Don Draper exhibits a creative director’s worst qualities

Don leaves his copywriter's boards in the back of the cab and presents his own idea instead

Anyone who’s been watching MadMen Season 5 can’t help but notice the deterioration of Don Draper’s creative skills. He hasn’t had a good idea in a year. The brilliance once demonstrated in the Kodak Carousel pitch have blurred into distant memory. And as he sits in his office noting that the agency’s latest reprints (remember reprints, with varnished borders?) all prominently feature the name of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s newest star, writer Michael Ginsberg, not even a stiff drink can ease his anxiety.

This week Don resorted to the all too common practice of expressing his fear, insecurity and jealousy by trying to compete with his very own staff.  Sadly, most all of us who grew up in the ad business have seen this movie. Creative director can’t stand having the spotlight shine on someone else, even when it’s someone he hired and mentored.  So he becomes not just the boss, but the rival as well.

First Don pathetically tries to beat the idea with one of his own, a practice that might be among the most demoralizing management tactics ever conceived, not to mention absurdly unfair. How can you be the contestant and the judge and ever expect a fair outcome? And who in his right mind would openly criticize the boss’s idea unless it came with a resignation letter?  In this episode, the subordinates agree that the agency will present two ideas and the client will get to pick a winner.  Of course when Don conveniently leaves Ginsberg’s work in the cab and presents only his own, there isn’t much of a choice. You can guess the outcome and the effect on morale.

In a business where the best idea – not the person who had it – is supposed to win, competition is essential. It keeps everyone sharp, pushes teams to put in the extra effort, and eventually weeds out the weaker players.  But that’s when competition remains among peers and the creative director stays objective.

If you want to learn anything from MadMen this season, focus on Mathew Weiner’s story arcs, character development and attention to detail. All three features can make for great advertising. As for Don, the only lesson he’s sharing with us is how not to be a very good creative director.

Related Links:  MadMen through the Boomer Lens

The real lessons we need to learn from Project Re-Brief

Idea first, engineering second.

By now everyone has seen or at least heard of Google’s Project Re-Brief. In order to showcase the potential of online advertising – after 18 years we ought to be able to do something better than the ubiquitous banner ad – Google had the brilliant idea of re-creating some of the advertising industry’s most famous ads and making them digital.

In typical Google fashion, they spared no expense or effort. To re-create Coke’s then epic 1971 Hilltop ad – it feels so small now – Google grabbed art director Harvey Gabor out of retirement, brought him to New York and taught him what the Internet – ad servers, HTML5, accelerometers, touch screens, and real-time video – can do.

If you watch the making of film you can see the reverence that Google shows for Harvey and the respect they convey for the “big idea.” They even let Harvey present using foam core.  (Anyone other than me, and Harvey, remember what that is?)  Granted part of that is the show — after all this is about demonstrating to ad agencies what they could do with Google and its cool tools and toys – but the real point is that a great ad idea is even better when executed to include user participation.

From ads to experiences

The finished experience, while not yet a scalable idea, is very much Nike Chalkbot-like; it connects the user, the web and the physical world in a seamless, magical way. Five Coke machines around the world are tied into Google servers. From a simple online ad that takes advantage of Google’s location services, a laptop video camera and YouTube, it lets a computer (or tablet or phone) user record a message, send the gift of a Coke to the machine of her choice, and include a video greeting. At the receiving end an unsuspecting passerby hears a machine singing the former hit, “I want to teach the world to sing…….I want to buy the world a Coke and keep it company,” as it dispenses the free Coca Cola and the video message from the sender. The recipient can then send a message back and the entire system creates a composite video of the event and uploads it to YouTube. Wow.

Once we had a message, controlled, produced, and delivered by Coke. Now we have an experience enabled by Coke, but created and controlled by consumers. Once Coke said “we’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Now users are actually doing it for each other.  Once we had an old fashioned ad.  Now we have a new kind of ad.

Creating experiences vs messages

Change the team, change the process

But of all the changes evident in the above example, the most important one is the composition of the team needed to create it. When Harvey made his TV spot he worked with Bill Backer and a director. But if you take a look at the team in the room to make something like the Re-Brief version of Hilltop, you have IA, UX, tech, engineering and production.  And you have more of those kinds of creatives than you have of the old fashioned kind.

Many advertising agencies still start the process with a team of writers and art directors who conceive TV like ideas then ask the digital team to come up with something digital to go with it. If an agency is descended from the likes of Harvey Gabor and Bill Backer it’s in their DNA to work that way. (Let’s face it, none of us would start the kind of agency today that we may currently work for.)

But it’s probably time to embrace a totally opposite approach. Put five technologists and one writer in the room. Or gather four developers and one art director.  Or change the qualifications for the title creative director. It’s the only way to create executions – or platforms, or behaviors – this innovative.

My favorite shot in the case study video is the one that says “Engineers build vending machines that connect to display ads,” suggesting that after the creative idea was conceived, the team then told engineering what it needed.

This is the antithesis of the way the world usually works. In the typical sequence R&D comes up with an idea based on what’s possible, engineering builds it, marketing learns what they have to sell, and the ad agency – despite being closer to the market and consumers than most anyone – finally gets handed the product and the story to be communicated. They’re at the end of the line virtually all the time.

Yes, Re-Brief teaches us that old ads can be re-created digitally. And yes, it recognizes the value of an idea. No doubt the traditional advertising holdouts can point their finger at this and say, “See you still need the concept.”  Yeah yeah.

But both of those lessons miss the real points.

If we want to build new, interesting, interactive experiences, we need to change the team dramatically.  Not simply add a token technologist to the traditional creative team, but perhaps take the opposite approach. Add one traditional creative to a full-blown technical team.

And two, we should put engineering at the end of the process, not the beginning. Rather than build something and then convince a consumer to buy it or use it, maybe should start with the ideal consumer experience then back up and build it.

What are your takeaways from Re-Brief?

The paper clip: a creative exercise

Ingredients

One paper clip, 25 minutes, your imagination.

Assignment

Generate at least 25 great creative ideas to promote the utility and versatility of the paper clip.  (After all, it is an under appreciated occupant of supply closets everywhere.)

Process

Work in teams of five, but for the first five minutes no talking allowed. Each team member writes non-stop any ideas that come into his head. After five minutes teams work together, sharing ideas, building off of each other’s kernels, augmenting the initial body of work, making them better, and finally agreeing on five or 10 really good ones.

Criteria for deciding

• Do you like it, really like it?
• Is the idea guaranteed to get attention?
• Is it something you’d remember?
• If it’s not pure, raw entertainment does it offer genuine utility?
• Would you tell a friend about it?

Hints and stimulae

What if the paper clip were huge?

What if Marcel the Shell used it?

What if it were a metaphor?

What if the world were attacked by Origami?

What if Banksy created graffiti with it?

What if it were a Guinness record?

What if it starred in the SI bathing suit issue?

What if it came in a little blue box?

What if it were a political statement?

What if it had an arch rival?

What if Lady Gaga’s incorporated it into her shoe collection?

What if it were an amusement park ride?

I tried this exercise yesterday as a way to inspire students in my Strategic Creative Development class to think more creatively. It worked pretty well. It got people to break out of traditional routines, come up with crazier ideas than usual (we had everything from epic battles between paper clips and staples, a means to world peace, even famous one page documents – think Declaration of Independence — that upon close inspection had a slight indentation in the shape of a paper clip in their upper left hand corners, suggesting that maybe there should have been a second or third page that we’ll never know about.)

Anyway, thought I’d share it,  If your class or company or marketing department needs a little brain lubrication, this exercise works pretty well.

Got any others you can share?  I need more.

The less money you have, the more creative you can be

My favorite slide from Daniel Stein's #BUSCD presentation

Daniel Stein, CEO of EVB, shared that thought last night with #BUSCD, the class I teach at Boston University. Arguable, certainly. But as Daniel put it, “Give an agency $200,000 and they will come up with endless creative ideas. Give them $20 million and you get a TV campaign. Give them $200 million and you get really big TV campaign with celebrities and Superbowl spots.”

His lesson, of course, was that creative teams should welcome smaller budgets. The tighter financial reins won’t restrict your creativity.  On the contrary, they’ll liberate it. Take away that extra zero and you won’t have to satisfy expected solutions and media buys.

Of course Daniel told his now famous story of EVB’s Elf Yourself. The casting call for a dancer went out over Craig’s List. A repainted wall in the office served as the green screen. And the entire production cost well under $30,000. That’s a pretty good price for one of the more popular brand icons of the last five years.

There’s no shortage of examples that demonstrate how a tiny budget can yield both big ideas and real results. A few memorable favorites (particularly because they were among the first demonstrations of new social platforms) include Poke’s Baker’s Tweet, CP&B’s Shocking Barack, Fallon London’s Tate Tracks, Mullen’s Will it Blend, and the Milwaukee burger joint AJ Bomber’s Swarm Badge event.

In every case the budget was the advertising equivalent of pocket change. In most cases TV would have been the wrong solution. And as a result, creators were forced to use digital and social media in ways that invited users to be part of the story.

I should give Daniel a shout out for another reason. He kindly took the Red-Eye from San Francisco to Boston specifically to speak to 25 students eager to hear and learn from the best. It’s a wonderful example of someone who has succeeded and prospered taking time to give something back and help the next generation of advertising thinkers and creators.

Thanks, Daniel. Twenty-five students, and one instructor, are all smarter for your visit.

Note:  Will share Daniel’s #BUSCD deck once we get it online.

When did advertising get so small?

I’ve come around to agreeing that the best Super Bowl spot (above) only ran in Canada.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t run into anyone in the advertising or marketing business who wasn’t hugely disappointed with the commercials that ran last Sunday. It made all of advertising seem tired, old and in need of a serious makeover.

Even among the 25 students in the class I teach at Boston University, consensus seemed to be that all we got were recycled ideas (Honda), agencies struggling to extend past successes (VW, Chrysler), and sad attempts to replace humor with something more sophisticated (Bud Platinum).

Granted, it’s difficult to make great advertising of any kind. Add the pressure, money, judgment and expectations of the Super Bowl and the challenge is 10-fold. And today, with everyone having a microphone to express his opinion, in real time no less, it’s unlikely we could ever get consensus on what constitutes great.

At a Brand Bowl kickoff last Friday, held at the Boston Globe’s innovation lab, 60 people previewed half a dozen spots. They texted their reaction so we could quickly gauge a winner. Interestingly nearly all the spots split the audience. A slight majority disliked Ferris. A twinge more than half gave the VW dog the thumps up. But nothing stood out or made a lasting impression.

Granted come game day consumers and viewers pay attention to the spots. By adding their two cents, they elevate brand mentions and visibility across all of the social channels. And as Mullen’s Brand Bowl revealed, classic advertising humor still works at inspiring volumes of chatter. Doritos generated tens of thousands of tweets and M&Ms proved that a new female character can charm the pants off viewers.

But is that good enough?

There was a time when advertising helped define pop culture. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” or “Take it all off,” or “Wassup,” or “When I grow up,” were ideas that started with an ad and then migrated outwards. Today, however, most great ideas begin somewhere else. Hollywood. Silicon Valley. The app store.

That should bother anyone who still works in this business and be a challenge to the next generation ready to enter it. Maybe it’s too late. The new frontier has moved well beyond message based marketing to engagement, utility and collaboration.  But it appears that good old advertising still has some role to play. And if it’s going to show up for a competition as fierce as the Super Bowl, it better start bringing its A-game.

Related posts:

All the spots: Ad Age

Non Brand Bowl analysis: Media Works

Charming to Smarmy: NY Times