there’s the first ad
Every agency I have worked with has used their own template variant of what we call the creative brief.
Some will mandate adherence to a specific template more than others.
Either way, the creatives receiving said brief are somewhat more uniform in their response.
They generally give a cursory glance to everything else and jump straight to the proposition/point of view/key idea section (whatever you want to call it).
On more than one occasion, and with different creative directors, it's been pointed out to me that the brief I have provided contained the same problem for them - namely the proposition.
As a 'former' creative that then shuffled over to the other (planner) side my tendency is still to describe the proposition/point of view as though it were a line or an ad idea, and it is written as such.
For some creatives this was not a popular approach.
Their argument being that they now have to work backwards to go forwards, dismantling this 'creative' proposition back into something non-idea-ish, in order to then take it forward into a legitimate creative idea.
That's one way of looking at it, I suppose.
Another way is to adopt the approach of John Hegarty - creative legend and the H in BBH.
We are re-reading John Steel's Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning at the moment and in one chapter Steel reports on how Hegarty, too, headed straight for the proposition and similarly looked for a very simple, singleminded idea.
But Hegarty's next habit is described as this.
'[Hegarty would] take that one sentence and write it on a large piece of paper, above or below a picture of the product, almost as if the line from the brief were a headline.
Then he would pin it up above his desk and ask himself first whether the juxtaposition of that line and that product made some rational sense, and second, whether it also started to suggest something interesting on an emotional level'.
If there was something interesting there then...
'There’s the first ad in the campaign. It’s my job to create something better.'
That's endorsement enough for me to continue to write the brief as the ad for the ad.
