Quality/Quantity
‘When you produce 50 scripts for one shoot you are diminishing the value of the work. It becomes a commodity – easily created, easily discarded. Most of the scripts fail at an internal audit – binned even before they reach a client. This is an incredible waste of our talents – it’s dispiriting and inefficient.
‘Often we require several campaigns because we don’t have a singular creative strategy. We have too many catch-all propositions that need creative work to sort out the strategy. The classic procedure is to agree the ‘what’ of the brief with the client and then to expect an original ‘how’ from the Creative Department. We believe that advertising is a development process not a selection process.
‘Perhaps the most insidious result of this catch-all approach is that it destroys our self-confidence. Since we cannot present three ideas with equal conviction we present none of them with real passion. Most of us are at our most persuasive when we are most convinced – I believe we can only fall in love with one proposal at a time.
‘We need better progressing, better timing, better briefs, better work, better salesmanship.
‘The alternative is unthinkable. A giant ad factory where quantity is more important than quality.
‘Hands up who wants to work there.’
David Abbott, 20th April 1994.
Too fcukin right.
Hear! Hear!
Well said that man.
What we need is some of the old legends to come back and save us. Like Space Cowboys only with ads.
Deliberate overordering of creative work is a sure sign that the commissioner is riddled with indecision and lacks the guts to face down the client – who also lacks guts, decisiveness and other essential management qualities.
I love that line, “advertising is a development process not a selection process.”
I hadn’t heard that before.
there’s only one thing that stops great work getting out.
people who are afraid of losing their job.
oh, and cunts. forgot about the cunts.
leo burnetts speach about when to take his name down from above the door is also great…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpfo7MzEuxs
Get in, lad.
I “tweeted” (is that the nomenclature?) a version of this the other week. One of Saatchi’s dudes was posturing about more “sustainable” agencies.
http://www.psfk.com/2010/08/toward-a-sustainable-agency.html
Great little argument and sort of augments Dave’s point nicely. Worth a glance I’d say.
Sad that it’s actually (now) a very old problem we still haven’t been able to solve though.
Onward.
I was recently parachuted into a creative chernobyl. The brief had been agreed with the client. No wonder, it was cut & pasted from their original brief onto agency headed paper. It was a description of the new product. The strategy would be determined by the creative work (it’s worth bearing in mind the Planning guy is a ‘name’ in this business). So, we concreted over the leaky reactor with some weak-ass shit. Well, as the ‘what’ was never agreed, the ‘how’ could only be measured in yards of ideas. I used big A3 sheets, it saved a lot of time. I couldn’t find any A2.
I’m gonna stick my neck out here.
If you walked into a shop looking to buy a shirt and you were offered only one shirt would you buy it?
Even if it was the nicest shirt you’ve seen in a long time.
And it was reasonably priced.
It’s human nature to want a choice be that shirts or ad campaigns.
I think it makes sense to walk into any presentation with 3 options.
Yet, thousands of agencies make people write seven thousand claims, create 100 layouts for billions of words of bodycopys to produce adshit everyday.
This is a sad, sad world sometimes.
@Mick G
A colleague told me they’d presented over 50 scripts for one brief. I don’t think David Abbott is saying that we should only present one script. I think the post is perfectly timed, coming the day after I witnessed D.Draper violently ejecting a client.
Fuck Mick G and his shit shirts.
For any of you that find David’s writing style slightly disjointed, I must explain that I abridged a longer passage for reasons of relevance and laziness. David’s original piece is superb but runs to four pages of A4, which I refuse to type out.
And Mick: I think that if I was having a shirt tailor made (a closer analogy), I’d be fine with just the one shirt because I would have selected the tailor carefully and briefed him properly. Sure, he might get it wrong, but we’d have to take collective responsibility for that and work towards a better shirt next time.
Ladies and Gentlemen. Let’s hear it for Snowy.
A true legend.
This passage should be tattooed onto the foreheads of every flaky account person and planner.
If you walked into an antique shop and you were looking for a louis 14th chair and they only had one – and it was fucking perfect, and reasonably priced – would you shop around?
Mick G
If I’d briefed a tailor properly and he’d spent time considering the brief and then make a shirt that he knew was going to meet that brief I’d be happy to see just one shirt.
It might need a nip and tuck here and there but you’d expect that.
If I’d briefed him badly and produced something I didn’t want I’d only have myself to blame. He would then be compelled to produce ten shirts next time to see if any of them fitted. Which would have been a waste of his time. Less so mine but then I’m not staying up late producing 10 shirts.
MickG…
That’s because buying a shirt is a selection process not a development process.
Phil – I enjoyed seeing Don Draper ejecting those swimsuit clients too. But surely Peggy should have been given a pay rise and a Cannes Promo Lion for her supermarket ham stunt?
Mick G. You make it sound like your decision to buy a shirt was a spur of the moment thing. That you’d had no previous contact with the bloke selling shirts. And you could just as easily have chosen to buy a hat. Or a fridge. In which case I think you’d be a very tricky client. But not to worry. You won’t be alone.
An agency head (and someone much smarter than me) observed of the market recently: “With less ads being commissioned, you’d have thought there would be fewer clients making better decisions. Whereas it looks as if there are more clients and they are making worse decisions.”
Sounds like you’d fit right in.
The client has been taught to buy this way? By whom? By the agencies of course. As time went by agencies started acting like commodities and now they get treated like one.
You job (now) is to untrain them, perhaps tell them the bespoke shirt story, or explain what has happened in the past ie the 50 scripts story, and ask which they’d prefer.
Here is a rule that I like -“you cant blame a prospect for doing something you didnt say they couldn’t do”. Tell them up front the rules, you can do this or this but not that. I will bust my arse to help you but only under these conditions. If you dont think that is fair go to the ad factory.
If you tell them the rules of engagement and why, this shit wont happen anymore to you, if they want to join in the race to the bottom let them.
One more rule “no such thing as a bad prospect only bad salespeople”
So everyone here thinks they are 100% right – cannot be wrong; this is it; there is no other solution; there is ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER WAY TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM etc. Honest to blog?
honest to blog?
you used that term?
can you go somewhere and die please.
great post. david abbott was a prince. in fairness to Mick G, he never said “tailored shirt” he said “shirt”. 50 scripts is clearly indecisive insanity. but three would be the minimum i would present. if only to put on a bit of a show.
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