A creative network of the idea, by the idea, for the idea

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Inside the creative mind: Craig Davis

Wouldn't it be great if we could get advise from the best creative minds in the world?
Inside the creative mind is a series of posts bringing you exactly that through Luzer's Int Archive which is a magazine that showcases outstanding print, Posters and TV advertising from all over the world.


Every issue is anxiously awaited at agencies because its pages are an incredible source of inspiration for creatives worldwide.

In each issue they interview someone who has managed to put together a successful career in the creative arena. Not an easy accomplishment. That's why I decided to share with you a summary of some of these interviews.

The first one is with Craig Davis who at the time of the interview was Regional ECD in Asia and Africa, but today is JWT chief creative director Worldwide (those titles keep getting longer)
I decided to go with this as the first of the series because I happen to believe that what he says is key for successful agencies, the essence of innovation and the true job of a good creative director.
The role of an ECD? Find people who can deliver world-class work. Helping them do it, developing people and helping client embrace that kind of thinking. Basically, getting good ideas and making them happen.
A lot of people are capable of finding strong ideas. The tricky thing is to make them happen. I think that most agencies are the same, The key difference between a greta agency and an ordinary one is that the great agency is much more successful in getting interesting thinking into the marketplace.

I think my job is to simplify things. I think that what we do should be pretty simple but it's just made complicated. I try to simplify expectations, and try to simplify briefs and simply the idea.


Perspective is worth up 10 IQ points.I think that the best solutions are often discovered by people who are not up to their neck in the problem.

(Agencies) We are in a problem solving business.

I'm not a big fan of processes. Repetition breeds similar outcomes. changes will invariably lead to fresher, more interesting solutions.

(creatives) You need to be hungry for information. You need to collect sources of inspiration and ideas from all over the place.

I think more often it's people who are willing to explore and who can throw a lot of ideas out, and can later on come back and sift through them... that's interesting... To me that's the way it works. I think that you've got to sweat out a hundred ideas and if you are lucky, two or three can be really cool.

That's another thong I do, encourage people to think past the obvious, because the obvious is normally pretty dull stuff.

In this business you've got to enjoy thinking. You've got to enjoy the exloring part.

I think people think that they are born with 100 ideas, so they keep those 100 ieas really close to them. Because they have a career ahead of them. But I think that there are a million ideas out there running around all the time.

I think that tehre is a growing number of clients either frustrated with that (tradictional agency) process or with the outcome of that process. I think that there are lot of smart clients who see that the value is in the idea, the value is in the solution.

The competition to a client is not the other people who produce the same kind of products or provide the same type of service, the competition is music videos, films, television, news, newspaper content, etc. You have to give people surprise or delight. You have to touch them in some way.
I believe he is one of the great ones of our generation. I love his approach and his philosophy.
Look at the work of JWT recently and you'll notice his influence.


I hope you enjoyed it. There many more coming up. Stay tune.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Absolut creative



The Absolut Vodka print creative (developed by TBWA ad agency in New York) is another brilliant campaign that has influenced my career and the career of millions of creatives around the world.

Last week I focused on Nike as an example of brand and agency producing some of the best creativity of the last 20 years. Nike and its "Just do it" campaign is a complex combination of clever insights, talented creatives, brilliant execution and bold decision making.

A good example of this complexity is that although everybody understood "Just do it" very well, very few people besides W+K were capable of delivering a comemrcial with the right "Just do it" feeling.

With Absolut we find a different case of creative brilliance.

Everybody could and probably did create an Absolut print ad. (this fact was embraced by the agency and resulted in the first global collaboration between artists from all fields and a brand to create advertising)

All you needed was a bottle and your own interpretation of the campaign. This attribute (where everybody can contribute to the campaign with a valid idea is perceived in creative departments as a sign of having a good concept.

This "ease of creativity" is rare in advertising, and in the case of Absolut (and probably MasterCard, which will be subject of a future post) is one of the main reasons for its popularity: Everybody understood the creative idea.

The brief of the campaign wasn't promising:
Adman Geoff Hays of the TBWA ad agency in New York was asked to come up with a campaign for Absolut Vodka. The Stockholm team had taken great care to outline a campaign for the new product based on very specific guidelines - all advertising should center around the bottle, the product should not be identified with any particular lifestyle and the approach should have a timeless yet contemporary feel to it.
Its amazing how much creativity could be born from from such uncreative set up.

But it is a good remainder of the magic of the creative process and the creative idea (TBWA was and stil is one of the most creatives and innovatives agencies in the world. And I don't believe in accidents)

Keep this message from the brand in mind:
Creativity is that simple surprise and delight of seeing familiar things in a new way. From the very beginning, when Absolut vodka was first exported, we decided to be different - to surprise and delight.
Why is this important? Because all the decisions made by the Absolut brand were measure against this strategic vision.

  • Be bold. In 1980 you couldn't find many alcohol brands that had such a conceptual message. It was one of the first campaigns that really said more about the consumer than about the product itself. In the 80"s!!! You wanted to be seen with that brand, wear it, be associated with it. Absolut said a lot about you; clever, playful, classy, sensitive... creative. (is it surprising that the same agency creates the advertising for Apple?)
  • Make the product the hero. Many times the creative team forgets that the whole purpuse of the ad, is to seel the product. But don't be too harsh on us. Its part of the creative exploration and the process of landing on the right idea. I always say that the product has to be the center of the drama. In this case the Absolut bottle is the main character, and the name Absolut the story. what else could a client ask for?
  • Surprise and delight. I remember being attracted to the absolut campaign long before getting my first job as a creative in advertising. I found them... surprising. I remember getting winter gloves with a copy of the New Yorker in 1993 "Absolut Warmth". Following their strategy, to surprise and delight Absolut had to think outside the conventional print ad, within the limitations of the print ad world. I can ventured to say that without that brand vision, the creative team would have never searched for alternative ways of delivering the campaign in the way they did.
I hope you like this campaign as much as I do. It offers great lessons about creativity and the innovation process.
But it's also consistent with some of the lessons from the Nike campaign:
Be bold.
Never be satisfied.
Try everything, fail, learn and keep on trying.

Absolut is to date one of only three brands inducted into the American Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. The other two are Coca-Cola and Nike.