Despite all attempts to standardize, commoditize and gener-icize the creative process, idea generation is still largely an art form that defies definition and regimentation. You can buy the best software and the highest-powered computers, but that doesn’t mean big ideas will necessarily follow. You can put legions of bright, shiny faces on the case, but you still might end up with mush–or worse, outrageous concepts that fail to solve the business problem.
Many clients are offended when they throw their one big idea out on the table and everyone reacts with indifference. What they fail to grasp is that ideas are a dime a dozen. Creative teams go through hundreds, sometimes thousands of ideas to get one that might be a barn-burner. And even then you’re not sure.
In their book Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, the authors describe the agonizing process they went through for an obscure Columbus, Ga.-based insurance company named the American Family Life Assurance Co. (AFLAC).
The agency, Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd. based in New York, was given six weeks to come up with four concepts to test in a shoot-out against the incumbent agency. The client’s only request was that he wanted people to remember the name of the company. When pressed for guidance, AFLAC Chairman Dan Amos said in exasperation, “I don’t care if you have to show a naked man tap-dancing on the roof as long as you get people to know the name of this company.”
That’s a pretty wide-open slate for any agency, and obviously Kaplan Thaler didn’t want to let him down. But still, the existing mindset for insurance advertising was to show teary, tug-at-the-heart vignettes with people talking about how much they loved each other. It was hard to see any solution outside this traditional box.
Six weeks flew by. Even though the small agency was putting virtually all its talent on this important opportunity, nothing distinctive was happening. In the final week before the presentation, one of the creatives, Eric David, went out for a quick lunch. As he walked down the sidewalk, muttering the client’s name out loud, he suddenly realized how much like a duck he sounded.
He raced back to the agency and into the small office of his creative partner, Tom Amico. Without any explanation or setup, he simply did his AFLAC duck call. Tom’s eyes got wide as he wheeled around to his computer and within five minutes, the famous “Park Bench” TV spot was written.
Even then it wasn’t a slam-dunk, because most of the agency’s managers were horrified at the possibly of offending the client with this silly, totally unconventional approach. “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Robin Koval, “You’re actually going to show this to Dan? Remember, this guy sells cancer insurance!”
Ultimately, they decided that a funny spokes-duck with attitude might be just the ticket, but they still weren’t sure enough to bump one of their other four approaches. So they made a deal with Amos to let them submit five ads, provided the agency paid for testing of the additional spot.
The rest, of course, is advertising history. The duck spot scored a whopping 28% recall, more than double the usual for an insurance ad. The first ad aired Dec. 31, 1999, and within six days, AFLAC had more hits on its Web site than in the entire previous year. AFLAC’s annual sales, which historically had been rising 12% to 15%, went up 28% in 2000, and another 29% in 2001.
That’s bang for the duck … er, buck.
George Lois, who’s known for producing a few big bang ideas of his own, tells the story in one of his books (What’s the Big Idea? How to Win With Outrageous Ideas (That Sell)) about Music Television (MTV). In 1982, MTV was a small (less than $100,000) business-to-business account that involved marketing its 24-hour music video channel to cable operators, who wanted no part of it. “Many cable operators believed that kids who went for rock ’n’ roll were heavily into drugs,” Lois recalled. “Record publishers were convinced MTV would kill their business if allowed to prosper, and refused to allow their titles to be transformed into music videos.”
Lois dredged up one of his classic ad slogans, “I want my Maypo” and gave it a new twist, convincing a few rock stars (Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Pat Benatar) to look into the camera and say, “I want my MTV.” Then he produced a low-budget TV spot and selected several key markets in which to run it. The voice-over call to action was, “If you don’t get MTV where you live, call your cable operator and say, ‘I want my MTV.’”
Lois didn’t even provide a local phone number. Kids who wanted to call had to look up the number themselves. But the results were so overwhelming, within several days cable operators would contact Warner Amex (cable TV station) and beg them to stop running the MTV spots.
Six months after that first commercial ran, MTV was on the cover of Time magazine and journalists were talking about it being the biggest cultural phenomenon since the advent of television. Pretty strong for a little cable channel nobody wanted.
There are two parts to putting big ideas to work in any advertising program. First, you have to hire creative people who are willing to push beyond the obvious low-hanging fruit. Most of them will tell you the old 1% inspiration-99% perspiration formula really is true, but the corollary is that perspiration takes extra time, and in the ad biz, time is money. So you have to spend more to get more.
The second part of getting a big idea in your ad program is that someone has to be able to present the big idea successfully and, equally important, the client has to have the guts to approve it. That’s why I hate presenting to committees, because someone in the room is going to make a comment that starts the herd moving toward the safe, secure solution. It takes a bold, self-assured manager to stand up and head this momentum back in the other direction.
But if you’re lucky, the unconventional approach will be given a chance to prove itself. And that’s when we discover once again what a powerful tool advertising is when used properly.