The Spirit of the Stairwell

What is wrong with this picture ?

I’m thinking of bringing out a t-shirt which reads “Polly Perkins is a tw*t”.

Although the asterisk is only there for Campaign’s lawyers.

You may know who Polly Perkins is. She’s been in the papers a bit recently, because she was the reader at Faber who turned down Lord of the Flies for publication, scribbling on the manuscript the words “uninteresting fantasy”.

History can be a lovely thing, when it allows anyone with a genuine love of literature and originality to turn round to Polly Perkins right now and say – you rejected one of the most important and successful books of the last century.

People will be reading your name and associating it with idiocy for decades to come.

How d’you like them apples, Perky ?

Interesting enough for you, is it ?

And what has this got to do with advertising, the supposed topic of this blog, you may be asking ?

Well, everything. Because how ideas are appreciated and judged should be at the heart of any creative business.

Especially when there’s a lot of interesting debate right now about things like the Peperami crowd-sourcing initiative.

But.

We’ve somehow turned into an industry where all decisions are made by committee. And where people only feel they’re contributing if they can tell you what their “concerns” are.

The best story about this comes from a wonderful semi-fictional book about the ad industry called “Was 9.99, Now 6.99″

Written by a guy who I think was working at Y&R Paris.

At one point he writes about a very stressful presentation to a hugely important yoghurt client.

(Imagine, for a bit of light relief, that previous sentence without the last word.)

Our hero presents his script and the head yoghurt (honcho) does that thing of letting all 14 people on his team say what they think of it.

I think we’ve all been in meetings like that.

I wonder if Michelangelo Buonarroti had that experience with his Sistine chapel ceiling.

“What do you think, Brian ?”

“Well I like it of course, but I’m just concerned about what it will say to non-believers, i.e. the people we’re trying to attract into the brand ? Will they like all the religious stuff I wonder ?”

So in the yoghurt meeting, our hero bites his tongue as 14 people express their perfectly logical and plausible concerns. He knows that in meetings like this, it only matters what the head honcho says.

And then the head yoghurt (honcho) says “I love it. This is the best work the agency has presented to me for 5 years. I pass my sincere congratulations on to the whole team.”

Phew. Everybody smiles and lets out a sigh of relief.

“I have just one question,” he adds.

Pregnant pause.

“… Is humour really necessary ?”

In four words, he’s killed the idea more comprehensively than any of his lieutenants.

Because without humour, the script is just two people eating yoghurt.

However, in normal meetings, the killing isn’t as clean as this. Normally it’s deadly attrition.

Take a look at any list of so-called “100 greatest ads” – which by the way won’t have many examples in it from the last few years. (What you might call the “committee years”.) Imagine if any of those great pieces of work could have got through a meeting where a group of 14 people are encouraged to voice their “concerns”.

In fact what you’ll see is a bunch of ads that all have one thing in common – which is that they all have something “wrong” with them.

In fact, what’s “wrong” with them is what makes them successful.

Breaking the right rules is what any creative person will tell you is what you have to do.

And the really interesting question is this.

How many “bad” ads have killed products ?

I.e. how many people have been turned off a brand because of some element of the advertising ?

Name me one, apart from Strand cigarettes – which is 50 years old.

I.e. this search for the “concerns”, for what might be “wrong”, is by and large a complete waste of time.

Ads tend to work a little bit – or work really well. Very few of them actively damage a brand.

Their biggest enemy is just disappearing into the wallpaper of invisible marketing communications. Which, of course, is what most of them do.

So a far more useful discussion would revolve around asking – “What is good about this ? What is the most interesting thing about this communication ? Have we got something really spiky here ?”

But try telling that to Polly Perkins.

She’d tell you what was wrong with that idea straightaway.