Creative Destruction – Death by over analysis

What happens when you take a perfectly respectable creative and put it through the marketing manager’s microscope…for people who know what I do, my saying this would come as a surprise to them as I am a marketing person myself …which is exactly why I cant help but cringe at the creative destruction that takes place once we receive a concept for an ad!

A typical marketing campaign or ad goes through various levels of approvals, gathering comments of various people ranging from the actual bosses to employees who might have been passing the marketing desk on their way to the coffee machine!, They are people who feel the need to let us know their valuable comments on each and every element of the creative going into details of what they think that smile on the face of the model means to them at an existential level… and in the process totally missing the point by miles!

So here we go back to the drawing boards…and all because Mr. So & So from Whatever department had difficulty ‘decoding’ (a fancy ad term most often used by brand managers and client servicing guys) this piece of art, we have to now go about making it as ‘fool’ proof as possible! (Yes, we admit and live with the fact that we are fools)

Now begins what I fondly call, creative destruction…no this is not as simple as the murder of pure thought, or the repression of misunderstood art. This is the slow and painful process of creatively killing by justifications, which receive an ear only by virtue of the speaker possessing the title of a ‘client’! Each element of the unfortunate ad is analyzed and over analyzed. Everything from the creative thought to the position of the 3rd full stop on the 2nd line to the ad agency’s intelligence is questioned. Everyone from the CEO to the watchman are invited for blind tests. And finally the agency is given ‘productive feedback’.

If by now you are feeling all sorry for the ad agency…STOP right now…don’t we wish it was as simple as this! Try eavesdropping on a conversation between brand managers and creative agencies and you will realize that far from changing the whole ad….convincing the agency guys to budge an inch is a major achievement, as any brand manager worth his day will testify! How many times have you heard these dramatic proclamations, “this ad does not deliver the right kind of attitude we want to project!”, or “sir please understand the whole impact of the ad will be destructed if we increase the size of the logo by an inch!…” and the less said the better about the practiced looks of exasperation on the faces of the servicing guys.

Being a client myself I have, since a long time, nursed a hurt ego and a notion that maybe agencies run special secret training sessions on ‘how to respond to difficult clients’. I am sure they teach them the art of ‘exaggeration – how to make your creative sound like the best concept after sliced bread’ or ‘time management – how to deal with doped out creative people who wont deliver and give excuses to clients’ & my favourite ‘looks of frustrations – how to pretend nobody, not the client, not their creative teams, not even the wife understands them and how they are too poorly paid for doing this shit!’

Though who gets the worse of the deal, the client or the agency can be a rhetoric I don’t think I want to get into…All this for that one exception or moment of true inspiration which is purely for the good of the brand and unadulterated by the egos of the many people involved!