption off their milk purchases.

Figure 7.8 summary: A high-contrast, grainy black-and-white photograph of a man's face and shoulder, which appears to be a still from a film or a processed image. The figure is a portrait of a person identified as Oreo Kane.

।Figure 7.9 summary: An image showing a fragmented or distorted depiction of a Wheaties cereal box and a person. It appears to be a visual artifact or an abstract artistic rendering rather than a data-driven figure, likely serving as an example of the CFMPAB process described in the text.

In addition to the promotional efforts, point-of-purchase displays were set up in stores across the state, with "got milk?" shelf-talkers set up not in the milk aisle but in aisles that sold companion foods such as cookies and cereal (Figure 7.11). Small versions of billboards were placed on grocery carts (Figure 7.10), and in convenience stores "got milk?" ads were even placed on the floor to lead people to the dairy section. If all else failed, "got milk?" checkout dividers (Figure 7.12) were also produced, to provide a final reminder as the groceries made their last journey along the checkout conveyor belt.

Figure 7.10 summary: A photo of a grocery cart advertising display featuring a screen with the text "got milk?" and a background image of milk splashes. It is an example of grocery cart advertising, with no data or analytical result to report.

Figure 7.11 summary: A high-contrast, black-and-white image of a shelf-talker advertisement that reads "got milk?" set against a complex, textured background. The image depicts a specific marketing asset, the CFMPAB "got milk?" shelf-talker.

Figure 7.12 summary: A high-contrast, black-and-white photograph showing a checkout divider with the text "got milk?" printed on it. It is a descriptive image used to identify a specific object in a scene.

Campaign Expansion

The campaign was launched in November 1993, and between then and the time of writing, in June 1997, Califor-mans have been exposed to 23 different "got milk?" poster executions, 25 T.V commercials, and 25 radio commercials.

Milk deprivation has been used as a means of breaking a hardened criminal in an N.Y.P.D Blue—style interrogation and has caused a priest to forget who he is for a moment and beat up a faulty vending machine. In my personal favorite from the campaign, "Heaven" (Figure 7.13), milk was used as a device to torture an evil yuppie.

The spot opens on the aforementioned yuppie, talking into a cellular phone as he swaggers down the street. "Tom, can I make a suggestion?" he says, then shouts "you're fired" and barges onto a crossing, pushing past an old lady who falls down. He ignores her and doesn't see the huge truck bearing down on him. When he sees it, it's too late. The horn sounds, and the spot fades to black.

A white dove flutters, and a beautiful woman murmurs, "Welcome … to Eternity." Gentle music starts as the yuppie takes in his new surroundings, and the woman shuts a door. He is in a large, white, sunlit room. There are beautiful white flowers, a white goldfish swims in a bowl, and on a table is a large plate of enormous chocolate chip cookies. He takes a bite, takes one more look around, and laughs in delight. "Heaven!" he crows, heading for the refrigerator.

He opens the huge door, and inside there are hundreds of cartons of milk. "yes!" he exults, and punches the air. Funny . . . the first one is empty. And the second. And the third.

His puzzlement turns to concern, then confusion, then panic as he pulls empty carton after empty carton from the shelves. "Wait a minute," he gasps, on his hands and knees in front of the fridge, "where am I?" His answer is supplied by the words, "got milk?" which just happen to be in flames.

Hungry and thirsty children and kittens have glared from billboards, daring passing motorists and pedestrians to stop and buy milk or risk the wrath of their own families, and radio commercials have evoked the horror of a "town without milk," ending their description of the inhabitants' misery with a gentle statement that "of course you've got milk in your fridge . . . don't you?"

Got Results?

This story began with the opening paragraph of an article written by Bruce Horowitz in the Los Angeles Times in May 1994, just six months after Californians had seen "got milk?" for the first time. Much to his and everyone else's surprise, he wrote, that "yawner," milk, was the subject of an advertising campaign that in a very short period of time, had "developed a near-cult following." The campaign had already passed the long-running "Does a Body Good" milk advertising in terms of awareness, and both qualitative and quantitative research revealed that "got milk?" was a favorite of all advertising campaigns among Californians. People even admitted that they were affected by it: Cravings were triggered for the featured foods, and trips to the store were triggered out of fear of running out.

This was very encouraging, but generations of milk researchers had probably been encouraged by the "I-should-drink-more-milk-than-I-do" numbers, too. And as Jeff Manning was always quick to point out, people liking the campaign and saying nice things wasn't going to keep him (or the agency) employed beyond the initial two-year commitment.

Fortunately for the C.F.M.P.A.B, Manning, and ourselves, the anecdotal evidence we were hearing in our initial research was not just talk.

First, the number of Californian households claiming to use milk on a regular basis appeared to have increased. Nielsen's Household Panel showed an increase in milk's penetration from 70 percent of households in 1993 to 74 percent in 1995. This news came as a bit of a surprise, as it had really not been our intention to gain additional households; but if it meant additional volume, we would accept it without argument.

Our primary aim had been to persuade people who already consumed milk regularly to consume more, and prior to the campaign launch, we had commissioned a tracking study through Marc Research to monitor our target's milk usage. Between October 1994, before the advertising broke, and the end of 1995, the average number of occasions on which people claimed to use milk had risen from 3.9 times in the past 24 hours, to 4.3 times. Nielsen's Household Panel also showed increases in milk consumption over the previous year in all but the first two months of the campaign. Where California had previously trailed the rest of the United States in per capita and household milk consumption, it quickly overhauled the other states and has since extended its lead. As consumption in the rest of the United States continued to decline, it provided further confirmation that something different was going on in California.

In terms of milk volume, the intention of the C.F.M.P.A.B from the start had been to stem the decline in their sales, which in 1993 were down 3.6 percent over the previous year. It soon appeared, though, that the campaign had helped to do more than stem the decline, as milk sales in California began to rise. In 1994, the first year of "got milk?", California Department of Food and Agriculture figures show that milk sales increased by 0.7 percent over the previous year — an increase of 5.2 million gallons, with a retail value of $13 million. This was the first increase in milk sales recorded anywhere in the United States in the last decade (or, for what it's worth, anywhere in the world). Sales in 1995 were down by a percentage point, in 1996 were up slightly over 1995, and in 1997, the campaign's fourth year, they appeared to yet again be on the rise. Note: The California Department of Food and Agriculture has revised its figures after identification of some errors in data collection, which means that some of these numbers may differ slightly from those previously released.

On the surface, those numbers may not appear very impressive, but if the previous steady decline is considered, the 1994 numbers alone represent a swing of 4.3 percent, or 33 million gallons, or $83 million. The California Milk Processors estimate that if the decline had remained unchecked (they compare their actual performance to a "nose dive" scenario, whereby they assume a continued 3 percent annual decline), they could have lost a total of 170 million gallons of volume between 1993 and 1998. I personally regard that scenario as too extreme, but it is quite possible that about 10 percent of their volume, or 75 million gallons, has been protected over the life of the campaign.

In the summer of 1995, the D.M.I (the body representing all dairy producers, or farmers, in the United States) decided, on the basis of the success of "got milk?" in California, to adopt the campaign to run nationally, with an $80-million annual media spend. They pay the C.F.M.P.A.B a royalty to run their campaign, and the C.F.M.P.A.B ploughs the money back into media. The D.M.I, incidentally, has subjected the campaign to extensive quantitative copy testing, which in almost all respects confirmed the findings of our own, less scientific (and much cheaper) qualitative research.

They concluded that "got milk?" was "memorable and entertaining," "most likely to generate awareness and interest in milk," clearly communicated "need or strong desire for milk," and generated "increased expectations of drinking milk in the next week." The campaign consistently and greatly outscored control samples and historical milk databases on many key measures. Thank God for that.

In the first year that "got milk?" was broadcast nationally, milk volume increased by a similar amount to that seen in the campaign's first year in California.

"Got milk?" remains among the most popular advertising in the United States, with U.S.A Today's Adtrack study ranking it as the second most popular campaign in America in March 1996. For the methodological reasons outlined in Chapter 3, I don't regard that as great cause for celebration, but as my dad likes to say, it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And I suppose that while a sample repre- sentative of the population at large may be misleading for Isuzu or Porsche, it can't be that far wrong for a product as ubiquitous as milk.

One of the surest signs of a campaign's success in the real world is the degree to which it is able to enter popular culture, and "got milk?" has appeared unsolicited in cartoons and on popular television shows, like Cybill, Mad About You, The Cosby Show, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On an episode of Roseanne, Roseanne poured an entire gallon of milk over her sister's head, then asked her if she'd "got milk?" In San Francisco, we've seen "got porn?" on signs on the outside of sex clubs, graffiti on the side of a bus where the not-too-substantial breasts of a well-known "waif" model had been covered with the words, "got milk?", and (my personal favorite) one of our copywriters recently spotted a billboard at a county fair, featuring a large picture of a goat and the line, "goat milk?"

The campaign has also been very successful from a merchandising point of view. My children wear "got milk?" baby clothes and drink from "got milk?" bottles. Adults too can wear the logo on their T-shirts and drink coffee from "got milk?" mugs. Sometimes I wonder whether it's gone too far (apparently, special shirts for nursing mothers were regarded as too much), but I must admit when I see the stuff in stores or on people I still get a little kick out of it.

One day, about three years into the campaign, Jeff Manning got a telephone call from someone at Mattel. He later admitted that he thought they must have dialed him by mistake, but it turned out they really did want to talk to him. Would he be interested, they asked, in allowing Mattel to produce a "got milk?" Barbie ^{TM} doll? Manning said that it took him all of about two seconds to make up his mind (of course, he said yes).

So, advertising really does work in some mysterious ways.

People often ask me what lessons can be learned from the campaign's success, and in many cases, what they really mean is, how can they do "got milk?" for their client? The answer is, they probably can't, any more than we could do "got milk?" for any other of our clients (or would even have done it for the California Milk Processors at a different point in time). A deprivation strategy such as that which provided the foundation for "got milk?" only works when not having the product creates a crisis, and for most products it would simply not be true. I suppose it could be said that running out of toilet paper at certain moments represents a crisis of massive proportions, but a deprivation strategy would not necessarily help any individual brand of toilet paper. An advertising idea, however powerful, cannot simply be painted over other categories, products, or consumers. It has to start from the inside and work out.

If there are any general lessons to be learned from "got milk?" they have more to do with the approach to the campaign than with the nature of the solution itself. I hope that the preceding description provides good illustrations of some of the more general points I have made throughout this book: that the best ideas result from the combination of many different points of view; that industry wisdom is sometimes not so wise; that research should not start with a blank sheet of paper but with hypotheses; that research needs to be as creative and expansive as the process of developing advertising ideas if it is to succeed in uncovering the truths of consumers' relationships with any product or category; and that the success of a research project is not directly proportional to its level of sophistication and expense.

The best research and strategic thinking in the world is absolutely worthless without a creative execution of similar stature. Indeed, the power of the strategic thinking of "got milk?" and many of the other campaigns mentioned in this book was not apparent until someone (not the planner, I must stress again) came up with a great creative execution. As my old boss in London used to say, "you don't have a strategy until you have an ad." Only a memorable advertising execution can prove that an abstract, intellectual stra tegic idea is capable of tangible, emotional execution and response.

Finally, the beauty of "got milk?" lies in its simplicity, and the simple, obvious solution is nothing to be ashamed of. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Nobel laureate biochemist, once put it, "Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different." And that is the essence of planning.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a number of people for their direct contributions to this book.

I wrote it for one reason, which was simply because Andrew Jaffe, the Executive Editor of Adweek magazine, and Ruth Mills, of John Wiley & Sons, asked me to. I would like to thank both of them for extending the offer and sincerely hope that they will not regret it. In particular, I would like to thank Ruth for her support, guidance, and feedback at every stage of the book's development. Thanks also to Linda Witzling and Monika Jain of John Wiley & Sons and Christine Ducker and Christine Furry of North Market Street Graphics.

My friend, Adrian Morgan, designed the jacket. Actually, he designed a lot of jackets, redesigned them, and started over once I changed the book's title. Thank you, Adrian, and please forgive me.

In addition to making my life easier and keeping me sane over the past four years, my assistant, Lynn Rubenzer, has provided invaluable logistic and creative support for this book. Without her help, I would have quite simply failed to complete it. Bess Cocke, the incomparable Ron Urbach, Ruchele Eisenman, and especially Michelle Lamphere provided the legal advice and attention to detail in the complex area of permission to reproduce advertising images that hopefully will protect me from litigation. Thanks also to Greg Martinez, Max Fallon, Suzie Watson, Suzee Barrabee, Michael Stock, Beau Bouverat, and Stacy Higgins, who pro- duced the visual materials; to Scott Burns for his recollections and original scripts from the "got milk?" campaign; to Maria Thomas and Rachel Elgin, who helped track down some of my stranger and more elusive facts and figures; and to Bruce Gifford, for his endless supply of weird stories. Thanks also to Lionel Carreon and, again, Stacy Higgins for their help in compiling the credits.

Several other of my friends helped out in various capacities: Roger Williams provided encouragement and a much-needed explanation of the finer detail of publishing contracts; Mark Barden, Tim Hollins, and Jerome Conlon were willing to discuss new scientific theory and recommended much interesting reading material on the subject; and Kevin Dundas read my manuscript as I wrote it, suggested changes, and was prepared to read it again once I had made them. Without his feedback and enthusiasm for the project, I probably would not have finished.

I would also like to thank Jeff Goodby and Sue Smith of G.S&P; Mary Carole Bahr, a student from the Ad Center at Virginia Commonwealth University; Professor Kathy O'Donnel from San Francisco State University; and Sheira Furse of Hewlett-Packard, for their helpful comments on what at the time I naively thought was my finished manuscript.

For giving their permission for me to include their advertising in the book, and for their support along the way, I would like to thank the following people: Stephen Palmer and Niall Murdoch of the British Guardian newspaper; Sean Clarkin of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America; Carol Eleazer and Diane Cantello of unum Corporation; Joel Ewanick of Porsche Cars of North America; Mary George of Bell Helmets; Dick Gillmore of American Isuzu Motors; Ken Mills and Julie Petrini of Polaroid; John Bartelme and Bob Fox of Foster Farms; Bruce MacDiarmid and Tina Salem of Chevys Fresh Mex; Jean Patterson of K.P.M.G Peat Marwick; Signe Bjorndal of Norwegian Cruise Line; Jeff Manning of the California Milk Processors Advisory Board; and Rhonda Ihrke and Pam Becker of General Mills. Too numerous to mention here are all the photographers, agents, actors, and models who gave me permission to use their work and likenesses, and who are all identified in the credits on page 288. Thank you all.

That is already a very long list of people, but I ask for your indulgence to allow me to step back from the book for a moment.

My only ambition, until I graduated college, was to spend the rest of my days teaching geography and coaching cricket in some rural English school. The fact that I'm now working in advertising never ceases to surprise me, never mind writing a book on the subject, so whether they meant to or not, I am very grateful to the following people who created the series of accidents that led to the book.

Without Toby Nash and Ivan Pollard, it would never have occurred to me to even apply for a job in an advertising agency. I think I should thank them for that. There are many other things I could say about them, but I'll save that for another book.

I would also like to thank the guy who turned down the trainee job at B.M.P in London in 1984, to become a stock-broker. I was fourth on B.M.P's list of three, so without him I would probably still be selling dog food from the trunk of my car. Whoever and wherever you are, I hope you survived the stock market crash in 1987.

At B.M.P I was fortunate to work with some truly remarkable people. Nick Hough opened the door to the agency's Courage business and a host of opportunities. Peter Field, Andrew Ockwell, and James Best trained me; and when Peter left to join another agency, it was James and Andrew who suggested that I might like to step into Peter's vacant planning job. That is how I inadvertently became a planner. David Cowan agreed to let me transfer into his department, despite the fact that I had a degree in geography, and Ross Barr, Chris Cowpe, and Paul Feldwick tolerated my continued presence there in later years. I would like to thank them all for the opportunities that they presented to me. To Chris Cowpe and Chris Powell I owe a special debt of thanks. They had the confidence to let me make a new business presentation after only two years in the agency, and after I had screwed that up, they let me make another. I know I wouldn't have let me do it. Thanks also to Tom Rod-well for the cricketing adventures and the realization that it was only advertising, and should never be taken too seriously. In that regard, this list would certainly be incomplete if it did not include Bill Lea and Derek Morris.

Many of the aforementioned were also instrumental in my move to the United States, to affiliate agency Goodby, Berlin & Silverstem. For that I must also thank Andy Berlin, who had the idea in the first place; Peter Jones, who helped arrange an intercompany transfer; and let's not forget my trusty immigration attorney, Richard Pettier, thanks to whom I have so far avoided deportation.

Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein, and Colin Probert hired me, and they and the other G.S&P partners, Harold Sogard, Steve Simpson, and Robert Riccardi, continue to inspire and challenge me. Their collective philosophy is unique in our industry for its devotion to excellence, combined with true respect and affection for the people around them. Sure, people are hired at G.S&P for the quality of their work and for their intellect, but also for who they are as people, and whether a six hour flight with them from San Francisco to New York would be an interesting and enjoyable experience. I know it is an environment that has encouraged me to do my best work, and for that I thank them and everyone else at G.S&P with whom I have worked.

Hundreds of people have passed through the door of G.S&P since I joined the agency in 1989, and all have changed the place in their own ways. I would like to mention four people in particular who really helped to establish planning: the creative teams of Steve Simpson and Tracy Wong; and David Page and Dave O'Hare, who, with their work for Chevys, the Northern California Honda Dealers, and Isuzu, proved to both the agency and the outside world that planning, when used correctly, could inspire, guide, and even save great creative ideas. Finally, at G.S&P, I must give thanks to the planners themselves: Carole Rankin, Dan Baxter, Mary Stervinou, Irina Heirakuji, Jeffre Jackson, Kieran Darby, Linda Casey, Jo-Anne Fernando, Cathy Clift, Emily Reid, John Thorpe, Debbie Mobley, Laura Fornian, Andrew Teagle, Kelly Evans-Pfeifer, Sue Smith, Barbara Borst, Diana Kapp, Josh Mandel, Pam Scott, Kari Marubbio, Rosemary Hallgarten, Maria Thomas, Rachel Elgin, and Margot Bogue.

Almost done. Stepping even further back from the book and work, I would like to thank three teachers who encouraged my interests in reading, writing, and acting, all of which seem to be useful in the advertising business. I was lucky to be taught English at the same time by two remarkable men: John Charlesworth, who set the highest standards imaginable and who, as he reads this, is probably shaking his head and wondering what happened to all the grammar I was taught, while making corrections with his trusty pencil; and Robin Gracey, who lent me The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and cast me in the lead role in my first big stage production. Robin, you were an inspiration.

The third of these teachers was my own father, David, who was the principal of my elementary school and taught me personally from the ages of 8 to 11. It was great, except that it was a small, rural school of only four teachers, another of whom was my mother, Bridgett. My mother was an exceptional teacher, but the presence of her and my father in the same building meant that whenever another kid got into trouble, I would be dragged out into the schoolyard and beaten up (by the kid, not my parents). But that taught me to fight dirty, and that, too, is useful in advertising.

My parents taught me the value of hard work, humility, and respect for others, as well as imbuing in me a spirit of independence. For all the opportunities you gave me, thank you both very much.

Finally (yes, finally), the most important thanks of all — to my wife and best friend, Lynda, who has moved 5,000 miles from her family, and endured the traveling, late nights, and bad moods that accompany a job like mine without complaint. Well, not exactly without complaint, but close enough for me to be a very lucky man. She supported my taking the time to write this book, even though we have, as of September 1997, a two-year-old son, Cameron, and a six-month-old daughter, Hannah (call myself a planner?), and there have been times when I would probably have been much better employed changing diapers and tidying the kitchen than typing. Thanks too to Cameron and Hannah for their ability to sleep at night. Without that, none of this would have been possible.

If the above list seems excessive, don't hold it against me. There are far too few opportunities in this life to say "thank you" to the people who have really made a difference, and I am delighted to be able to do so now.

Jon Steel

September 1997

Bibliography

The following is a selection of books and articles that have informed and inspired certain parts of this book. You will notice that very few of them are specific to account planning and research. I consider this a good thing.

Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language: Towns; Buildings; Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Bendinger, Bruce, ed. The Book of Gossage. Chicago: The Copy Workshop, 1995.

Copy

Workshop, 1993.

Bernbach, William. "Facts Are Not Enough." Paper from the 1980 aaaa Annual Meeting. New York: American Association of Advertising Agencies, 1980.

Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1973.

Brown, Gordon, et al. How Advertising Affects the Sales of Packaged Goods Brands. Leamington Spa: Millward Brown, 1991.

Butterfield, Leslie, ed. Excellence in Advertising: The IPA Guide to Best Practice. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.

Caples, John. Tested Advertising Methods: How to Profit by Removing Guesswork. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Boston: Shambhala, 1991.

Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.

Channon, Charles. "The Difference Between Effectiveness and Efficiency." Speech delivered at the ADMAP/Campaign seminar. London: March 1990.

Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. "Building Your Company's Vision." Harvard Business Review 74, no. 5 (September-October 1996): 65-77.

Cowley, Don, ed. How to Plan Advertising. London: Cassell Educational Ltd./Account Planning Group, 1987. --------, ed. Understanding Brands: By Ten People Who Do. London: Kogan Page Ltd., 1991.

Delaney, Tim. "Planning: Are We in Need of a Reformation?" Speech delivered at the UK Account Planning Group, July 1988.

Feldwick, Paul. A Brief Guided Tour through the Copy Testing Jungle. London: The Account Planning Group, n.d.

Fortini-Campbell, Lisa. Hitting the Sweet Spot. Chicago: The Copy Workshop, 1992.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Tipping Point." The New Yorker (June 3, 1996): 32-38.

Hedges, Alan. Testing to Destruction: A Critical Examination of the Uses of Research in Advertising. London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 1974.

Hopkins, Claude. Scientific Advertising. New York: Lord & Thomas, 1923 (Crown, 1966).

Jaworski, Joseph. Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1996.

Jungk, Robert. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958.

Lodish, L. "The How Advertising Works Project." Proceedings of ARF Key Issues Workshop on Marketplace Advertising Research. New York: November 1991.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince: And Other Political Writings. London: Everyman/J. M. Dent, 1995.

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 1976.

March, Robert H. Physics for Poets. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Morita, Akio. Made in Japan. London: William Collins Sons & Company Ltd., 1987.

Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Random House, 1983. ------. Confessions of an Advertising Man. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

Ohmae, Kenichi. The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.

Peters, Tom. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Pollitt, Stanley. "How I Started Account Planning in Agencies." Campaign. (April 20, 1979): 30.

Popcorn, Faith. The Popcorn Report. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Reeves, Rosser. Reality in Advertising. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.

Rosenblatt, Roger. The Man in the Water: Essays and Stories. New York: Random House, 1993.

Strean, Herbert, ed. The Use of Humor in Psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994.

Toobin, Jeffrey. "The Marcia Clark Verdict." The New Yorker (September 9, 1996): 58-71.

Watson, James D. The Double Helix. New York: Mentor, 1968.

Wheatley, Margaret. Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organizations from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1992.

Wing, R. L. The Art of Strategy: A New Translation of Sun Tzu's Classic The Art of War. New York: Dolphin/Double-day, 1988.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press, 1977.

Abbott, David, 48

Abbott Mead Vickers, ad agency, 48

Account planning:

as advertising discipline, xv, 31 to 57 agency commitment to, 44 to 45 consumer representative in creative development research, 210 to 212 control mechanism ("right of veto") for, 198 to 202 "cult of," 49 early development of, 38 to 41 essence of, 269 "getting it right" credo of, 41 to 48 and indication of consumer response in judging advertising content, 195 and new consumer alliance, 31 to 57 necessary skills of, 48 to 54 relationships with account management, 46 to 47 relationships with creatives, 46, 47 to 48 resources required, 45 to 46 versus "traditional research," 61 to 62

Account Planning Group (U.K), 208, 210

admap, 20

Advertising:

art versus science in, xiv, 15 to 25 awards:

Cannes, 15, 212

Effie, 18, 56, 212

One Show, 15, 212 problem of, and value of, 14 to 15 building relationships with consumers as effective principle of, 13 to 19, 1 to 29 creative revolution in, led by Bill Bernbach, 33 to 34 current popularity in Britain, 32 to 33 effectiveness, 11 to 13, 17 to 13, 42 to 45, 195 historical British intolerance for, 31 to 33 influence of, xii lack of trust in, 9 to 10, 22 new model for, 22 to 25 principles of successful human relationships as pattern for, 7 to 9 as pure art form, minority view of, xiv to-sales ratios, xi saturation, 10 to 11

-as-science: counterproductive to reaching consumers, xiv limitations of the "scientific method," 15 to 25 three critical perspectives of, 4 to 5 as two-way communication, after Howard Gossage, 7 to 8

Advertising Age, 198

Advertising agencies:

creative department tensions in, 12 to 15 media department's role in creative process, 245 to 246

Advertising Science (Hopkins):

on advertising as "science," 16 as influence on advertisers, 6

Adweek (magazine), 18, 42, 48, 56, 199

Alka-Seltzer, ad campaign for, 33

American Association of Advertising Agencies, 13

American Isuzu Motors, see Isuzu

American Marketing Association, 18, 56

Animatics, 193

Aron, Adam, 225 to 226

Art, in advertising, 11 to 15 inevitable commercial nature of, 12 magic of, 15 potential as obstacle, not aid, to per- suasion, 15

Accent of Man, The (Bronowski), 231

Barbie trademark, 267

Barr, Ross, 53 to 4

Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London ad agency, 48, 149

Baxter, Dan, 61

Bay, Michael, 252

Bedbury, Scott, on "traditional research" as enemy of creativity, 191

Bell Helmets, ad campaign for, xvin, 161 to 166

Berlin, Andy, 200

Bernbach, Bill:

on basic human instincts, 135 on creation of statistics, 59 on effective, creative advertising philosophy, 13 Bernbach, Bill (Continued):

leader of creative revolution in advertising, xv, 33 to 34 on molding public opinion, 59 on "the power of an idea," 33 on realm of imagination and ideas, 103

Boase Massimi Pollitt (B.M.P), London ad agency, 2, A, 11, 34 to 42, 52, 53, 76,

208

Bohr, Niels, 22

Brand(s):

creative development research in capturing essence/character of, 196 establishment of, 11 to 12 relationship of, with users, doctrine of Bill Bernbach, 33

Brief Guided Tour Through the Copy-Testing Jungle, A (Feldwick), 208

Bronowski, Jacob, on essence of science,

231

Brown, Arnold, futurist, 86

Brown, Gordon, on inadequacy of persua- sion scores, 207

Burnett, Leo, 36 on advertisers' identification with con- sumers, 9 to 10

Burnham, Pat, 48

Burns, Scott, 242, 246

Bush, George, 87

Butterfield, Leslie, on role of planner in creative development research, 210 to 211,212

Cage, Nicholas, 197

California Fluid Milk Processors' Advisory Board (C.F.M.P.A.B), see "got milk?"

Campaign (ad magazine), 20, 38 to 39, 150, 195

Chance, role of, in successful advertising, 25

Change, as powerful, constructive force, 15, 17, 19

Channon, Charles, on distinction between effectiveness and efficiency, 20

Cheerios, 256

Chevys Mexican Restaurants:

ad campaign for, 18, 205, 212 to 222 creative development research for,

216 to 218

Chiat, Jay, 42 to 43

Chiat/Day, ad agency, 42, 48

Clark, Marcia, 97

Clinton, Bill, 86, 160

Clow, Lee, 48 Cobain, Kurt, 87

Coca-Cola Corporation, and New Coke debacle, 72 to 73

Cochrane, Johnny, 97

Common sense, as foundational principle of best advertising research, xvi,

104 to 105

Confessions of an Advertising Man (Ogilvy), 1

Consumers:

as contributors to advertising solutions, xvi genera! failure to involve, in advertising communication, 1 to 29 identification with, for successful advert- ising, 9 to 10 involvement of, in effective advertising,

1 to 29:

in communication, 6 to 7 in development of communication, 5 to 6 throughout process, 195 to 196 relationships with, as central premise of account planning, 13 to 19, 1 to 29,

101, 195 research done to versus done with, prevalence of, 22 to 23

Copy-testing:

in creative evaluation, 206 to 209

Coupland, Douglas, on Generation X, 87

Coupons, as means of interacting with consumers, championed by

Howard Gossage, 8

Cowpe, Chris, 35 to 38

Cracknell, Andrew, on creative briefing, 150, 169

Creative brief/briefing, xvi, 139 to 188 as ad to influence creative team, 149 to 150 as bridge between smart strategic thinking and great advertising, 140 client role in, 143 to 149 creatives' input to, 180 to 182 debate concerning value of, 140 to 141 definition of, 139 to 142 doesn't always provide the answer, 182 to 187 format of, 152 to 153 communication of main idea, 168 to 173 objectives of advertising, 157 to 159 purpose of advertising, 153 to 157 strategy for planting main idea, 173 to 178 support, 178, 179 target audience, 159 to 168 good ad as sine qua non of good brief, 188 great briefs are simple, 151 to 152 great briefs are simple, 151 to 152 as means to end of distinctive/relevant ad campaign, 142 misperceptions concerning, 142 to 148 no-brief option of, 187 to 188 parameters concerning, 143 to 149 three primary objectives of, 141

Creative development research, xvi, 189 to 229 aims of, 194 to 196 and bad consumer response, 222 focus groups versus one-on-one interviews, 202-20S "got milk?", 241 to 256 improving ideas, 212 to 222 need for open minds, 196 to 202 as negotiation, 222 to 229 quantitative, 205 to 209 stimulus material, 192 to 194 subjectivity, 109, 211 who should conduct, 209 to 212

Creative evaluation, 206 to 209 role of objectivity and detachment in, 211

Creativity, definition, 122

Creativity, as foundational principle of best advertising research, 105

Crick, Francis, 21

Cuervo Gold, ad campaign for, 73 to 75.

Daily Telegraph, 92, 98

Dairy Management, Inc. (D.M.I), 266

Delaney, Tim, 98

Descartes, 18

Dismore, Mark, 165

Dole, Bob 160

Double Helix, The (Watson), on role of personalities/cultural tradition in progress of science, 21

Doyle, Dane, Bernbach (D.D.B), ad agency, 33

Dudwick, Ken, 237

Economist, The, survey/study on ubiquity of commercial messages conducted by, x

Effie, advertising awards, 18, 56, 212

Einstein, Albert, "fantasy" and "intuition" tenets of, 21

Evans-Pfeifer, Kelly, 174

Fallen McElligott (ad agency), 42, 48

Feldwick, Paul, on copy-testing research, 208

Focus groups:

Bell Helmets, 163

B.M.P research, 37 California Milk Processors, 238 to 245, 247 to 250

Chevys, 214 to 218 in creative development research, 202 to 205 discussion guides, 79 to 81 experimentation, 110 facilities, 76 to 78 follow-up surveys, 251

Foster Farms, 197 in-home, 76

Isuzu, 131, 155 to 156, 167 to 168 "natural habitat," 130 to 134

Northern California Honda Dealers, 116

Norwegian Cruise Line, 132, 226

Polaroid, 133 to 134 political correctness, 82 to 83

Porsche, 124, 126 to 127

Sega, 180 to 181, 200 to 202 "unnatural habitat," 75 to 79 for unum Insurance, 67, 110 to 113 viewing rooms, 95 to 97

Fortune (magazine), 86

Fossey, Dian, 78 to 79

Foster Farms, ad campaign for, 18,

183 to 186, 196 to 197 flexibility of ad agency in advertising development, 196 to 198

Fox, Bob, 196 to 197

Frost, Geoffrey, on "them-r-us marketing," 80

General Mills, 256

Generation X, 87

"Getting it right" credo, of account planning, 41 to 48

Goldman, Debra, 48

Goodall, Jane, observations of, on impact of environment on animals, 78 to 79

Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein, 114, 198, 199

Goodby, Jeff, 48, 56, 184, 198, 224, 233, 242,250 to 251 on advertising as a reaction inside consumers' heads, 5f on creative brief as analogous to fisherman's guide, 141

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (G.S&P; ad agency), 17 to 18, 42, 48, 107, 160 to 161, 201, 208, 223, 224, 233

Gossage, Howard Luck, 9, 15, 28 on advertising as two-way communication, 7 to 8 Gossage, Howard Luck (Continued):

on dream of less — but more stimulating

— advertising, xix on "extra-environmental man," 119 "got milk?" ad campaign, of California

Fluid Milk Processors' Advisory

Board, 17 to 18, 64, 68 to 69, 133,

159 to 160, 205, 223 to 224, 231 to 269 campaign development, 241 to 256 client briefing, 234 to 236 decline in milk sales, 232 to 233 deprivation strategy, 239 to 241 development of scripts for, 241 to 249 expansion of campaign, 259 to 263

Gallup survey conducted on milk purchase/consumption, 234 to 235 image problem with milk, 235 objectives of, 159 point of purchase, 256, 259 to 260 power of joint promotion in success of,

256 to 259 results, 264 to 269 role of media department in creative process, 245 to 246 simplicity of, 269 stimulus material, 243 to 244 targeting, 236 to 237

Graham, Billy, 160

Grand Effie, advertising award, 18

Guardian, The, 2 to 4, 11

Gunn, Donald, 15

Hailsham, Lord, 31

Hegarty, John, 48, 149, 150, 169

Heinz Pet Products, 103 to 104

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, applied to advertising research,

75

Hierakuji, Irina, 201

Hockney, Michael, 34 to 35

Holmes, Stephen A., 93

"Homeless" advertising, 25 to 29

Homework, in research development,

132 to 133, 240 to 241

Hopkins, Claude, 6, 16

Horowitz, Bruce, on milk as "boring," and subsequent action by C.F.M.P.A.B for more effective milk ads, 232,

264

How to Plan Advertising (Butterfield), 21

Hubbard, Elbert, on progress and inertia

99

Hussein, Saddam, 95 Isuzu, ad campaign for, 18, 93, 131, 154 to 158, 167 to 173, 223 to 224 multiple-audience approach in, 167 to 168 objectives of, 154 to 158

Jackson, Michael, 160

Jacobsen, Arnie, 104

Johns, Vicky, 104

Johnson, Bill, and research at Heinz Pet Products, 103 to 104

Jordan, Michael, 160

Jurassic Park, 13

Keough, Donald, 72

Kerstetter, Bob, 184

Ketchum, ad agency, 233, 237

King, Stephen, 38, 39

K.P.M.G Peat Marwick, 136 to 137

Kraft General Foods, 256

Leadership and the New Science (Wheatley), 18, 23

Leaving Las Vegas, 197

Lennon, John, 13

Los Angeles Times, 232, 264

Los Angeles Times Magazine, 191

Louis Harris & Associates, 93

Luker, Steve, 132, 225

M&Ms, eating of at focus group facilities, 77,95

Machiavelli, 102

Machine model of science, 18

Mack, Stan, 56 to 57

Maclean, Norman, on thinking as "seeing" and "noticing," 139

Madden, John, 147

Made in Japan (Morita), 222

Man in the Water, The (Rosenblatt), 49, 118

Manning, Jeff (C.F.M.P.A.B), 233 to 235, 237 to 239, 242, 245, 251, 264 to 269 on affecting behavior—not just attitude — as objective of advertising, 235 to 236

Marc Research, 237

McCann Erickson, ad agency, 233

Media department, in creative process, 245 to 246

Michelangelo, 13

Mind of the Strategist, The (Ohmae), 31

MongoDB, Indian, 70 to 72

Montana, Joe, 151 to 152

Morita, Akio, 222 to 223 on consumer needs and wants, 189 Morris, Dick, 86

Mother's Cookies, 256

Multiple-audience approach, in advertis- ing, 162 to 168

Nabisco, 68, 256

nasa, 105

National Football League, and experiment with instant replay, 63

National Medal of Arts, 12

Natural habitat, in research development: lack of, 75 to 79 need for, 131 to 134

Nestle, 256

New Science (see Quantum Theory)

Newton, Sir Isaac, 18

Newtonian Laws, 18, 21, 22, 26, 101, 106

New York Times, 95 to 94

Nielsens Household Panel, 264, 265

Nike, 80 creativity and excellence of advertising for, 191

Nintendo, 202

Northern California Honda Dealers, ad campaign for, 18, 114, 116 to 118

Norwegian Cruise Line, ad campaign for, 18, 48 to 49, 64, 132, 135, 223 to 229

Numbers:

American reverence for, 90 fallibility of, in research development,

88 to 94

Objectivity, as barrier to discovery, 75, 108 to 109, 209 to 212

108 to 109, 209 to 212

Ogilvy, David, 1, 99, 100 on denunciation of advertising as pure art form, 14

Ogilvy on Advertising (Ogilvy), 14, 99

O'Hare, Dave, 117, 181

Ohmae, Kenichi, on source of solutions, 31

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, "harmonization" concept of, 21

Oreo, 256, 257

Orwell, George, 184 on advertising, 25

"Parker scores," 92, 98

Partnership for a Drug Free America, The, ad campaign for, 18, 54 to 56

Perceptual advantage, in advertising, 184

Perspectives, of advertising: business, of client, 4 to 5 creative, of agency, 4 to 5 opinions/prejudices, of consumer, 4 to 5

Peters, Tom, 88

Photomatics, 193

Pirsig, Robert, 17, 20

Pizza Hut, 131

Pliskin, Robert, 222

Polaroid, ad campaign for, 18, 133 to 134, 158, 174 to 179, 223, 224

Pollitt, Stanley, 35 to 36, 38 to 4

48, 65 on planning and early indication of con- sumer response, 195

Porsche, ad campaign for, 18, 124 to 129

Postaer, Jeremy, 56

Pretesting, Me Creative Development Research

Pritchard Wood Partners, ad agency, 40

Probert, Colin, 198

Proposition, of a creative brief, 149, 168 to 173

Q.R.C, 103 to 104

Quantum theory, parallels to advertising, xiv, 22 to 25

Reagan, Nancy, 56

Reagan, Ronald, 12

Reality in Advertising (Reeves), as influence on advertisers, 6

Reeves, Rosser, 6

Regionalizing, of national advertising message, 116

Relationships, as basis for effective adver- tising 14 to 15, 1 to 29

Research, constructive:

application of common sense, xvi,

104 to 105 body language, 137 to 138 creating the right environment, 130 to 134 in creative briefing, xvi, 139 to 188 in creative development, xvi, 189 to 229 detachment as tool, 118 to 120 experimentation, 110 and lack of answers, 138 naivete — using a child's eyes, 121 power of subjectivity, 108 to 109 projective techniques, 124 to 129 in strategic development, 16 to 17,

101 to 102, 103 to 138 taking the wider view, 109 to 118 watching the game away from the ball,

134 to 138

Research, counterproductive, 13, 15, 16, 59 to 102 Research, counterproductive (Continued):

dangers of following rules, 99 to 101 fallibility of numbers, 88 to 94 interrogation versus discussion, 79 to 81 lack of objectives, 62 to 66 "pop" research, 84 to 87 questions asked in the wrong way, 73 to 75 as a security blanket, 59 to 60 "unnatural habitat," 75 to 79 what people mean, what people say, 81 to 84 in wrong hands, dangers of, 94 to 98 wrong questions asked, right questions missed, 66 to 72

Research, general:

in advertising development, 15 to 16 common sense and creativity in, 16 to 17 copy-testing, 206 to 209 for creative briefing, xvi, 139 to 188 for creative development, xvi, 189 to 229 to embrace unpredictability of people,

101 to 102 enemy of creativity, 191 to 192 importance of environment, 24, 75 to 79,

130 to 134 inertia in, 99 to 101 qualitative, power of, 203 to 204 quantitative, limitations of, 61, 205 to 209

Right of veto, of account planners, 198 to 202

Risk, as powerful, constructive force, 15, 17, 24

River Runs Through It, A (Maclean), 139

Rolling Stone, 25

Rosenblatt, Roger:

on focus on continuing process, not "noise of moment," 135 on humility, 49 on perverse sounding rules, 118 to 119

Routson, Tom, 184

Rubin Postaer, ad agency, 116

Saki, 8

San Francisco Chronicle, 90

San Francisco Examiner, 214

Schindler's List, 13

Scientific method, deficiencies/ inadequacies of, in application to advertising, 17 to 25

Sega, ad campaign for, 18, 48 to 49, 131, 160, 180 to 181, 199 to 202

Sergeant Pepper, 13 Sexual imagery, in Norwegian Cruise Line ad campaign, 224 to 229

Siboni, Roger, 137

Silverstein, Rich, 41, 48, 198, 201, 218 on analogy of joining-the-dots game to consumer participation in advertising, 6 on clients' getting advertising they deserve, 236 on juxtaposition of art and commerce in advertising, 15

Simplicity:

as foundational principle of best advertising research, 105 as hallmark of successful advertising communication, 18, 25 to 26

Simpson, O.J., 97 to 98, 212

Simpson, Steve, 132, 214, 216, 219, 225

Sistine Chapel, 13

Sogard, Harold, 187

Sony Corporation, 189, 222 to 223

U.K ad campaign for, 145 to 146

Spartacus, 156

Spielberg, Steven, 13

Stalin, Josef, 20

Starbucks Coffee Company, 191

Stervinou, Mary, 132, 163 to 164, 225 to 226

Stimulus material, 192 to 194 "got milk?" spots, 243 to 244 shortcomings of, as barrier to communi- cation, 194

Stone, Oliver, 216

Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert, on nature of discovery, 269

Target audience, 17, 19, 159 to 168, 236 to 237

Teagle, Andrew, on creatives' writing ads from a brief, 147 to 148

Thatcher, Margaret, 52

Thompson, J. Walter (ad agency), 39, 41, 233

Thriving on Chaos (Peters), 88

Total, 256

Triangulation, principle of, applied to advertising, 1 to 5

Trix, 256, 257

Trump, Donald, 160

Uncertainty, as powerful, constructive force, 15, 17, 24

Unique Selling Propositions (U.S.P's), 13, 135

UNUM insurance, ad campaign for, xviii, 66—67, 111-115, 118

USA Today Adtrack survey, 93

on "got milk?" ad campaign, 266-267

Video games, world of, as exclusive preserve of kids/teens, 200-202

Videomatics, 193

Volkswagen, ad campaign for, 33

Von Oech, Roger, on reasons for decline of creativity with age, 121

Watson, James, "human events" concept of science, 21 on art for art's sake versus selling products, 11 to 12

on creative briefing, 146—147

Westbrook, Bill, 48

Whack on the Side of the Hear), A (Von Oech), 121

Wheaties, 256, 258

Wheatley, Margaret, 18, 23

Wieden, Dan, 191

Wieden & Kennedy, ad agency, 48, 191

Wilde, Oscar, 120

Wine Advocate, The, 92

Wodehouse, P.G., 31

Wolfe, Tom, on trend research, 85 to 86

Wong, Tracy, 214, 219

Zacky Farms, 183

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), 20 I would like to thank the following people whose expertise and talent made possible the advertising featured in this book, and whose support and permission enabled me to reproduce it.

Fig. 1.1 Title: "Points of View"

Client: The Guardian

Marketing Director: John Gordon

Agency: Boase Massimi Pollitt

Account Mgt: Peter Herd

Account Planner: Adam Lury

Copywriter: Frank Budgen, John Webster

Art Director: John Webster

Fig. 2.1 Title: "Long Way Home"

Client: The Partnership for a Drug-Free America

Vice President: Amy Maximov

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Jeremy Postaer

Art Director: Jeremy Postaer

T.V Producer: Cindy Fluitt

Director: Jeff Goodby

Talent: Robert Johnson (Kid)

Title: "Bear & Salmon"

Client: unum Corporation

V.P, Corp. Adver.: Carol Eleazer

Director., Corp. Adver.: Charles Hurdman

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Harry Cocciolo

Art Director: Jeremy Postaer

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach

Account Planner: Irina Heirakuji Photographer: Galen Rowell/Mountain Light

Represented by Gary Crabbe (510) 601 to 9000

Fig. 4.2 Title: "Father & Child"

Client: unum Corporation

V.P, Corp. Adver.: Carol Eleazer

Din, Corp. Adver.: Charles Hurdman

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Dave O'Hare

Art Director: Mike Fazende, Bob Pullum

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach

Account Planner: Irina Heirakuji

Print Production: Suzee Barabee

Photographer: Michele Clement/San Francisco Represented by Norman Maslov (415) 641 to 4376

Fig. 4.6 Title: "Kills Bugs Fast"

Client: Porsche Cars North America

President/C.E.O: Frederick Schwab

V.P, Vehicle Sales & Mktg.: Rich Ford

G.M, Marketing: Joel Ewanick

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Bo Coyner

Art Director: Rich Silverstein, Todd Grant

Account Mgt: Julie Chandik

Account Planner: Irina Heirakuji

Print Producer: Max Fallen

Photographer: Clint Clemens

Represented by Jae Choi (212) 206 to 0737

Fig. 5.1 Title: "Another Satisfied Customer"

Client: Bell Sports, Inc.

President/C.O.O: Mary George

V.P, Helmet Mktg.: Graham Webb

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Paul Venables

Art Director: Jeremy Postaer

Account Mgt.: Brian Hurley

Account Planner: Mary Stervinou

Print Production: Max Fallon

Photographer: Heimo/San Francisco (415) 621 to 8260

Talent: Tom Crumb/Boom Models & Talent

Fig. 5.2 Title: "Ten Dollar Head"

Client: Bell Sports, Inc.

President/C.O.O: Mary George

V.P, Helmet Mktg.: Graham Webb

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein Copywriter: Paul Venables

Art Director: Jeremy Postaer

Account Mgt: Brian Hurley

Account Planner: Mary Stervinou

Print Production: Max Fallon tographer: Heimo/San Francisco (415) 621 to 8260 nt: Caitlin Barrett/Gossett Entertainment Management

Title: "Toy Store"

Client: American Isuzu Motors, Inc.

Director. of Marketing: Dick Gillmore

Natn'l Adver. Manager.: Chris Perry

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Chuck McBnde

Art Director: Chris Hooper

Account Mgt: Robert Riccardi

Account Planner: Kieran Darby

T.V Producer: Ben Latimer

Director: Michael Bay

Talent: Chris Dollard (Father)/Abrams Artists, Doug Ely; Christie Loundsbury (Kid)/Helen Garrett Agency, Jim Garrett

Fig. 5.4 Title: "Grocery Carts"

Client: American Isuzu Motors, Inc.

V.P, Marketing: Jerry O'Connor

Director. of Marketing: Dick Gillmore

Natn'l Adver. Manager.: Chris Perry

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Scott Burns

Art Director: Erich Joiner

Account Mgt: Matt Seller

Account Planner: Kieran Darby

Print Production: Suzee Barabee

Photographer: Duncan Sim

Photographer: Duncan Sim

Represented by Michael Ash, C.M.P (212) 655 to 6500

Fig. 5.5 Title: "Dog"

Client: Polaroid Corporation

Director. of Mktg. Comm.: Joanna Hughes-Brach

Grp. Mktg, Comm. Manager.: Ken Mills

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Bob Kerstetter

Art Director: Chris Hooper

Account Mgt: Robert Riccardi, Lisa Briggs

Account Planner: Kelly Evans-Pfeifer

Photographer: Hunter Freeman/San Francisco (415) 252 to 1910 figure 5.6 Title: "mom/wow"

Client: Polaroid Corporation

Director. of Mktg. Comm.: Joanna Hughes-Brach

Grp. Mktg, Comm. Manager.: Ken Mills

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Al Kelly

Art Director: Mike Mazza

Account Mgt: Robert Riccardi, Lisa Briggs

Account Planner: Kelly Evans-Pfeifer

Print Production: Suzee Barabee

Photographer: Hunter Freeman/San Francisco (415) 252 to 1910

Fig. 5.7 Title: "Architect"

Client: Polaroid Corporation

Director. of Mktg. Comm.: Joanna Hughes-Brach

Grp. Mktg. Comm. Manager.: Ken Mills

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Harry Cocciolo

Art Director: Sean Ehringer

Account Mgt: Robert Riccardi, Lisa Bnggs

Account Planner: Kelly Evans-Pfeifer

T.V Producer: Jane Jacobsen

Director: Kinka Usher

Talent: Kenny Moscow (Architect)/Abrams Artists, Doug Ely; Taylor Nichols (Architect)/Abrams Artists, Doug Ely

Fig. 5.8 Title: "Dog & Cat"

Client: Polaroid Corporation

Director. of Mktg. Comm.: Joanna Hughes-Brach

Grp. Mktg. Comm. Manager.: Ken Mills

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Scott Aal

Art Director: Grant Richards

Account Mgt: Robert Riccardi, Lisa Briggs

Account Planner: Kelly Evans-Pfeifer

T.V Producer: Jane Jacobsen

Director: Kinka Usher

Director: Kinka Usher

Fig. 5.9 Title: "Cop"

title: "Cop"

Client: Foster Farms

President/C.E.O: Robert Fox

Director. of Marketing: John Bartelme

Product Manager: Angel Ilagan

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Bob Kerstetter

Art Director: Tom Routson

Account Mgt: Greg Stern, Michelle Donald Account Planner: Kieran Darby

T.V Producer: Ed Galvez

Director: Marc Chiat

Fig. 6.1 Title: "Pilot"

Client: Chevs Mexican Restaurants

President: Mike Hislop

Director of Marketing: Laura Brezner

Director of Marketing: Bruce MacDiarmid

Agency: Goodby, Silverstem & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Steve Simpson

Art Director: Tracy Wong

Account Mgt: Marty Wenzell, Shannon Maher

Account Planner: Jon Steel

T.V Producer: Betsy Flynn

Cameraman: Chris Routh

Fig. 6.2 Title: "Salsa"

Client: Chevys Mexican Restaurants

President: Mike Hislop

Director of Marketing: Laura Brezner

Director of Marketing: Bruce MacDiarmid

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Steve Simpson

Art Director: Tracy Wong

Account Mgt: Marry Wenzell, Shannon Maher

Account Planner: Jon Steel

T.V Producer: Betsy Flynn

Cameraman: Chris Routh

Talent: Steve Simpson (Interviewer), Tracy Wong (Interviewer)

Fig. 6.3 Title: "Polygraph"

Client: Chevys Mexican Restaurants

President: Mike Hislop

Director of Marketing: Laura Brezner

Director of Marketing: Bruce MacDiarmid

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Steve Simpson

Art Director: Tracy Wong

Account Mgt: Marty Wenzell, Shannon Maher

Account Planner: Jon Steel

T.V Producer: Betsy Flynn

Cameraman: Chris Routh

Talent: Steve Simpson (Interviewer), Dennis Flynn (Regular Guy)

Fig. 6.4 Title: "Fantasy"

Client: Norwegian Cruise Line

President/C.E.O: Adam Aron Agency: V.P, Marketing: Bruce Mainzer

Director. of Advertising: Signe Bjorndal

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Steve Simpson

Art Director: Steve Luker

Account Mgt: Marty Wenzell

Account Planner: Mary Stervinou

T.V Producer: Elizabeth O'Toole

Director: Carlton Chase

Talent: Britt Williams (Swimmer)/K.S.A, Michael Daly; William Burns (Cantina)/C.E.D, Linda Jenkins; Lesley Baevis (Cantina)/C.P.C, Courtney Hanlon; Ron Kauk (Rock Climber)/Baldwin Talent, Lyn Baldwin.

Figure 6.4 summary: A series of four black-and-white frames from a television commercial for Norwegian Cruise Line titled Fantasy. The frames depict abstract, high-contrast imagery of architectural patterns and a landscape, concluding with the brand logo and the tagline It's different out here. This is an illustrative sequence from a promotional advertisement with no analytical data to report.

Fig. 6.5 Title: "There Is a Place"

Client: Norwegian Cruise Line

President/C.E.O: Adam Aron

V.P, Marketing: Bruce Mainzer

Director. of Advertising: Signe Bjorndal

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Steve Simpson

Art Director: Steve Luker

Account Mgt: Marty Wenzell

Account Planner: Mary Stervinou

Print Producer: Laurie Lambert

Photographer: Herb Ritts

Fig. 6.6 Title: "Fantasy"

Client: Norwegian Cruise Line

President/C.E.O: Adam Aron

V.P, Marketing: Bruce Mainzer

Director. of Advertising: Signe Bjorndal

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein Copywriter: Steve Simpson Art Director: Steve Luker Account Mgt: Marty Wenzell Account Planner: Mary Stervinou Print Producer: Laurie Lambert

Photographer: Herb Ritts

Fig. 7.1 Title: "Chocolate Chip Cookie"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Jeff Goodby

Art Director: Rich Silverstein

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach, Michelle Donald Account Planner: Jon Steel, Carole Rankin, Sue Smith

Print Producer: Michael Stock

Photographer: Terry Heffernan/San Francisco (415) 626 to 1999

Title: "P.B&J" Sandwich"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Jeff Goodby

Art Director: Rich Silverstein

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach, Michelle Donald

Account Planner: Jon Steel, Carole Rankin, Sue Smith

Print Producer: Michael Stock

Photographer: Terry Heffernan/San Francisco (415) 626 to 1999

Fig. 7.3 Title: "Cupcakes"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstem

Copywriter: Harry Cocciolo

Art Director: Sean Ehringer

Account Mgt: Michelle Donald

Account Planner: Jon Steel, Carole Rankin, Sue Smith

Print Producer: Michael Stock

Photographer: Dan Escobar/San Francisco (415) 777 to 0916

Fig. 7.5 Title: "Aaron Burr"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Scott Burns, Chuck McBride

Art Director: Erich Joiner

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach

Account Planner: Jon Steel, Carole Rankin, Sue Smith

T.V Producer: Cindy Epps

Director: Michael Bay

Talent: Sean Whalen (Main Character)/Abrams Artists, Doug Ely

Fig. 7.6 Title: "Baby & Cat"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein Copywriter: Chuck McBnde Art Director: Erich Joiner

Account Mgt: Tom Hollerbach

Account Planner: Jon Steel, Carole Rankin, Sue Smith

T.V Producer: Cindy Epps

Director: Michael Bay

Talent: Jeff Austin (Dad)/Abrams Artists, Doug Ely, Amanda Elness (Baby)/Film Artists Associates, Ruth Devorin, Chelsea Elness (Baby)/Film Artists Associates, Ruth Devorin

Fig. 7.7 Title: "Trix"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Harry Cocciolo

Art Director: Sean Ehringer

Account Manager: Michelle Donald

Account Planner: Linda Casey

T.V Producer: Betsy Flynn, Cindy Epps

Director: Kinka Usher

Reproduced by kind permission of General Mills

Fig. 7.8 Title: "Oreo Kane"

Client: California Fluid Milk Processors Advisory Board

Chairman: Richard Walrack

Executive Director: Jeff Manning

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Copywriter: Chuck McBride

Art Director: Todd Grant

Account Mgt: Suzanne Reeves

Account Planner: Sue Smith

T.V Producer: Bob Wendt

Director: Kinka Usher

Director: Kinka Usher

Fig. 7.9 Title: "Wheaties Box" figure 7.13 Title: "Heaven"

About the Author

Figure 6.5 summary: A promotional advertisement for Norwegian Cruise Line featuring a person's face and a small image of a cruise ship alongside the text, "There Is a Place." This is a marketing image with no analytical data or chart to report.

)-> Figure 6.6 summary: A high-contrast, black-and-white artistic image for Norwegian Cruise Line titled "Fantasy." Since it is a promotional or conceptual image, there is no data or analytical result to report.

Figure 7.3 summary: A black and white photo of two cupcakes topped with dark frosting and white cursive lettering that reads "got Milk?". This image serves as a visual example under the label cupcakes.

Hewlett-Packard; the California Milk Processors ("got milk?"); Anheuser-Busch, Inc.; American Isuzu Motors, Inc.; Porsche Cars of North America, Inc.; D.H.L Worldwide Express; Foster Farms; Sutter Home Winery; Bell Sports, Inc.; S.B.C Communications; Nike; unum Insurance; Polaroid Corporation; and Pepsico.

"Jon Steel is one of the great practitioners in advertising today. This book captures the essence of how to understand and connect with other human beings—not just to sell them something, but to create strong, long-lasting brand connections. It should be required reading for all planners, creative people, and account people."

"A very smart, very funny look at what works, what doesn't, and why, in the sometimes maddening, sometimes inspiring business of advertising. One of the brightest books about the subject in a long, long time."

"Jon Steel is one of the top five account planners in the world. The depth and breadth of this book reflects his vast personal experience and exceptional talent. It's not just a great book about account planning, it's a great book about advertising."

“The beauty of this book is that it discusses the theories and practice of one of the brightest minds in advertising today, yet never loses its irreverent tone. It's a great book for the advertising industry and a must read for planners.” —Rob White, Director of Planning, Fallon McElligott

"...I was glued to Jon's book. Best practice, common sense, and extraordinary intelligence throughout."

"Jon Steel's book is the perfect insight into a discipline that for some time has been misunderstood, misused, and maligned by most agencies and clients in the U.S. So, run it up the flag pole, put it to groups, check it against the norms, the answer is the same—Truth, Lies, and Advertising should be read by anyone who has to make or approve advertising."