Advertising is Hard.

I’ll be quite honest with you. My creative briefs all look totally different. My project approach for something I start tomorrow will look very little like what I did yesterday. Generally every project includes lots of hours of poking around, drawing nonsense, waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a moment of genius (which invariably will be incoherent only a few hours later). Format works great, but it’s usually best when it’s used to explain something that’s already been done, not necessarily setting up a challenge for later.

And I think the reason is that what we do is really fucking complicated.

At first, our creative strategy was to create a single, simple, benefit-oriented message and repeat it again and again. We assumed a rational brain with a knowable attention span as our willing recipient. But now, difficult is an understatement. We still need that single, simple something, but now that Gossage’s reality is a for-real reality, we’re expected to entertain like a movie, make inanimate objects human, be comfortable with experimentation but forecast for success, all while speaking to smaller and smaller slices of audiences and battling an increasingly misused research environment.

And media might be even worse. It wasn’t so long ago a media department could function on a single rolodex. Now they’re expected to deliver not only more platforms, but hundreds of thousands of media opportunities both online and off. Guerrilla and otherwise. And they can’t buy for impressions, but engagement, and do so creatively with content partnerships, atypical placements and the like. And we haven’t even gotten into analytics. All we know is that the old metrics aren’t worth much more than the paper they’re printed on and nobody agrees on what the hell will replace them.

Yeah, really fucking hard. Single, simple message written for TV, radio and a magazine ad sounds great. Now we know why they had so much time for a scotch. And it’s easy to understand why 360 degree marketing strategy took hold for so much of this decade. It gave us a sense of control in an utterly manic marketplace.

But back to process. Of course, I have somewhat of a way I do things, just like you yours. We read a bunch of stuff, broadly, we talk and think about the audience, the marketplace, the product, stuff like that. We have certain tricks to jog our brain when things get stale.

The problem is that stringent process is used when we’re trying to make a certain product. But now that we’re not trying to make a single proposition necessarily, and not really advertising, but sometimes applications, utilities, sometimes events or experiences, hell – sometimes training programs, kiosks, intranets, whatever. So Gossage said that people read what interests them, and sometimes that advertising. Maybe we should say that we solve problems, and sometimes that includes advertising.

Until then, this broad process allows us to mask what the actual creative process is like, a potluck of crazy sprinkled with magic.

photo via Neil Krug