Patton must have worked in advertising

General George S. Patton must have worked in advertising, because he said, “Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy.” And it's true. People never see your strategy. They see an ad. Or experience a website. Or hear a radio spot. And if it's clever or exciting or emotional, they'll connect with it. Maybe Patton was having lattes with Mike Lescarbeau and Luke Sullivan and overheard them say that big ideas are like nuclear bombs, in that neither has to land precisely on target to work.

Joseph Stalin must have worked in advertising, because he said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own." And it's true. If try to come up with one big idea, it'll probably take you two weeks to do it. And it'll be terrible. But if you dare yourself to have 50 ideas, they effortlessly pour from your brain onto paper and at least a couple are always, always brilliant.

Robert Kaplan must have worked in advertising, because he wrote that the battlefield is more intellectually stimulating than the Potomac, because "ideas can only be tested through application." And it's true. There are people working in the advertising industry who position themselves as "strategic thinkers" purely because they don't have any actual skills. Fuck 'em and their ability to work phrases like "30,000 foot view" into everyday conversations. Nobody lives at 30,000 feet. Spend all your time up there and the lack of oxygen will fry your brain. If an insight doesn't lead to a great execution, get a new insight.

Napoleon Bonaparte must have worked in advertising, because he said, "The most important qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation." And it's true. Lots of people have good ideas. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways for those ideas to die. A great creative knows that coming up with an idea is only the first step. Then you have to sell it and watch it die and be willing to go back to the well over and over again until you find an idea that lives. And then you have to tirelessly pursue your idea through revisions and updates and productions and post-productions. Napoleon must have traded text messages with Paul Arden just after he wrote, "Energy is 99% of the job. If you haven't got it, be nice."

Or maybe none of them worked in advertising. Maybe advertising just feels a lot like war.

Marketing takes intelligence. Advertising takes guts.

These are words I have written before:

[Blogging] immortalizes everyday language, holding it to an impossibly lofty standard.

And I am thinking about those words now after reading a post by Noah Brier named "When Too Much Listening Is A Bad Thing."

It's precisely those emotional comments that [the Microsoft/Jerry Seinfeld ad campaign] should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didn't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... The people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.

In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback.

Brier is right. More than once I've prepared a marketing director for the idea that an ad (this radio spot, for example) might offend someone. But these days, a client might get more than a cranky phone call. He or she might get an angry blog post that an antsy junior marketing executive sends to an unpredictable CEO who forwards it to the whole senior management team, which immediately convenes a committee to seriously consider the matter. The next day the agency phone rings, a junior account coordinator picks up the call, and an effective, wonderful ad dies.

In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This Luke Sullivan wrote that we marketers get so tied up measuring public opinion, we forget that we have the power to shape it. The Internet appears to give us the ability to measure opinion more accurately than ever before. But it gives disproportionate weight and unprecedented permanence to isolated, impulsive rantings.

For the most part, I've been blessed with courageous, focused clients. But the weight of the written word makes even stout hearts wobbly. Sometimes the best course is to just sack up and plow on.

Pigs, pitching and the Denver 50

I'm not the first person to blog this quote. Or the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth:

The whole creative process is stupid. It's like washing a pig. It's messy, it has no rules, no clear beginning, middle, or end; it's kind of a pain in the ass, and when you're done, you're not sure if the pig is clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place.

That goes double for pitching, which Marc Brownstein recently laid into at Small Agency Diary:

I'm not advocating abstinence from dating. It's just that the courting process has gone too far. It's often a waste of an agencies' time to pitch among 12 other shops. Narrow it down, clients! Apply some discipline to the process.

Pure's Gregg Bergan had a good column in The Denver Business Journal not too long ago. He opined that a trip through an agency's portfolio and a long lunch was a better predictor of relationship success than a creative shootout:

Schedule a time to visit each agency. Ask to meet with your entire prospective team and no others. Don't agree to a meeting until all of them can make it. Ask to see a portfolio that represents the work of the actual people who would be on your account. If the agency portfolio includes work of others, you don't want to see it.

OK. But the pitch process survives not only because clients like seeing a bunch of work for free. Creative departments, despite the strain, often love a shootout. It's competitive. Energetic. And win or lose, it gives writers and art directors a whole lot of chances to produce stuff for their books.

When we created the idea for The Denver 50, we all agreed that past award shows thrived on snappy headlines and big egos. And we wanted the New Denver Ad Club's first show to let go of those things and embrace the thinking of agencies like Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Anomaly and StrawberryFrog.

Letting go of the pitch process would take the same sort of willpower.

Dumb ways to kill good work

Some cliches earn their status. Others are memorable mostly for their inanity. And still others lie in between.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

A brilliant insight. Also a clueless, lazy assertion.

It's said a lot by clients. Luke Sullivan took them on in Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This.

Sometimes clients need to be reminded that their product isn't substantially different from the competition's. All that may distinguish the two is the advertising you propose... You need to get your client to see that execution can be content and personality can be proprietary. They're called "pre-emptive claims" - claims any competitor could've made had they moved fast enough.

All well and good. But what if the objection is raised not by the client, but by someone who should know better? An account executive. Worse, a creative director.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Often the definition of "anybody" seems to float along with the motivations of the objector. For instance, Adidas ran a spot where an Olympic weightlifter snatched a heavy barbell, pumped his fist, and walked offscreen. The spot ended with the Adidas logo and the tagline "Forever Sport." Adidas has a rich athletic history and a product line that validates this claim. A smart planner would have supported it. But cover up the Adidas logo and you could easily believe you'd watching an ad for the USOC, Gatorade or even Nike. If the same planner woke up on the wrong side of the bed on that particular day, the campaign could have been consigned to the agency basement.

And even when a claim isn't unassailably authentic, a well-done ad can create ownable space all by itself. Saatchi/London's classic work for XXXX claimed, "Australians wouldn't give a XXXX for anything else." Except that Wikipedia reports that XXXX is one of a few beers popular in Queensland, and unpopular throughout much of the rest of Australia.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Um yeah. And if we covered up the photo, that logo would be sitting next to some whitespace. It's all nonsense. We're not going to cover up the logo, we're going to end up making it 10% bigger. So please, unless the claim is random to the point of dishonesty, give it a rest.