It Starts and Ends with the Brief. But What’s in the Middle?

I was asked last week: “What is the process you use to develop advertising ideas?”

If I’d had an ounce of integrity I’d have answered: “Actually, there is no process.”

There may be a process for developing a strategy; there may be a process for developing a media plan; but there is no process for giving birth to an idea. There never has been and there never will be.

If clients knew that, they might almost be as scared witless as creative guys are when we sit down and start with a blank page.

What helps, of course, is a tight brief. Clients who are used to seeing good ideas are also used to spending the time up front with the strategists and the account folk. They try to get the brief right.

Because the brief helps us evaluate the merit of each idea.

The best briefs are focused. There’s a consumer insight. There’s a tone that’s unique to the brand. There’s a single message with support points that prove it. And everyone agrees to it.

I am sure some clients would prefer things if we had a more proven method. Maybe we could reveal it on a fancy chart with arrows and boxes and buckets and silos and feedback loops and checkpoints and all manner of obfuscatory baloney. The chart could have a very important sounding title, like “Developmental Matrix” and it could show how, through consumer ethnographic analysis, the idea starts as a small phrenological stimulus and then by some highly-evolved, labarynthine system it’s transmogrified into a grand, unifying concept.

But that would be bunch of BS.

How it really happens is like this: a writer and art director are locked in a cage. The creative director opens the cage door just wide enough to throw in five pounds of briefing documents, memos, research reports, and old ads. He slams the door, yells “I need this stuff by Thursday, and it better be good” and runs off to lunch with his assistant. (Well, okay, I don’t actually have an assistant. But you get the point.)

So maybe what I should have said is: “Just bloody hard work.”

- James Dunlop, Creative Director, jamesd@marshall-fenn.com