The #1 Thing to be Clear on Before Briefing Advertising

I was once tasked by the CMO of a large CPG client to provide training tips on how his marketing folk could write better advertising creative briefs.

I approached the task in a semi-quantitative way: I asked hundreds of people at the client and agency to send me examples of what they thought to be good or bad creative briefs.

I got sent 356 briefs. I got sent more bad briefs than good briefs but that did not surprise me since it’s human nature to moan rather than to praise. Despite the skew to bad briefs I had enough of each type to be able to look for what differentiated the good from the bad. I knew I had a representative data set because the 356 briefs included multiple product categories, multiple geographies, global brands as well as regional/local brands, and brand equity briefs as well as new product launch briefs.

What I concluded was there were three things that differentiated the good creative briefs from the bad.

The #1 thing was that the good briefs always had a crystal-clear articulation of the key problem that advertising needed to solve.  Not a woolly business or marketing wish-list but a specific job to be done that advertising was capable of. In the very best cases, that job to be done was expressed in a way that caught the reader’s eye and acted as an instant catalyst for creative development work.

 (The two other differentiating factors between the good and bad briefs related to the presence and/or quality of a consumer insight and the leanness and power of the message to be conveyed but those can be topics for another day…).

My conclusion that distilling the key problem to be solved was the most important differentiator between the good and bad creative briefs makes intuitive sense. If you start in the wrong place you drastically reduce your chances of ending up in the right place.

Of course, it is much easier said than done. In practice, it is fiendishly difficult to do because it involves the distillation of multiple business and marketing goals and the making of tough strategic sacrifices. My experience of large clients is that their multiple layers of people and their matrix structures do not create the best environment for the ruthless logic required to distil and sacrifice your way to the key problem. Rather, the reverse is true. Everybody wants to add their two cents’ worth and that rarely makes briefs leaner or cleaner. Creative briefs are like snowballs: the more you roll them around the fatter and dirtier they get.

Margarine’s Problem

The news that Unilever intends to sell its portfolio of margarine brands is a good example of the importance of distilling the key problem to be solved before briefing advertising.

There are some famous brands in that portfolio but not a lot of famous advertising recently. Unilever’s spreads marketing over the last decade is a case in point of failing to nail the real problem that advertising needs to solve.

Margarine is an important part of Unilever’s heritage and it still accounts for a significant slice of the company’s business plus it’s highly cash-generative. Unfortunately, it is in decline so it is a drag on overall top-line growth for the company.

There are many macro reasons for the decline (like the changing landscape of consumer habits and attitudes towards food, like rising raw material costs, like stronger competitive threats) but there are also many micro reasons: choices Unilever made over a generation that reveal their cash cow attitude towards margarine (like under-investing in marketing and packaging and product development).

In recent years, Unilever has tried all sorts of initiatives to inject more growth into margarine, even creating a standalone business unit with its own P&L and dedicated management team to enable focus and the freedom to take the necessary decisions. They have tried to get us to bake more, to use margarine in cooking more, they have introduced butter-like variants, they have focused on the higher margin heart health variants, they have changed brand names and they have updated packaging. They have reduced price and increased advertising investment (a combination usually frowned upon by CFO’s).

They have had some success but mainly in terms of slowing the rate of decline and winning share within margarine rather than creating growth versus butter. Even though Kraft-Heinz’s recent attempts at a take-over were rebuffed, the experience has clearly shaken Unilever and margarine’s under-performance is now deemed unacceptable so they intend to cut the unit adrift and sell.

Tellingly, what Unilever has never done to any serious degree is address the elephant in the room when it comes to margarine: the product is perceived to be artificial. People have little or no idea what’s in margarine and they suspect that whatever is in there has been messed around with by men in white coats. This is a gift to butter which exudes naturalness and goodness. When it comes to food values, cows beat chemists hands down (or should that be hooves down?).

The perception that margarine is artificial acts like a hand-brake slowing down all the marketing initiatives Unilever has been doing to get people to buy more margarine.

There has been some work to address the issue (notably Flora’s re-packaging to highlight its plant-based ingredients) but nothing like the relentless commitment needed to bust the myth.

Defining your key problem to be solved as dispelling the perception that margarine is artificial could lead to powerful emotional creative work or aggressive creative work that takes butter head on. And it could drive all your marketing activity program not just advertising.

If they had written a creative brief which started with the problem: “everyone thinks we are artificial and manufactured by chemists while butter is natural and made by cows” then who knows where they might have been able to go creatively? It may even have staved off the sale of the portfolio.

BT’s Problem

Further back in my past-life I worked on one of the great UK campaigns of the 1990’s: the BT “It’s Good to Talk” campaign starring Bob Hoskins.

This was a hugely famous and successful campaign that socially re-engineered Britain’s attitudes towards talking on the phone. And it all came from one of the very best problem definitions ever (courtesy of David Abbott, who was a brilliant strategist when not being one of the all-time great copywriters).

Imagine a time (if you can) when there was no internet and no mobile phones. BT’s consumer revenues came from voice calls over its fixed line network. In a post-privatization price-regulated environment where they were guaranteed to lose share, the only way BT could increase revenue was to stimulate more phone calls or get into new businesses (which is why they jumped so enthusiastically into mobile and internet and IP TV when those technologies came along). There have been some famous and successful attempts at call stimulation advertising but nothing has ever come close to the impact of “It’s Good to Talk”.

That’s because while those other campaigns focused on showing how rewarding and pleasurable time on the phone could be, the “It’s Good to Talk” campaign adopted a much more direct and challenging strategy by zeroing in on why Britons did not make more phone calls.

The problem was men and their attitude towards small-talk on the phone. They had a deeply ingrained cultural barrier to chatting on the phone which not only meant they did not do it very much but they also dampened their wives’ and kids’ natural tendency to do it. If BT could change men’s attitudes towards phone usage then it would not only encourage them to make more phone calls but, more importantly, it would remove a hand-brake on other family members’ phone usage. Ker-ching!

Bob Hoskins was a brilliant vehicle to persuade men to adopt more female-style behaviours on the phone. Women found him attractive (in an endearing way) and men liked him. He was a hard man and that meant he could tell other men to soften up. Over many TV commercials he played out the benefits of female-style phone behaviour versus male-style behaviour and the campaign entered folk lore. Even today, twenty years on from the last ad, people still know and say the “It’s Good to Talk” phrase when in conversation.

Sainsbury’s Problem

The same agency that gave us “It’s Good to Talk” also gave us Sainsbury’s “Try Something New Today” campaign in the mid 2000’s which is a fabulous example of the creative and commercial power of problem definition.

Sainsbury’s was on the back foot in 2004 when a new CEO arrived with a recovery plan that basically consisted of increasing availability and reducing pricing so that shoppers could enjoy great products at fair prices. It wasn’t rocket science but it was ambitious. The plan called for an additional ￡2.5 billion in sales over 3 years.

Initially, Sainsbury's advertising did not change and the “Making Life Taste Better” slogan continued. However, the decision was taken to create a new brand idea that more energetically sought to support the recovery plan.

With 14 million customer-visits a week and three years to achieve the plan, a young planner at the agency calculated that Sainsbury’s would need to generate an extra ￡1.14 every visit (￡1.14 × 52 weeks × 3 years × 14 million customer-visits = ￡2.5 billion).

This completely transformed the problem to be solved from helping deliver ￡2.5 billion extra sales to getting shoppers to spend a little extra on each visit. And in doing so, a hard to grasp number was turned into a launch pad for an idea.

Based on the insight that most people are creatures of habit and sleep shop their way round their weekly grocery store visit the agency created the “Try Something New Today” idea. Creative teams are instantly launched into possible creative work by a brief that starts with that problem. The rest is IPA Effectiveness Awards history.

What’s Your Problem?

It’s no coincidence that both the BT and Sainsbury’s examples of great problem definition are also IPA Effectiveness Award Gold winners (BT also scooped the Grand Prix). Nailing the specific problem to be solved by advertising is clearly not the only vital factor that needs to be in place for a successful creative outcome but, in my view, it has the potential to have the greatest impact because once correctly defined the problem will drive the brief, the consumer insight, the main message and ultimately the creative solution.

So, always think “what’s our problem?” when sitting down to start the process of advertising development. I sometimes use the MICE acronym (Most Important Change to Encourage) but what’s needed is far more than an understanding of current behaviours and attitudes versus desired behaviours and attitudes.

What’s needed is an in-depth understanding of whether your brand is trying to grow the market or grow share within the market, of whether you are seeking to attract trialists or current users, and of whether you intend to communicate a brand message or a product message. And that in turn depends on what stage your market is at (new or growing versus mature or declining), what stage your brand is at (new or growing versus mature or declining), and what your brand status is (leader versus #2 versus niche operator).

The process of problem definition is not easy but if you apply logic, data, and rigour then you can increase your chances of distilling your way to a start point that will pay dividends later in the creative development process. As another great copywriter-cum-strategist (David Ogilvy) once remarked, “A blind pig can sometimes find truffles but it helps to know that they grow in oak forests”.

About the Author

Mike Teasdale runs Left-Handed Planning Ltd, an advertising strategy consultancy advising clients on how they can spark and nurture opportunities for creativity. Mike has 50 years of experience as a left hander and 25 years of experience as an unconventional strategist in top ad agencies like BBH, BBDO and Lowe helping companies like BT, AT&T and Unilever unleash their inner left-handedness to multiple awards-winning effect.

You can learn more from www.left-handedplanning.com. You can contact Mike via [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/teasdalemike or +44 7885 284 535.

Left-Handed Planning Ltd. Abnormally Good Thinking.