ARSE-BACKWARDS CREATIVITY

 

 

When I started at art school, like most people I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing.

Was I supposed to be working realistically like Degas, or stylistically like van Gogh, or emotionally like Bacon, or crudely like Pollock, or ironically like Warhol, or conceptually like Duchamp?

What fashion was I supposed to be following?

Then one day, I was talking to my friends on another course, Industrial Design.

They said, their biggest influence was the Bauhaus, and they kept repeating the maxim: ‘form follows function’.

That took root in my mind and slowly went off like a depth-charge.

Of course – form FOLLOWS function, that was it.

What something eventually looked like should be defined by its ability to do the job.

That’s how you’d know if it was any good.

Don’t start with what it looks like, start with the job it’s supposed to be doing then see if it does that job.

Then form wouldn’t be about fashion, or trends, or expert opinions, it was purely about how well it delivered the answer to a problem: form FOLLOWED function.

Suddenly I didn’t have to listen to anyone else’s opinion, the form wasn’t subjective because it could be judged objectively.

In fact, the real creativity wasn’t even in the form, it was in defining the problem to be solved, the function, because form FOLLOWED function.

So the exciting re-interpretation of the function was the really creative part.

The form was just the part that delivered that function.

Later, I found this worked perfectly for advertising.

The creative’s job started with the strategy, the creative re-interpretation of the job we were supposed to be doing.

That’s why the very best creatives came up with the most creative strategies.

Because form FOLLOWED function, and if we were going to do an exciting ‘form’ we were going to make damn sure we had an exciting and creative ’function’ to work from.

But over the years the ‘function’ part got its own department, called ‘strategy’.

The strategists would separate the function off and define it themselves, then give their definition of function to the creative dept as a brief.

And, because creative people weren’t doing it, most strategy wasn’t very creative at all.

In fact, strategy wasn’t seen as needing to be creative, just correct.

So ‘form’ began following a very dull ‘function’.

Because the people writing the briefs, the strategists, had misunderstood the function.

They thought the sole function was to make sure the advertising followed category norms and didn’t make mistakes.

They thought it was it was up to creatives to make the form exciting.

So now form DOESN’T follow function.

And it seems that’s how most of us are doing it, because of the £20 billion spent on all forms of advertising in the UK: 4% is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively, and 89% IS NOT NOTICED OR REMEMBERED.

That means roughly £18 billion is invisible, because we’ve got the ‘function’ wrong.

In those circumstances, you would have thought it was pretty obvious that the main function must be getting seen and remembered.

You would have thought strategists would direct their energies towards finding creative solutions for impact.

But apparently that’s too simple and obvious, especially now the Cannes Awards are often given for the ‘case-studies’ justifying the ads.

Awards given to advertising that doesn’t work on its own: advertising that needs a complex explanation.

In fact, maybe they could do away with the ads and just give the awards to the briefs.

But, on the other hand, creatives seem happy to enter ads that didn’t even run.

The creative function is to cheat in order to ‘win’, by any means possible, little gold trophies.

Form without any function at all in fact.

So the motto for creatives has become: ‘form follows form’.

And the motto for strategists has become: ‘function follows function’.

All of which just goes to prove what Edward de Bono said:

“There are a lot of people calling themselves creative who are actually mere stylists.”