Luke Sullivan PRESENTATIONS & WORKSHOPS
Building Big-Ass Fires Under Creative Companies.速
I was in the ad business for 33 years, all of them at pretty good agencies like The Martin Agency, GSD&M, and Fallon. My book “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This” was named one of the Top Ten Marketing Books of All Time by readers of Ad Age. And now I’m offering a series of presentations and workshops on advertising, branding, and marketing. There’s no “If you can dream it you can do it!” B.S. – just rock solid creative advice that your people can start using
immediately. “Building Platforms, Not Just Campaigns” and “Leveraging Cultural Tensions to Improve Creativity” are two of the more popular presentations, but I have a full workday’s worth of content collected from workshops and keynotes given at conferences from Sydney to Helsinki. Some of the lessons are captured in this book. On the thumbdrive is a 15-minute clip of a speech in Reykjavik, some references, and a few other goodies. Operators are standing by.
Start with the truth. It can be a truth about the product, the brand or the category, but whatever it is, find the most honest, human, and universal truth you can. It’s unlikely the truest thing will be featured anywhere on the client brief. It’s in your heart and bones. Start there. Why does this product even matter?
What is the truest thing you can say about your brand?
This is the sister question to “What is the truest thing you can say?� Interestingly, both questions lead to the same place. People do things for emotional reasons and then rationalize their actions. Find the emotional center and the words and the ideas and the truth will start to flow.
Find the emotion.
Surrounding the truths of any product or category, you’ll find conflicting energies. Food, for example. We love to eat but don’t want to gain weight. Cars: we love driving them but worry about their effect on the environment. These opposing forces can be used to generate heat, sparks, flame and story.
Identify the central conflicts in the product, brand,or category.
Find and leverage these conflicts. Without them, you don’t have a story and without a story to tell, no one will listen. Conflict is at the core of every single movie, book, or sit-com you have ever enjoyed. The conflicts you leverage can be as big as good-versusevil or as banal as Crest-versus-cavities.
Conflict creates story.
You’ll never see a headline in the news that reads, “Area Bank Not Robbed.” People don’t slow down to look at the highway; they slow down to look at the highway accident. This isn’t because we’re all secretly morbid. It’s simply natural to tune out the status quo and tune in only when the status changes.
When everything is okay, people aren’t interested.
Clients prefer to show life with their fine products because it’s a happy place where no one has cavities or is overdrawn at the bank. But if we want to tell a story, does it make sense to start at the happy ending? Life in Pleasantville is boring. Start with a problem and work your way to a solution.
Without is usually more interesting than with.
This is the answer to the timeless client question, “Why do you creatives always have to be so negative?” The fact is, Darth Vader is more interesting than Luke. Remember: “Bad is stronger than good as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.” (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 201, Vol 5, No. 4. 323-370.)
Bad is stronger than good.
Campaigns are held together by things like messaging, typeface, or the art direction. But when brands are being launched or redefined, it’s better to start from a higher place; a place where a brand can live for a long time.Think of a campaign as a movie, and a platform as a Hollywood franchise.
A platform is an idea that creates ideas.
Think of a platform as a movie franchise. The “Lord of the Rings” or the James Bond franchises both created worlds. However fanciful these worlds may be, they have their own internal logic and a set of rules that allow for the creation of sequels and prequels. TV writers call it “universe building.” We call it platform building.
A platform is a world with its own rules.
When you finally hit on a working platform, you will feel a release of energy, as all the possibilities start to unfold. You’ll see the rules of the new world and how they can all be recombined to tell your brand story in a wide variety of ways. A platform isn’t just a story. It’s the mother of stories.
The rules start talking to you and won’t shut up.
Weird how it works, but if you need more space than a Post-It note to describe your big idea, your idea isn’t big enough.
It’s not a big idea if itdoesn’t fit on a Post-It.
Identify the truest thing about your brand and then look for conflicts in the general area of that truth. Remember my student’s platform for Crocs.The truest thing? They’re ugly. What conflict can arise from this truth? You won’t get laid. Platform? “Crocs.The World’s Most Comfortable Birth Control in15 Bright Colors.”
Truth plus conflict sometimes sparks platforms.
People aren’t interested in ads. So why interrupt the shows, sites, and magazines that people think are interesting, when you can start being the interesting thing? The age of advertising as interruption is over. Advertising as destination, advertising as content is where the fun stuff is.
Don’t sit down to do ads. Sit down to do something interesting.
The internet is a roaring real-time data blizzard where the only boring things are banner ads.The fun stuff starts when we help brands hot-wire the grid and mash Google StreetView to iTunes, layering real-time weather reports and the current score of the Rams-Cowboys game to camera feeds from space. You know, stuff like that.
Don’t make things for the internet. Make things out of the internet.
Come up with an idea for your client that’s so interesting the press will write feature stories about it. An ad idea so cool you don’t have to pay people to watch it. For instance, the press release from Burger King about how they stopped selling the Whopper? That became the Effie-winning WhopperFreakout.
Can you express your idea as a press release?
Brand messages are no longer enough. Instead of having your brand just say something, have it make something, or do something. It’s like Edward Boches said: “Soon, applications, utility, and platforms will outpace messages as an agency’s most important creative output.”
It’s not what can your brand say,but what can it do?
Problem finding is a playful screwing-around and “what if-ing” that often results in giant leaps forward; leaps nobody was expecting because the problem didn’t exist until you pointed it out. Think of it as Creative Research & Development. Look at your client, at their customers, their stores, their website. Look for bottlenecks, redundancies, unmet customer needs. Then solve this new probem, elegantly.
Why solve problems when finding problems is way cooler?
Figure out how your brand can give people things that improve their lives. Give them something that’s fun to do. Give them an experience. Give them something they didn’t know they needed. Seriously. Why give people just brand messages? What can anyone do with a brand message? Jack squat is what.
Is it beautiful, useful, or entertaining?
Something is remarkable, says Seth Godin, when people make remarks about it. Which means if you want people to go,“Holy shit, they really did this??� you have to really do it. How else can we help our clients get into the national conversation? (Please note that the national conversation is about commercials only during Super Bowl week.)
Is this idea something people will talk about?
If you have to ask this question, you should sit down and figure out how to execute your idea. Because it means your idea is outrageous, or oversized, or too-much, or will upset or offend the status quo. These are all very good things.They get people talking about your idea. Remember:Tell the truth and run.
Are you sure they’ll even let us do this?
Creativity is no longer the most important attribute of an advertising idea. Because cleverness will not get us past the eye-rolling of a nation of profoundly skeptical cynics. Being believed is the first order of business and to do that a brand needs to speak and act (and advertise) with transparency and authenticity.
Authenticity beats authority.
If your brand has some sort of obvious shortcoming (it’s ugly or tastes bad), try seeing what’ll happen if you address that directly and really own it. Denying it is inauthentic and as long as the benefits outweigh the negatives, it’s all good. Plus, customers will love you for your candor and transparency. VWs were ugly. And it’s partly why we loved ‘em.
Embrace The Suck.
When you think you’re all done, and you’re pretty sure you have a great idea that works in all media, one that’s authentic, interesting, shareable, on-strategy and all that good stuff, ask one last question. Ask, “So what?” Is this just another advertising idea? Or is it an idea worth advertising?
Ask “So what?”
Luke Sullivan: Building Big-Ass Fires Under Creative Companies 速 Write: heywhipple@me.com Read: heywhipple.com Follow: @heywhipple