1966: the World Cup Final, England were ahead, in the dying seconds the ball came to Bobby Moore.
Everyone yelled for him to kick it out of the ground, waste time, let the clock run out.
But he didn’t do that, he made a 40-yard pass into an empty space, Geoff Hurst ran onto it, belted it and scored, the whistle went and England won 4-2.
Everyone thought Moore was mad, why did he take the chance of giving possession away to the Germans?
But Hurst said he knew what Moore would do before he even kicked the ball.
Hurst played with Bobby at West Ham, and Moore would always spot the space where everybody else wasn’t.
He’d pass the ball into space, expecting his team-mates to see the space and run into it.
Hurst said, “Unlike everyone else, I knew what he’d do before he did it because I played with him at West Ham, so as soon as I saw the space I got on me bike.”
Without looking at Moore he started running into the empty space, the ball came across, Hurst kicked it and scored, before anyone else knew what was happening.
And Moore became the only English captain ever to lift the World Cup.
A few years later Bobby Moore went into management and took over at Southend.
You’d think that must be an easier job for a man who’s beaten the best in the world: to help a lower division club to beat inferior opposition.
But it didn’t turn out that way, Bobby was a failure at Southend – now how can that be?
The difference was the level of the players at the club.
On a world-class team the players are world class, they anticipate your decisions, everyone’s thinking the same thing, everyone working toward the same end.
But at Southend it wasn’t like that, the players weren’t world class, so they wouldn’t move until they saw where the ball was going.
Of course, if you wait until you can see that, the other team can see it too, you’ve got no advantage.
All the advantage comes from everyone intuitively wanting the same thing and trusting each other to try to achieve it.
It works that way with us, when the client, strategists, media, and creative all want the same thing we have a powerful team with one thought in mind.
But when we all want different things: when the client just wants safety and category norms, when the strategists just want an intellectual brief about emotion, when media just wants value-for-money, and the creative director just wants awards, then you don’t have a team.
You’ve got people pulling in different directions, on separate agendas.
Here are some examples of what a team, working together, looks like in our business:
When David Abbott sat down with media director Ken New, and discussed an upcoming campaign, then between them they changed a TV brief to a 48-sheet posters brief.
They could do it because media and creative were working together towards the same objective: the best way to get people talking about the Economist.
Later, when AMV creatives and strategists sat down together and reframed £2 billion of new revenue as coming from existing customers instead of new ones, they came up with Sainsbury’s ‘Try Something Different’ campaign.
Or BBH, when research showed the agency’s German approach was flawed, the client sat down with creative and said he believed in the agency’s campaign anyway.
So they ran it and ‘Vorsprung Durch Technic’ transformed Audi sales in the UK.
Or when LWT’s B2B trade-campaign wasn’t working, the GGT media dept said they should run posters instead, let the programmes sell the station.
The client agreed and that just left the creative dept to run provocative ads.
That’s why I’ve always found that creatively a team is much more effective, more practical, more exciting than individual brilliance.
So, if your best ideas aren’t running it may mean you’re working with the wrong people. Maybe they don’t want the same things you want, maybe they’ve got a different agenda.
Then you’ve got a choice: either change yourself to fit the situation or change the situation to fit yourself.
Maybe try to get onto a team that wants to play the game the same way you do.
I once freelanced at a local agency. Nice people but the work- oh dear. The junior team’s idea of a campaign for a car was to start every headline with “This is a car …” In the first ad it was “with ABS brakes.” Next ad “This is a car …” that surprised everyone (because it has rear camera) Of course in these digital/ experiential age, this team probably went on to be Chief Digital Creative Officers.