Who make better planners? Planners or creatives? (Via Chemistry.ie)

Reprinted in full, the erudite Rory Sutherland with another excellent, thought-provoking post.

This was the debate at the IPA on Monday evening. David Golding vs Dave Trott. And, my sweet Lord, was it good! Quite possibly among the best single hours I have spent at an event in my working life.

I also however have a slightly odd take on this argument (if I were a planner I would probably describe my stance as being Feuerabendian). My position is that I completely accept the value which planners and other specialists can add to the creative output of an agency – and I believe that varied groups of people are a good thing. But I believe our current, sequential approach to using different talents is a dreadful way to use our mix of talents to best effect.

In a single sentence my view is “Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad”.

In short I believe that the way our business now tends to make “being interesting” subordinate to “being logical” is the single greatest reason why a lot of advertising is awful (and explains why the number of people who “believe the ads are as good as the programmes” has been in constant decline for over 20 years).

Put another way, when given a choice between post rationalisation and pre-rationalisation, I’d choose post-rationalisation 80% of the time.

Here goes:

1) I think there are really only two types of people in advertising agencies. Good people and crap people. Hence I am a little wary of debates about “what sort of crap people should we employ – crap planners or crap creatives”. It’s more important to have good people than to obsess about what they do. If I were a septic, I would quote Vince Lombardi here: “Hire the best athletes” was his mantra. He simply drafted the best people, without much caring whether they were quarterbacks, running-backs, line backers, motherf***kers or whatever else you have in the NFL. Incidentally our business of charging by the hour makes it difficult to hire except by specialism, which is a problem. 2) There are many, many ways of solving a business problem. Your solution could be reached through highly analytical means or purely creative means; by interrogating a database or by interrogating your mum. None of these is right or wrong, better or worse. I would argue that if you are turning human understanding into business advantage for your clients, you’re doing a good job; if you’re not, you’re not. You can do this with a marker pen; equally you can do it with a speadsheet. In fact I ecccentrically believe dataanalysis and really good statistical modelling can be immensely creative – because, just like a good creative team, well-worked data can reveal wonderfully unexpected, unasked for truths. In Freakonomics the guns-vs-swimming-pools insight is arrived at numerically, but it is no less an astoundingly original thought for being uncovered by computers. Never forget this, folks: turbo-charged logic is a valid form of creativity.

3) Good agencies should be entirely open minded as to how they solve a problem. Via persuasion, behaviourism, business insight, econometric modelling, wild creative leaps, economic theory, anthropology, technology, media insights, by design, PR, promotions, digital……. (Dave T’s Sainsbury’s pitch story was tremendous at illustrating this). I also agree entirely with DT in that “brand” should not be – as it seems to have become – the default starting point for all thinking – though it should patently direct the way the solution is implemented.

4) A better mix of people will hence have a better chance of arriving at an optimal solution. Interestingly, diverse groups, according to recent behavioural research, seem to work rather well at problem solving – homogeneous groups are a catastrophe. Hence Planners alongside Creatives seem a better idea than Planners then Creatives. (Neither, by the way, is as good as Planners+Creatives+Media, which is what we had before a bunch of greedheads discovered you could make 1% more money from clients by supplying them with disjointed solutions).

5) So far a stalemate, right? No. And here’s where I side with Dave. What I am saying above is that all means of arriving at solutions are equally valuable. Fair? And yet our processes and thinking are inherently biased towards the rational and away from the creative. How so?

6) Notice that all creative people have to present and justify their thinking to rational people. This does not usually apply the other way round. I have never seen a creative person given the chance to critique a media schedule or a budget. Yet media buyers are routinely asked what they think of the ads.

7) It is assumed that the process starts with rationality and eventually moves to creativity. Why necessarily this way round? Why not work in parallel, or even in reverse? A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic. Okay, you have to pretend to clients that you reached the solution in sequential order, because anything else makes them nervous. The same applies if you present a scientific breakthrough to the Royal Society – you can’t start a paper with the words ”I was sitting in my lab one night and I, like, had this idea, right…..” But it is fundamentally a benign lie. This may explain why many advertising successes are arrived at despite the established process, not because of it – and why pitches are more fun than real work.

Because of this sequence bias, in many cases the brief can be 1) excessively simplified or 2) overcomplicated before a creative even gets a whiff at it. (Much great advertising was made to a promise so simplistic – eg Heineken is refreshing - that no planner would feel they had added much value by writing it). David assumed that creatives would always leap to certain default solutions without planning input – eg Land Rover advertising always boiled down to military/safari/mud/dust. But are they wrong? Most of the best Land Rover advertising generally features some mud. I owned one of the damn things for three years and suffered the pain of 16mpg because it felt like Rorke’s Drift on Wheels. I’m not sure the creatives weren’t right.

9) Creatives are often paid on a project basis while Planners and Account People are on retainer. This is a complete con. It effectively says - ”why don’t the rest of us feel free to ponce about on your business for months - and we’ll just drag a couple of creative people in at the last minute if it’s absolutely necessary to execute something”.

10) DT observes that creatives would rather produce something irrelevant and visible rather than irrelevant and visible. You could view this as a criticism. But in a media-fragmented world what DT described as the instinctive creative approach (ie “let’s make something people will like and see how we can put it to good use”) makes more and more sense compared to “let’s spend weeks determining precisely what we want to say and then ask a creative team to try not to make it dull”, which is often the default approach when you start with planning and move sequentially to creative thinking.

So, in a sentence, I think both disciplines are equally valuable. But I think creativity needs affirmative action more than planning does. In particular, the assumption that planning always gets to work on the problem first shows an inherent bias in our thinking which is not only uncreative, it’s also downright unscientific.

As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner….. “You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first.”