strategy for strategy
I'm going to be teaching a course at the Miami Ad School on strategy for the next semester. The interesting/great thing about it is that I am teaching creatives not planners.
That being the case, I have a question to ask anyone reading this: while I/we know from experience that the best creatives are also great strategists (as are the best account people), how do people feel that teaching junior creative people about strategy should be different than teaching planners?
I suppose I should start with my own response, or at least where my head is at since this is till a work in progress. My feeling is that there should more emphasis on some of the upfront parts in the process as opposed to the actual development of strategy. To me, how you define and see the problem, as well as how you define the role of communication, are the elements that determie how far you are going to push the eventual ideas. Arming anyone with this skill would, hopefully, make them a better partner in the process. In contrast, people (in general) inately spark to an interesting idea or insight, and have the curiosity to go and look in places where these insights can be found.
That being said said, I am very open to being wrong :)
4 Comments:
A useful thing for creatives to help them get there quicker is to get them to think of how people will react to the creative rather than just how they will make it. It is a subtle thing but as a planner I am fundamentally interested in how people will percieve, react to and act on the creative - that is probably the most important planning thing a creative can do. I must admit on many occasions the creatives came up with wonderful stuff by taking their inspiration from what I put down in the we want people to think feel do box not just the proposition.
Mark, I agree with you, I think the best thing you could arm these young creatives with are ways to think about the world more plannerly. I would assume they're used to pulling inspiration from various sources, but do they dig deep when they see that inspiration and try to understand the larger effects it may have or the cultural reasons it exists?
Curious to hear what you end up with and how it turns out.
I'm with you too -getting them digging deeper is a great skill to pass on.
Another could be the importance of thinking about consumers as living, breathing people with hopes, dreams and aspirations, not just as "C1/C2 housewives with 2 kids living in the suburbs". It's much easier to create (& judge) compelling communications once you get beyond the ciphers and stereotypes.
This kind of dovetails into speed's point, in that we need to be able to inhabit the consumers skin in order to be able to judge how they will react to the work.
Have fun in Miami and keep us posted.
I think there is a real benefit to a creative being able to think like a planner in regards to the execution of a campaign idea. For instance, planners often have interesting insights into different kinds of participation, the different forms of viral/WOM, how to package information (transmedia), etc.
On the flip side, I think aspiring planners should also take copywriting and art directing classes. Doing so not only helps them understand what creatives want, but also excercises that part of the brain that makes interesting connections between disparate ideas - which is something very valuable to a planner who is often forced to make data interesting and inspiring.
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