Of creative briefs and leaps
Lakshmipathy Bhat
SVP - Global Marketing & Communications | Robosoft Technologies - The Experience Engineering Company
‘An ad for an ad’. That’s how JWT summed up the role of a creative brief. Just like an ad, it had to be focused, relevant and inspiring or motivating. Most brief formats require a single-minded proposition to be written down. Some of such one line propositions are brilliant and creative. At times, they could border on being the headline or strap line itself. Nevertheless, the creative team is then expected to interpret the brief and take a creative leap.
At Trikaya Advertising, we had the 5-10 principle (at least in our credentials!) which split communication into strategy (what to say) & creative (how to say it). The former got a ‘zero’ or 5, as there was either a wrong strategy (zero) or a right one. One cannot a strategy which is ‘somewhat right’. The job of creative was then to take it to 10 in terms of both the idea and the execution. For example, ‘an air conditioner which cools even during the hottest of summers’ maybe a right, relevant strategy but it needs a different creative interpretation to make the ad compelling.
But many have pointed out sometimes the final ad often sounds & feels like a line from the creative brief.
Image source
I too felt the same way when I came across this and shared it on my weekly blog.
But as Suzanne Pope points out just looking at that one single piece of creative it may seem like ‘ad as brief’. But the overall campaign to nudge Americans into accepting electric cars as the norm, works. As part of the campaign, a 90s style website educates consumers about the benefits of electric cars.
However, the point remains that as a general rule, a creative idea has to be an interpretation of a good, focused creative brief. I am not privy to the actual briefs here but if I were to conjecture:
'You are not you when you are hungry' series of ads for Snickers was based on the insight that in-between meal hunger makes one irritable.
The Economist posters including the famous 'Management Trainee. Age, 42' to convey that reading the magazine makes one knowledgeable.
What are some good examples of such an interpretation?
Product | Data Science
5 年Rakshat Singh Mohil now that we are discussing it!!
Marketing & E-commerce | Ex-Paints, BFSI, Media & Telecom
5 年‘no one ever got fired for buying an IBM’ brilliant use of defensive decision making.
Growing people who grow brands
5 年A Trikaya "brief" that we used to admire at Lintas was "The Ferrari of Shoes". Long live Ravi Gupta. The advertising industry did not give him even half of the credit he deserves in transforming advertising in India.
Ex-Ogilvy, Brand Strategist & Creative Director/writer, over 20 years in the business; open to relocating anywhere
5 年Actually, let me play devil's advocate (ooh, that dreaded expression in creative corridors) and say that the Snickers "you are not you, when you are hungry" is actually a consumer insight. For once, a true consumer insight. The creative idea is to dramatise what people become when they are hungry. They don't really have a great line to go with it, so stuck to the consumer insight as the line. :-)