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.