The best thing my dad taught me was: “The spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.”
Which might seem strange, because Dad was a policeman.
But what that phrase taught me was never let anyone else do your thinking for you.
And never let a set of rules be an excuse for not thinking.
As a rule the law is there to be followed.
But there’s often something that couldn’t be foreseen.
No rule is perfect, so how do you decide when there are extenuating circumstances?
Well, then you have to look at the reason the rule was made in the first place.
So, although Dad didn’t put it in these words, the reason laws were made was to enforce the Social Contract, so what’s the Social Contract?
That’s the agreement whereby we willingly sacrifice some freedoms to the state, in order to receive protection by the state.
For instance we agree to give up weapons in order to have a force that protects us from other people with weapons.
So if you find a man in the street with a weapon, he’s breaking the law.
But what if he’s looking for the person who kidnapped his child?
Then should you apply the letter of the law, and arrest him, or the spirit of the law, and help find the kidnapper and child?
Pretty much all my thinking has stemmed from that phrase.
For me it taught me to question everything, to get upstream of any conclusions and find the reason they existed.
Particularly, it led me to people like Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Bishop Berkeley and eventually Jean-Paul Sartre.
“The spirit of the law, not the letter of the law” allows us to agree in the main with someone without accepting their conclusions parrot fashion.
To follow their thinking back upstream bit-by-bit, possibly keeping the parts we like and leaving the parts we don’t.
Instead of having to accept their thinking as a complete package, it allows us to pick’n’mix.
It encourages us to use their conclusion as a springboard, not a straitjacket.
Which is exactly what creative departments used to be able to do with briefs.
A brief represented the end of the planning (aka strategic) department’s thinking, and the handover to creatives for them to begin thinking.
But now, the brief isn’t handed on like a baton in a relay race, now it’s like a ball and chain.
The brief is where everyone must stop thinking.
Consequently, knowing they aren’t allowed to question the brief, creatives have stopped contributing to it.
Now a brief is a requisition form with all the requirements of the job filled in.
An idea isn’t judged as good or bad, the phrase: “It’s not on brief” kills it immediately.
Creatives are not there to think, they’re there to execute the brief.
Perhaps add a new typeface, a piece of music, a visual technique, but that’s all.
There is no possibility of creatives adding anything different, new, or exciting to the brief.
So creatives have become too lazy to question the briefs, and because planners (aka strategists) know that, they are too lazy to write exciting, challenging briefs.
The dull conventional, formulaic keeps everyone happy.
So we have the same old briefs and the same old executions all done by tired robots.
As Rory Sutherland said: “Creatives have a fear of the obvious, but they must sell their work to people who have a love of the obvious.”
No wonder the motto now is: “The letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.”
Tell me about it, Mr T.
The brief I got said the ad had to cover 7 copy points.
That’s what I did.
But the suit rejected the copy at once.
Because I hadn’t followed his sequence.
He insisted that point 1 had to be the 1st item, point 2
the second …
He then threatened to complain to the General Manager.
That really rankled, especially when he kept insisting
the ad was “no good.”
I tried explaining that all 7 points were in.
But no, he was ticking off boxes.
So I took out a lighter and set fire to the ad right in
front of him.
I still can’t believe he’s now MD of another MMC.
But in some other part of the world.
“So creatives have become too lazy to question the briefs”
Whilst this might be true in some cases, I speak from personal experience where Creative Directors need to step in and shield their creative department from these lazy briefs.
Creatives like myself want to challenge the brief and create something that keeps the essence of it but makes the work better than expected.
However, the creatives of today need a Rory Sutherland, John Webster or Dave Trott who will back them rather than back down.
Too often nowadays, creatives are seen as obstructive and difficult when they try to do their job.
This is a real shame because most brilliant adverts, pieces of art, songs, movies etc are normally created when the creator goes against the grain and tries something different.
P.S. Dave, I’m sure I speak for many a creative when I say we would have loved to work for you and follow the spirit of briefs rather than the letter of them.
Beethoven, Picasso Banksy…the greatest creative artists of all time never had a brief. Perhaps advertising should follow this example. Ban briefs and just say to creatives make me a good ad for this product. In other words trust them The results could be surprising.