WHAT SORT OF PLANNERS DO CREATIVES WANT TO WORK WITH?

 

 

When we opened GGT, we were pitching for a draught beer called Holsten Export.

The rule for draught beer advertising was you had to shoot the ad in a pub.

This was more restricting than cans or bottled beers which could be shown anywhere.

So I thought, let’s take the props from a pub but set them anywhere.

I had our spokesman singing the ad at a piano, with someone leaning on the piano drinking a pint, and a dog underneath, and we’d have some barmaids pop up to sing the chorus.

Then we could take those elements anywhere: in the desert, in the jungle, on a raft, on the moon, etc.

I wrote the music and lyrics in the style of my favourite lyricist, Tom Lehrer, and we recorded them for testing.

But here’s the really creative part: the planner was Barry Pritchard.

Barry said: “Tom Lehrer’s a bit old-fashioned, have you thought of Neil Innes?

He’s got his own show each week on BBC2.

Also a live-action chorus is a bit old-fashioned, what about animation?”

Barry didn’t shut the idea down, he moved it on.

I’d never seen Neil Innes, but I took Barry’s advice and watched his programme, and Barry was right.

I rewrote the whole campaign for Neil Innes, and changed the chorus to animation, and we shot the campaign that way.

We won the pitch, sales went up, and the campaign won lots of awards.

But there’s something else Barry did that was also really creative.

He knew the drinkers we wanted weren’t sitting at home watching telly, they’d be watching the ads on TVs in pubs.

So, to test the ads, Barry hired a van and took a video recorder round some pubs, and played the animatics to drinkers in the back of the van.

That way he made sure he got the right audience, in the right place, at the right time.

That’s the difference between a planner who sits at their desk judging other people’s work and one who’s part of the process of developing great ads.

Planners like Barry help creatives think bigger, but conventional planners make creatives think smaller, by obeying or enforcing rules instead of helping break them.

The main problem is conventional planners (aka strategists) don’t think about advertising except in abstract.

Another planner who understood the difference was GGT’s head of planning, Neil Cassie.

For years, I ran a class for students one night every week.

People who weren’t in the business but needed help knowing what good advertising was, and how to produce it, so they could put a portfolio together.

Neil said to me “It’s all very well teaching other people what you think advertising is about, but why can’t you teach my department?

If we knew what creatives are looking for, what they think makes a good ad, we’d be much more able to contribute.”

I thought that was the most perceptive thing I’d heard from a planner, so that’s what we did.

Once a week Neil’s dept, of about 20 planners, would write ads and have them critted just the way we taught students.

Gradually learning what we thought we needed to do our job.

Instead of just delivering an abstract opinion on the target market, they’d learn how the sharp end of advertising actually works.

They’d learn how to be part of the process of developing great advertising instead of just developing abstract briefs.

And Neil himself made sure he was one of the people submitting work each week, putting it up on the wall with everyone else to be critted.

Not endorsing that the creatives were right, but seeing what we were looking for when we tried to do an ad.

Appreciating that writing the correct brief isn’t the end of the process.

Those are the sort of planners that creatives want to work with.

Someone who understands that our job is advertising, not sociology.