Bringing Good Insights to Life

Bring It Back, Do It Over

An ad legend's guidelines for building a foolproof insight-creation machine

1. Be really tough on the work.

With the accent on "really." My first mentor taught me that the power to stop bad work was the only true power a creative director possessed. He once took a set of campaign storyboards that people had been working on for weeks, looked at them, then opened his window and tossed them out on the street, 12 floors below. Not my style, but I'll never forget the cardboard sheets wafting down onto Madison Avenue and 46th Street -- like a pathetic ticker-tape parade for the rejected.

2. Never let them hear you bitch and moan.

When people hear you complain, they take it as permission to complain, too. Whatever misgivings you have about a client or a superior, keep them to yourself. Complaining deflates morale, makes you look weak, and creates an environment that breeds negativity like a contagion.

3. Judge an insight on its merits.

Not on how you would have done it. Easy to say, tough to do, particularly if you have a strong philosophy that's working. If you force-feed every insight and execution through your prism, you are bringing otherwise smart people down to your level. If you insist that people only do it as you would have done it, this is the creative equivalent of hiring people weaker than you are.

4. Don't compete with your people.

The biggest interpersonal flaw in any manager's tool kit is the constant overriding need to win. When you're the boss, you can afford to ease up. Cede a debating point, an execution of an idea, even ownership of a concept at least once a day, and you'll have people praising your open-mindedness and feeling that much more free to think boldly (because they know you won't always be automatically stomping on their suggestions). It doesn't mean you're weak and letting standards slip. It means you're strong enough to let others win their share.

5. Protect insights from their enemies.

There's no point in having an insight if you can't protect it from being radically altered by compromise, or rejected by a client who doesn't get it, or stripped of its original insightfulness by committee groupthink. The way to keep your insights out of the clutches of the people who try to reduce the insight to something familiar, or the copycats, is to build relationships. If you don't have that trusting relationship with the client, you won't be allowed to fail.

6. Let your client own your best insights.

In any successful campaign, the client thinks it's his success (and he's right) while the agency folks think it's theirs (and they're right, too). If you can create a seamless line of creativity where no one knows where the big idea came from, and no one cares, you're in the ideal position. It's amazing how much can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit.

Six weeks after the attacks of September 11, New York City's downtown was still smoldering and caked in soot. The entire city was in the dumps, which is how I found myself sitting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a makeshift command center. As the chairman of BBDO's North American operations, I was there to talk to the mayor about the kind of advertising that would make people feel better about New York and bring them back. Tourism wasn't merely off; it had vanished. No one was visiting the city.

Whatever New York was going through, we were living it every day. We all knew someone who had perished in the attacks; we all had been to memorial services. We realized that New York was demonstrating how people can come out of the woodwork to fight and help and contribute and rise to the occasion. We decided to call this process the New York Miracle.

Now all we had to do was make that miracle concept stick. As we thought about ourselves, why some of us had gravitated to the big city, we realized that people come to New York because they have a dream. Everybody dreams of doing something big in New York. If we could get that message across to people, maybe we could entice them back.

When Gerry Graf, one of our senior creative directors, said, "Imagine Woody Allen ice skating in Rockefeller Center," that opened the floodgates. The suggestions of famous people doing incongruous New York activities began to pile up. How about Henry Kissinger finding his way into an empty Yankee Stadium to round the bases, slide headfirst into home plate, dust himself off, and ask, "Derek who?" Yankee Stadium suggested Yogi Berra, except he was conducting the New York Philharmonic. Barbara Walters auditioning for a Broadway show, butchering the song "42nd Street"?