planning, creativity & planning for creative campaigns
Post on 17-Oct-2014
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talk I gave for Sweden's APGTRANSCRIPT
Hej Stockholm!
Ramblings from the Black Wolf
Creativity + Planning + Planning for Creative Campaigns
Heidi Hackemer / @uberblond
a little about my path grew up in the woods of Wisconsin amongst a von Trapp-esque family of musicians, Bach and pigeons, wanted to be an astronaut, ran a lot, studied Advertising and English Literature, came to NYC, waitressed for two years, started at FCB as a copywriter, two years later I flipped to planning, went to Fallon London, decided I liked the sun, came back to NYC to BBH, loved it, quit my job, bought a big black truck (the Black Wolf), drove around the country for four or five months, slept in the back of the truck most nights, met a spiritual guru in the swamps of Louisiana, came back to NYC and now I’m a freelancer. got it?
after the journey of the past year, the good news for me is that...
I love planning
the obviousI love culture I love people I love cracking a problemI love working with creative, smart people
but the real reasonplanning is a wide playground where, once we get our core craft down, we get to define what we’re all about professionally... and many definitions are valid
we’re a motley bunchbeyond the craft, great planners seem to have something in common: they are brave enough embrace who he or she really is. that leads to a pretty diverse and insane community
I love that
planner megut instinct plannervery inspired by primal human truth and culturelove the big story of a brand + culture; love making it worklove the possibility of digital (it’s so human)love the creative processlove winning
*this will be important-ish in about 15 slides
it’s a great time to be a planner
why?we’re neededthe problems are much more complexthe solutions can be ridiculously relevant
so let’s get into it creativity, planning
and all that jazz
three muses tonight1) Steve Jobs2) Dumbledore3) Judy Garland
Steve Jobs
In the past I’ve talked about the Mother Effin’ Wolf Pack*...
teams of smart, amazing people bouncing in and out of a collaborative environment, all working together to slay the problem at hand
* yes I have a thing for wolves.
wolf packs work when each individual brings something unique to the process and has an output that they’re solely responsible for
account person wolf
planning wolf
creative wolf
production wolf
and media wolfand digital experience wolfand legal wolf... you get it.
let’s be incredibly simplisticaccount peeps uniquely bring an understanding of process as well as the client’s/biz POV...creatives uniquely bring the capacity to turn a strategic solution into magic...and what do planners uniquely bring to the table?
we bring the divergent thinking in from the outside
divergent thinking helps us create provocative lenses for problems
divergent thinking is the oxygen that fuels exceptional creativity
this is ridiculously important, especially now
why?creation has been democratizedanyone can put an idea out therethere are more ideas fighting for attention than ever beforeas ubiquitous computing rises, this is only going to be more acute of an issue
now, more than ever, we as an industry have to be really, really good at what we do: making ideas that people pay attention to and are motivated by
creativity isn’t cutecreativity is how we win and our clients win (read Sir John Hegarty’s book)
I don’t believe we can be truly creative and win when we’re all working off of similar, processed inputs
we have an industry problem
institutionalization
Black Wolf Epiphany #1
I was very close to becoming, if not already, a fraud
(wyoming)
planner meremember this?
gut instinct plannervery inspired by primal human truth and culturelove the big story of a brand + culture; love making it worklove the possibility of digital (it’s so human)love the creative processlove winning
feeds, back rooms and Mintel reports had become 90% of my cultural understanding(pretty arrogant)
personally, I was losing my perspective, my gut. for my teams, I wasn’t authentically bringing the oxygen
Terminal 5 & MoMA were the primary brain stretch venues (they’re about five avenues away from one another btw)
how terribly divergent of me
this happened largely because I was succeeding in the institution of advertising
advertising values a linear path. I did itI stayed in the advertising walls and steadily moved upjr planner > planner > senior planner > planning director
advertising values the 60 or 70 or 80 hour work-weekyeah, I’ve done that too. a lot.
advertising values being busy, hectic & doing advertisingthere’s something really noble about busyness culturally and especially in our industry
creativity doesn’t value these things so much
not only was I not bringing the divergent perspective, I had a hunch that I wasn’t living a
life where creativity could really happen
so how does that make me good at what I love, ie planning?
Black Wolf Epiphany #2
it’s in the dots stupid
(south dakota)
the south dakota crisis“It’s been two months on the road. what do I have to show for it? I don’t know what I’m doing with my life... should I be blogging more? writing more? tweeting more? instagram’ing more? networking more? will I ever work again? will I have to leave NYC? will I be homeless soon? will I really have to live in the truck? maybe I could be work in a meat processing plant. I can’t work in a meat processing plant!! Maybe I should get just my shit together and get back on that advertising path. or I will end up toothless and living in my parent’s back yard in Florida... in a truck.”
{very attractive, heidi}
when I was in South Dakota having this
moment, Steve Jobs died. and I, like everyone else, spent some time going
through his life
“The minute I dropped out (of college) I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting...
Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on...”
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Steve Jobs
this was a huge moment for me
I had been living the linear, advertising lifeand was anxious because I wasn’t still on it
but reading about dots made me question the linear
a dot life is differentit’s varied. it’s defined by the individual, not the institution.
the life & mind seem to meander more, have more space
I became obsessed with this idea of “living the dots” + and its relationship to creativity. what I learned...
creativity values space, exploration
space
“Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”
Jonathan Schooler professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara
if I owned the world versionBill Gates schedules regular Think Weeks - times where he goes off in seclusion, shuts down and allows his mind to take in varied creative inputs and wander
“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible”
Picasso
reality versionJosh Linker / Blogger for Fast Company
5% Creativity Challengeschedule 5% of your time for thinking (2 hrs/week)companies that have done this reported zero drop in productivity, a “flood of new ideas into the organization” and happier employees
exploration
“Being able to step back and view things as an outsider, or from a slightly different angle, seems to promote creativity. This is why travel frequently seems to free the imagination, and why the young (who haven’t learned all sorts of rules) are often more innovative than their elders.”
Jonah Lehrer, author: How Creativity Works
Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words.
The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.)
George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation.
from “How Creativity Works”
Dalai Lama talks about our thinking as paths. Go down the same paths too much, and they turn into ruts. Ruts aren’t good. Awareness helps people divert out of ruts and mentally explore new spaces.
reality versionfind your dots, the things you’re just curious about explore and invest in them, even if it doesn’t make sensetake some time to think about your own ruts - do they need to be broken?
net netI don’t believe you can plan for breakthrough creative work
if you don’t ruthlessly value creativity in yourself
my net net
right now, I’m more valuable to agencies if I keep myself out of the agencies
it gives me spaceit gives me divergent inputs
I’m more creative, more focusedI’m more energized when I’m in
I’m better at my job(that makes me happy)
after Droga, back on the road for a few months this summer
better, richer, fullerexploring the American Dream in 2012
this is scaryit’s scary to walk out of an ad agency at 6:00 (I do believe we call this the “half-day”)it’s scary to stare at the ceiling or go for a walkit’s scary to not take the next big, logical jobit’s scary to trust the work will come as a freelancerit’s scary to take off for a few monthsit’s scary to not be one of us
I’m not advocating for everyone to quit their jobs, become a freelancer, buy a truck and travel around
I am advocating for more personal thoughtfulness:what do you believe in?why do you do this job? are you creating the best conditions to make that happen?
your answer may involve being in an agency; that’s okay
if I were one of the bigger badasses in the industry, I would more eloquently put it like this:
we need to blow it up and start again
1) identify what you love doing. be ruthless
2) identify the conditions under which you love doing it
Then design an agency, a job, a life around it
Cindy GallopIfWeRanTheWorldmake love not porn
Dumbledore
shit planners say
“my brief is so fucking smart.”
“um, that was in the brief, you idiot.”
“that isn’t on brief.”
“I haven’t seen the work.”
(day before meeting)
STRA
TEGY(
CREATIVE
(
ACCO
UNT(
PRODUCT
ION(
MED
IA(
these grumbles more often than not come from a culture of hand-offs...
STRATEGY(
CREATIVE(
ACCOUNT(
PRODUCTION(
MEDIA(
CLIENTS(
...rather than a team culture of synchronized flow
shocking observation from my experience
if we let creatives into our process,
creatives are more likely to let us
into theirs(done thoughtfully, this usually helps the work)
in the long list of deliverables that the process of making work requires, planning has the first big one - the brief
we set the tone
what kind of tone are you setting for your projects and teams?
when setting the tone, remember space & create a rhythm
space for individual creation, a culture of building, respect for
ultimate responsibility
getting practical
if Dumbledore would have told Harry everything that Harry ultimately
needed to know on Day One, Harry’s head would have exploded
the constant conversation, however, made for a deep relationship
the iterative briefrooted in the immense complexity of the communication landscape today -
but it also, nicely, creates a lovely rhythm on a team
do the planner thing: dig deep, read a lot, research
define the problem you’re trying to solve. define brand and marketing goals. gather a slew of emotional and behavioral insights. make some hypotheses
make a wall of your thinking/hypotheses/interesting stuff. set out a nice cake. invite team members to come round and chat
write a brief. lay out the emotional story. have some engagement planning thoughts. get some media suggestions in there. make a tumblr
(this brief shouldn’t surprise anyone because of step three)
if it’s modern, the solution will probably be complex. nod to the complexity. promise more cake and discussion once they’ve cracked an idea
wait.wait.help.wait.wait.idea cracked. yay.
feed bits of thinking, inspiration, deliverables - shoot for something helpful to give them every day. build, shape, make better. every day
build the strategic fortress. sell it
net netopen your own process upbe respectful of the space that everyone needsfeed, think, talk, be present
word of caution: don’t collaborate to death
“The most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according
to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re
extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as
independent and individualistic.”The Rise of the New Groupthink, NY Times
Judy Garland
being a creative is really hard
pressure is intense
hours are really long
it’s tough
I believe we really need to be sensitive to this as planners
as @mrbsmith so beautifully articulated and @EMMACNYC got super excited about so she and I talked about it a lot and thus I was influenced
positivity is one of the strongest planning tools that you can build... especially when it comes to
working with creatives
be positive, be into it(if you don’t feel it, fake it until you do)
think about creative reviews as building sessions not winning sessions
when you’re giving feedback, lead with the bits that you thought were good/smart
keep venting sessions short and move them away from devolving into bitching sessions
speaking of venting...if you’re a director, find someone off the team to vent to; coach your planning team to vent to
you and not at the team
keep it about making great work
sound simplistic? naive? a bit touchy-feely?
the Positivity/Negativity (P/N) ratioin a 2004 study, high performance teams had a P/N ratio of 5.6, medium performance teams a P/N of 1.9 and low performance teams a P/N of 0.36 (there was
more negativity than positivity)
net netgrow upmake it about the work, not about yoube someone that other people want in the room
wrapping it up...
divergency & spacefuel creativity
what kind of planner do you want to be? what do you value?
make it happen
you set the tone. own that, respect that
be positive. it works
thank you