Hegarty on Advertising

Turning Intelligence into Magic

John Hegarty

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773970
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

First published by Thames & Hudson in 2011, this is a book that no creative professional should be without. Written by one of the worlds leading advertising men, it contains over four decades of wisdom and insight from the man who put Nick Kamen into a laundrette for Levi Strauss and gave Audi the immortal Vorsprung durch Technik, among many, many other highly successful campaigns for major brands.

This revised and expanded edition discusses the changes that have taken place in the advertising industry and Hegartys own career since the original book was first published in 2011. One new section Why Im now parking my ideas in a garage discusses Hegartys new company, The Garage. In the other new section From Unilever to the UN via a llama Hegarty talks predominantly about the ad he did for the UNs Global Goals for their Sustainable Development campaign.

Note: Best viewed on a colour device

1

IDEAS

Ideas are what advertising is built upon. We worship them, we seek them, fight over them, applaud them and value them above everything else. Walk round the floors of any agency and the phrase you’ll hear most is: ‘What’s the idea?’

Ideas are the most incredible thing we possess. They can change the future of brands, of countries and of the course of history. They engage, entertain and stimulate, encouraging debate, dissent and adoration. We take them for granted, but sometimes it is important to step back and marvel at their brilliance and, so often, their simplicity.

Ideas are the most egalitarian thing we do. They can be done by anyone at any time. You don’t need qualifications to be able to do them or special equipment to conceive them – they can be created anywhere.

I believe that celebrating this unique skill is fundamentally important. The creation of ideas is the intellectual force that has driven civilization and empowered the dreams of us all. And, with ideas, the more you have them, the better you get at having them. That’s one of the many reasons why advertising is such a stimulating environment in which to work.

The pressure of such creative demands can be exhausting, and one of the most relentless environments I ever worked in was the Cramer Saatchi consultancy, set up in 1967 and the forerunner of Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency. It was certainly an exciting place to be, but to make it pay we had to create a major campaign a week: print, TV and posters, point of sale. Everything. We even used to redesign the packaging if we felt it needed it. This was 360° thinking before people knew what 360° thinking was. || Most of our briefs came from agencies that had failed to crack a creative problem, so they turned to us to dig them out of a hole. The problem being that, as the client had run out of patience with the agency, they had also run out of time, so we were always working under extreme deadline pressure. Over night, over the weekend, over everything.

We were working so hard and so fast that at times it was madness. We’d be presenting the ideas we’d drawn up before the ink had dried. Binning the bad ones took too much time, so we’d just chuck them over our shoulder and start on a new one. It was all slightly comic and felt a bit like a scene in the Billy Wilder movie The Front Page. Walter Matthau, cast as a ruthless newspaper executive, has convinced Jack Lemmon, who plays a reporter, to stay at his typewriter and cover the story of an escaped convict. Lemmon becomes so engrossed in writing the story that he can’t stop. And as we all know, a journalist can’t write a story without smoking. So he simply says to Matthau, who is standing next to him, ‘Cigarette me.’

As a result of working under such pressure to turn things around quickly, the consultancy would occasionally produce work of which it wasn’t really proud, typically a great piece of thinking that gradually became compromised in an attempt to get the client to buy it instead of putting it out of its misery and starting again. There is always a belief in these situations that, somehow, the compromises won’t show when the finished work is produced. Sadly, this kind of wishful thinking affects us all.

At times like this we all live in hope that the fundamental brilliance of the idea, despite all the compromises, will shine through. The truth is, that hardly ever happens and you should have the courage to kill your baby before it gets really ugly.

At Cramer Saatchi one of these disasters would reach production from time to time and everyone in the office would do their best to distance themselves from that particular dog. All well and good until, with horror, we realized that on one occasion the work had been entered into the D&AD Annual – the most prestigious awards in British design and advertising. Of course, the creatives who had conceived this questionable work didn’t want anything to do with it. Some glory-seeking photographer or agency had entered the abominations without telling us. As no one wanted to own up to the really bad work, it was agreed we would invent a couple of fictitious characters who would go down as the creative team responsible for this drivel. We never, of course, thought any of the dreadful work we all loathed would stand a chance of being accepted, but on one occasion it was. If you look at a copy of the 1970 D&AD Annual, you will see that the entirely invented creative team of Donald Lorio and Jake Stouer made their one and only illustrious appearance in the annals of creative genius. I remember at the time Charles thought it was hilarious, saying something like even our shit work is good. And an entry into D&AD was good for business.

I digress, so let’s return to my main point at its very simplest: ideas and the belief in being able to produce great ideas are everything; otherwise advertising is just information. The trick is to make the information interesting and relevant. In the world of marketing communication, understanding those two words – interesting and relevant – has filled a library. But it shouldn’t have. Ultimately, it’s just common sense and a desire to excite people. || Always remember that all information goes in through the heart. Or, as James Stephens, in his book The Crock of Gold, said: ‘What the heart feels today, the head will understand tomorrow.’

So how does one create that ‘great idea’ that turns the raw information into advertising that will engage and entertain as well as inform? || There is a fantastic book on playing tennis called The Inner Game of Tennis which has a very simple conclusion: relax and let your true self perform. And so it is with creativity, perhaps even more so, I would say. I have always said that I do my best thinking when I’m not thinking: that’s when inspiration strikes. You’ve already fed all the issues, concerns, wishes and desires of the brief into your mind, and then you just have to let it percolate. You can talk about it, consider the brief in terms of what you like, what you don’t like, what you would like to see and what appeals. || Out of that absurd, crazy process pops a brilliant thought: that’s where the magic emerges. Of course, no one wants to believe it’s so random, but it is.

Now I can hear the corporate minds saying: ‘But if it is so random and unpredictable, how can a creative business operate as a business?’ This is not an unreasonable question to which my answer is: ‘With great difficulty.’ This is probably why wonderfully talented agencies come and go with such regularity, being brilliant, stunning and amazing one minute, then suddenly descending into mediocrity and predictability the next.

You have to accept the creative process is completely dysfunctional. If you deny that fact, you will ultimately fail. You may get away with it for a while, but then, like paint over rust, the rust will eventually burn through. || The unpredictability is what makes what we do in advertising so exciting – you literally don’t know where you’re going to end up. Creativity isn’t about predictability: it has to surprise and challenge – it has to be daring yet motivating. || In a creative organization, if you understand that, then there’s a good chance you’ll be successful and continue being successful.

Why does Hollywood produce so many predictable, boring movies? Because they’re following a formula. And there’s nothing a formula-led mindset likes more than a nice, comfortable process. You can take refuge in a process. Those in business who are formula-led are always trying to find a way of processing creative thought. They want to streamline it. They want to make it more predictable. Their answer: tissue meetings.

Have you ever had to suffer a tissue meeting? All of us in advertising have at some point, haven’t we? For those that don’t know what I mean, count yourself lucky! A tissue meeting is a stage between the strategy having been agreed between the agency and the client and the final creative presentation. It’s a meeting where the agency shares a number of creative routes with the client. The idea behind a tissue meeting is to make the client feel happy and involved with the work they’re eventually going to buy. All very reasonable, you might think, but brilliance is rarely reasonable.

Everyone walks out of the meeting feeling satisfied, except the creative people – the ones who have to come up with the magic.

Whoever came up with the completely stupid idea of tissue meetings should be taken out and shot. They are the invention of a predictable mind trying to make the unpredictable predictable. Tissue meetings were created to keep clients happy and to make them feel we are in complete command of what we do, which we’re not.

Creativity isn’t a process; advertising is a process.

Creativity is a manic construction of absurd, unlikely irreverent thoughts and feelings that somehow, when put together, change the way we see things. That’s why it’s magic. If you want to be ordinary, then, yes, use a process. || With a process and a series of tissue meetings you can very easily make things obvious, certain and easy to buy. And I’m not just talking about the advertising business. The world is full of predictable things: open any magazine, turn on your television and there they are. Why? Because the world wants creativity to behave like a formulaic process. You can see it happening in any creative industry.

Process is trying to make order out of chaos. Creativity is trying to make chaos to create order. They are at opposite ends of a spectrum.

You don’t think Leonardo da Vinci went to a tissue meeting when he was painting the Mona Lisa, do you? Imagine the scene: perhaps Leonardo could have her looking to the right? Maybe she could be wearing some jewelry? Bit more of a smile, maybe? Stick an apple on her head – that would get people wondering. Of course Leonardo didn’t go to a bloody tissue meeting – it was a piece of inspiration. A piece of inspiration that has lasted 500 years and still has us standing back in amazement. Believe it or not, that’s what any half-decent creative person is trying to do – create something that will make people stand back and look in amazement. Creativity can change the way we feel about something and will stay with us for eternity. Is that asking for too much? Maybe, but unless we try we’ll never get there. And I can guarantee one way you won’t get there is in a sodding tissue meeting. By definition, a tissue meeting is trying to corral creativity. I want to set it free. Despite my rant about these meetings, they’ll still continue. Even I will probably have to go on enduring them. But unless we admit their limitation, we won’t inspire that great idea – that piece of magic that can do wonders for clients’ sales figures.

But how do you know when an idea is great? And is good the enemy of great? Does a process that gets you to good hamper great? I think it probably does. The more you process it, just like food, the blander it will be.

I was once asked to present a lecture on what I looked for in a ‘great idea’. My initial reaction was that it was a dysfunctional, random process and most of the time relied upon nothing more than inspiration. || But although this is what I believe, simply standing in front of an audience and saying something amounting to ‘I just buy what I like’ would have made a very short speech and one, I’m sure, the organizers would not have welcomed. I therefore set about analysing how I went about my work. Could I detect any formula? Was there more to it than just instinct? Like riding a bicycle, you don’t really think about it. So, I had to interrogate my own beliefs. What was it about an idea that I liked? What turned me on to one thought as opposed to another? Was there a common thread that I could identify?

Now it’s important to state that my intention wasn’t to develop a simple formula for creating ideas. I think that’s impossible. There may be a simple formula for reading a balance sheet, but certainly not one for the creative process. However, there obviously is a process of a kind that you go through as you create. Why do some ideas resonate over and above others? You have to have an understanding of the tools you use to reach a decision about when you have a ‘great idea’.

When I examined my own process, I realized there was a common thread that was clearly identifiable in all the work I did ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Abouth the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright