In 1934, Willy Messerschmitt won a competition to design the fighter for the Luftwaffe.
He didn’t like flying himself, but he was superb designer.
When he developed the Messerschmitt 109, it embodied everything he cared about: speed, agility, modernity.
Pilots said it was like a thoroughbred racehorse, fast and agile in the hands of a highly-skilled pilot, but it was also unforgiving.
The problem was that the realities of war weren’t the same as cold-state thinking.
For instance, Messerschmitt’s 109 had a very narrow landing gear protruding from the wing roots, this made it sleeker but, in wartime the plane had to operate from muddy, bumpy fields, the narrow landing gear either got stuck or unbalanced.
It’s estimated around 1,700 pilots died because of this narrow landing-gear.
Then there was the inverted, inline V12 engine, which was good for a sleek, streamlined fuselage, but needed to be liquid cooled, and a single bullet could cut a fluid-line.
And of course, all the controls used the latest hydraulic connections, all very modern but, again, a single bullet could cut them.
So, when the Luftwaffe needed a new fighter, they called on Kurt Tank instead.
He was the head of design at Focke Wulf and he’d fought in the previous war.
He knew wars weren’t fought in presentation rooms, they were fought in mud and rain with the someone trying to kill you.
So Kurt Tank designed a plane for the real world, not for the presentation room: the Focke Wulf 190.
The first thing he changed was a wide, rugged landing gear, so the plane wouldn’t kill the pilots on take-off or landing, very ugly but it saved hundreds of pilots’ lives.
Then he changed to a radial, air-cooled engine that didn’t need liquid cooling; and he changed to metal pushrods instead of hydraulics, so there were no fluid lines to cut.
Unlike Messerschmitt, Kurt Tank knew what battlefield conditions were like, so he started from there and built a tough, easy-to-maintain, practical fighter.
As a Luftwaffe ace said “It was less of a race-horse, more like a war-horse”.
The Luftwaffe was now able to have many more fighters in the air because Kurt Tank built a tough, durable, easy-to-maintain, real-world fighter.
And in the real-world, pragmatism over-rides presentation-room strategy.
Unfortunately, strategy has taken over all aspects of our job: advertising.
Strategy is fine in the meeting room, where everyone is listening and there isn’t any competition, but that isn’t the world where advertising has to work.
In the real world no-one reads the strategy, in the real world the advertising itself is all that counts.
It either stops people or it doesn’t, the strategy stops being relevant the minute they turn the brief into advertising.
The numbers are as follows:
Each year, £20 billion is spent on all forms of advertising in the UK.
4% is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively, 89% is NOT noticed or remembered.
That’s roughly £18 billion where the strategy was probably fine, but the ads were invisible.
Because either the ads deliver the strategy in a way that gets attention or they don’t.
If they don’t, all that strategy is dead, all that money is wasted.
It all comes down to what Bill Bernbach said:
“If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic.”
And that’s what advertising has become: academic.
We are inundated with academic thinking about: the brand, emotion, heuristics, algorithms, and all the other words that can tell you why it should work.
The strategic thinking is there, but unfortunately the advertising isn’t.
Because all that clever strategy doesn’t survive the trip from the presentation room to the real world.
As Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said:
“No strategy survives first contact with the enemy”.
Or, as Mike Tyson put it:
“Everyone’s got a strategy until they get hit”.
One time I had to hire some art directors and copywriters. Anyone from the creative department with “brand custodian” on their CV, the agency was suspicious about. These are usually the prats who think their job is chiefly to enforce every jot in the corporate identity binder. They’d say things like “CI says the headline mustn’t be more than 7 words.” Or “the hero product must always be shot against a white background.” How’s that even an advertising strategy? The way around it was to present the work to the Sales Director, not Corporate Communications. She didn’t give a toss about Corporate Guidelines, all she wanted was to shift her products.
A deliberately provocative title that belies an alarming lack of understanding of what strategy actually is.
If the role of advertising is to get noticed, the role of strategy is to help the team understand how best to get noticed. What media, what audience and what devices are most likely to work best.
Did you stop to consider the reason a lot of advertising doesn’t work might be because the creatives don’t follow he strategy? Or reject the strategists’ feedback due to an inflated sense of their own artistry?
Strategy must be based on unique insights into the product’s customers. Without that, there is no point in spending time and money to create and place advertising. Many strategies expend considerable effort to avoid discovering this insight. So when it comes time to actually do the work, it’s a classic case of garbage in, but garbage out.
This is wide of the mark, Dave. Your fighter plane anecdote is itself about the value of strategy.
The reason bad ads don’t work is because they’re bad ads. The strategy could be off the mark, but so could the creative concepts and implementation. There’s no dichotomy and no easy answer. If there were, everyone would be producing great ads. But they aren’t.
Strategy is understanding what will work. In your analogy Kurt Tank is the strategist, he understands what is needed for a fighter to work in war conditions. His strategy is then designed and built. It’s a perfect example of strategy and creative working together.
There are definitely bad strategies being thrown around that aren’t built on an understanding of customers, competition and markets, but the same can also be said for bad creatives who design and build without an understanding of these things themselves. It’s bad strategy that causes the problems, not all strategy.
Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan till they get hit in the mouth. That got him lots of attention
Whilst I agree with much of the argument I also think the fundamental problem with advertising now is there is to much attention focused on platforms and delivery and no time on development of ideas.There are very few big ideas in advertising now
“People feel, before they think, before they do”.
Louis Cheskin
If your advertising doesn’t make people feel something.
They won’t be compelled to act.
It would be interesting to look at the % of advertising that works v what doesn’t and measure it for feeling.
Going by the wording of the headline, I thought strategy was intended to be the bad guy. But from the above tale, Messerschmitt appears to be the creative who is all flash and no substance, while Tank seems to be the strategist who saved the day.