AN AGENCY THAT DIDN’T USE BRIEFS?!

My friend Joan McArthur is a veteran creative director and copywriter who now runs training sessions for agency people here in Toronto. I was checking out her blog this week (http://www.joanmcarthurtraining.com/2011/04/14/amnesty-international-goes-guerrila/), and ran across something really interesting. The creative teams of Doyle Dane Bernbach didn’t get briefs before coming up with their groundbreaking ads for Volkswagen, Avis, Chivas Regal and others. They just sat around jamming in a very human way about what these products meant. But in spite of the haphazardness of their approach, the resulting ads were as strategically sound as anything we’ve seen since:

These ads were created long before anyone talked about brand-building, but they achieved that goal in spades nonetheless. These ads were created by people who passionately lived and breathed their brands (in fact, they almost were their brands), and that passion allowed them to play creative, planning and account roles all at the same time.

I’m not for one minute suggesting that we don’t need planners or account folk. (We do, particularly given the very specific benchmarks by which today’s ads are measured.) But I am saying that creative people cannot expect other departments to deliver the intangibles of our craft: the curiosity, the intuition, the feeling of intimacy we have with the thousands or millions of strangers who will be our audience. Those things have always been our responsibility, and as we see from the examples above, great things happen when we embrace that responsibility.

But as a cool and useful exercise, the next time you need to make an ad, try pretending there is no brief. Just make a true and simple point about your brand in a true and simple way. You might find it energizes you for the actual job at hand. And you might even find you get an idea for an ad that wasn’t asked for, an ad that will win some awards.

In fact, this trick doesn’t even need an actual client. Many years ago, my Ogilvy colleague Mike Kirkland had a thought about library books. Now, no library system can afford to do ads, but Mike didn’t let that stop him. Although Mike calls himself an art director, he’s also an excellent writer, as this award-winning campaign demonstrates:

You can check out more of Mike’s great and inspiring work here:
http://mike-kirkland.com/index.html