Bringing Good Insights to Life

You have to be optimistically patient. Insights and great ideas don't come to you with clockwork precision, perfectly timed to suit your needs when you snap your fingers. They come at their own pace, and you have to patiently wait for them. If you have had useful insights in the past, you will have them again in the near future. I can't say when exactly, but they will come. If you have written great copy before, you will do so again. I call it "optimistic patience." Stay at your desk and be patient. There is no rational reason to think that you are blocked (whatever that means!), that you have dried up, that you have used up your full quota of good ideas (as if there is a quota). You simply have to keep scratching and clawing and groping for the answers -- and trust that they will come. The only thing you can't do is rush the process, or grab on to the first idea that pops into your head because you're in a hurry.

Every once in a while, a bold company is forced to bet it all on one huge initiative. Failing to place that bet means the end of growth and inevitable extinction. We got involved in one of these bet-the-company moves when Gillette was putting all its chips on a top-secret proprietary shaving system called Sensor, and it was looking to us, as its longtime ad agency, for a huge marketing insight. It was relying on one product to rejuvenate, refocus, and restore the morale of an entire corporation.

We were a little slow to understand how much was riding on this. Gillette had become known principally for making lowest-common-denominator products like the disposable Good News razor. Gillette execs saw themselves as part of an innovative high-tech company. Their product: the steel shaving system. The answer and the insight, we found, was looking at us in every Gillette employee we met. They did not see themselves as producing a low-interest product that people used in front of the bathroom mirror every morning and then forgot about for the rest of the day. They saw themselves as committed scientists who were using technology to relieve men's suffering. Gillette's tech wizards were pioneering laser welding on a mass scale with shaving systems, a process previously reserved for space programs. Gillette's management, from the CEO on down, was enthralled by metal technology and constantly making things better.

This notion of advanced technology being applied to a worthy cause, and of everyone at Gillette pushing to be not good, not better, but the best, eventually sunk into our cerebral cortex. And that's when the theme line appeared: "The best a man can get." We saw it everywhere at Gillette. Why not trumpet it everywhere around the world to describe what the company stood for?

You don't ordinarily find advertising insight in the hearts of the employees who work for the client. You find it in research and marketing data. You find it in the CEO's statements. You find it in throwaway comments in meetings. You find it in customer complaints. But the more we looked at "The best a man can get," the more we appreciated how it fulfilled an absolute must for Gillette.

Achieving this kind of insight might seem accidental. It's anything but. You can't predict when great work will appear, or if the client will appreciate its greatness, or for that matter how the public will respond. But you damn well can stop bad work from getting out the door. You can damn well stop lulling yourself into complacency. And you better damn well challenge yourself to do your best before your client does. Never let a due date or a client meeting the next day convince you that something's ready when you know it isn't. Send it back. Make everybody stay at his desk all night if you have to. Cancel the meeting (as a last resort). And don't feel too bad about it. You'll feel a lot worse if you compromise and let something less than great get through.

In judging creative work, I've never been afraid to deliver the brutal truth. But the effective method for delivering it is to always have a reason for your opinion. This lets you attack the work rather than the person who created it. My reasons were fairly basic and predictable: The work wasn't memorable. It wasn't breakthrough. It's been done before. It's off-strategy. It sounds familiar. Anything less and I had only solved half my problem. People knew I hated the work, but they didn't know why or how to do better. "I don't like it" is only the headline. Why you don't like it is the body copy. You don't have a complete message without both halves. And so I focused on giving people not only clear rejections but clear directions. You can't just be the creative rejecter. You have to be the creative director.

And any sharp, experienced creative director can add something to a bad idea. But why bother? You're only elevating the bad to mediocre. A bad idea, supported by nonexistent insight, should never see the light of day. Save your brainpower for the undeniably good insights that are just a hair short of perfect. This is not only prudent time management but it's also how great creative enterprises are built. If you can add 10% or 20% of value to a concept or execution -- whether it's by changing one word in the headline, tweaking copy, tightening up the edit, or brightening up the sound mix -- then you're earning your keep and, in turn, raising rather than dropping the performance bar in your organization.

That's a small insight, but if you're armed with it, the ideas will never stop flowing.