Avoiding Compromise in Advertising
“Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.” — David Ogvily in Confessions of an Advertising Man.
And in Ogilvy on Advertising, he notices, “Many commercials and many advertisements look like the minutes of a committee.”
Avoiding compromise is one of the hardest things you’ll encounter, especially if you have a truly radical idea. As Helmut Krone, art director of the famous Volkswagen ads of the 60s, said, “If you can look at something and say, ‘I like it’, then it isn’t new.” And bureaucracies, even those inside advertising agencies or marketing departments, fear nothing more than the new. Why? Because the disease of “best practices” has infected everything. ‘If someone hasn’t already done it, and succeeded, then we can’t do it.’ Which means you’ll never do anything truly interesting.
Fight fight fight, against compromise. It will be hard enough when people don’t like your idea. It will be just as difficult if people do. Ogvily said, “Any fool can write a bad advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one.”
Creativity is not the product of compromise. Are there examples of great art that that was passed around and made better by successive teams? Of course. Countless movies, for instance, have been bettered through revisions by outsiders. But if you think about your favorite films, books, or ads, you’ll often find they were the product of smaller teams, or large teams with a clear leader.
Vision and ownership are necessary to accomplish something radical, and radically effective.
Management may want his or her “touch” on it. Your client or internal teams will want to make slight adjustments, so they can feel “ownership” of the idea. You may need to make concessions, but if they compromise the core idea, if they muddy it in any way, you are likely better off scrapping the whole thing.
An idea half executed will not be half as effective. It will not be effective at all.
Bill Bernbach’s famous Avis campaign is just one example of uncompromising creativity leading to success.
“Avis had been stuck in second place in its category and had been losing money for 15 years when Avis President Bob Townsend asked Bill Bernbach to give the company’s image a boost. What resulted was an unlikely campaign success story as DDB embraced Avis’ second-place status. Almost overnight, Avis raced into the black. The ads transformed Avis into a popular underdog, with everyone rooting for them to succeed.” — www.ddb.com
How did they achieve such a massive success? Bernbach told Avis: “If you want five times the impact [as your competitors for every dollar spent], give us 90 days to learn enough about your business to apply our skills, and then run every ad we write where we tell you to run it.”
In fact, they drafted a six-point contract to codify their relationship, and their respective roles as agency and client:
1. Avis will never know as much about advertising as DDB and DDB will never know as much about the rent-a-car business as Avis.
2. The purpose of the advertising is to persuade the frequent business renter to try Avis.
3. A serious attempt will be made to create advertising with five times the effectiveness of the competition’s advertising.
4. To this end, Avis will approve or disapprove, not try to improve ads which are submitted. Any changes suggested by Avis must be grounded on a material operating defect (a wrong uniform for example).
5. To this end, DDB will only submit for approval those ads which they truly as an agency recommend. They will not “see what Avis thinks of that one.”
6. Media selection should be the primary responsibility of DDB. However, DDB is expected to take the initiative to get guidance from Avis in weighting of markets or special situations, particularly in those areas where cold numbers do not indicate the real picture. Media judgments are open to discussion. The conviction should prevail. Compromise should be avoided.
Being uncompromising does not mean being disagreeable.
It means agreeing that a good idea is a good idea, and will suffer like anything precious from tampering.
