Innovation Blog

Art and Copy:

What Innovators Can Learn from Advertising, or:

Why No Company Should Do “R&D” 

By Shlomo Maital

Oct. 15/2009

    A brilliant documentary about advertising is called Art and Copy. It is now playing at theaters across the U.S.  Here is a brief synopsis:

ART & COPY describes  advertising’s “creative revolution” of the 1960s —  artists and writers who  all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for “Just Do It,” “I Love NY,” “Where’s the Beef?,” “Got Milk,” “Think Different,” and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. 

    Innovators can learn a lot from this 85-minute film.    I often think that startups should BEGIN by creating the advertising for their product.  If you cannot produce an exciting ad for it, why bother? 

    The film explains that in the 1960s and 1970s, the key people at ad agencies were account executives. The creative department was valued at less than zero.  Then a revolution occurred.  Creativity, not account managers, created order-of-magnitude changes in revenues and profits for Wendy’s (Where’s the Beef?), iPod, Apple, New York City, Nike,  milk producers — and votes for Barak Obama.   The creative department faced the risk aversion of senior managers and their wives, who a priori rejected brilliant but unconventional ad campaigns — and had to come up with new campaign ideas when their original ones were rejected, after weeks and months of round-the-clock work. 

    Two small memorable episodes from the film:

     ·  Nike’s Just Do It campaign was inspired by a newspaper headline.  In Utah, a convict about to be executed by firing squad said to the executioners:  “Let’s Do It!”.   An ad agency executive read the story — and came up with the legendary mantra for Nike.

    ·  The ambience of the ad agency is crucial; all the truly creative agencies shown had spaces that were open, sunlit, comfortable, spacious, unusual — the exact opposite of design-by-committee.  On the wall of one agency was a sign, made with 100,000 clear plastic push pins:  Fail harder!  A great sign.  The unusual part of the sign:  Rather than write the words:  Fail Harder! with the push pins, as most people would do,  the creator made the sign the hard way by filling all the spaces in the sign with push pins, leaving the words Fail Harder! only where there were no pins — far far harder and more time consuming but — far more striking.  Take the hard way, the sign says.  Don’t take the easy obvious way.   

     ·   Seize the opportunity!  Nike brought in a Latin dance expert, to help pose models for still photos, for the iPod ad campaign.  The expert, though not told to do so,  took the model’s hand — and they did a torrid salsa dance.  It was his way of showing the model how to pose.  The creativity department watched in awe.  At the end of the dance, everyone in the department agreed:  This is our ad!   That is how the famous iPod salsa ad was born — dancing figures, in black shadow, with the white iPod earphone cords.

    In watching this film, Art and Copy,  I reached the following rather wild conclusion.  For what it is worth, here it is:

     No company should do R&D, have an R&D department, or appoint a VP (R&D).  There IS NO SUCH THING as R&D.  Companies do not do research.  Universities, labs, scholars do research.  Companies do development.  But there are different flavors of development.

    Every organization should have a VP (Creativity). Every organization needs a Creative Dept., just like that in ad agencies, whose goal is to come up with wild unconventional ideas.    In his or her creative department, there will be three reports:   head of product (or service) creativity;  head of process creativity (dealing with the company’s business model, every aspect of it, including sales, marketing , advertising, supply chain, pricing, and HR);  and head of innovation scouting, or imitative creativity — benchmarking other industries to bring home new ideas, to adapt and adopt.  (BT has a head of innovation scouting, for example).    These three senior managers should work closely together, travel together, meet face-to-face frequently to exchange information, and should embrace the principles of Applied Creativity (head in the clouds, feet on the ground).[1]  

    Call a spade a spade.  R&D?  Why?  If the goal is creativity, call the function just that.  You will then staff the creativity group with creative people, by definition.   The truly great ad agencies were created by creative people who were chewed up and spit out of conventional bureaucratic ad agencies.  How many creative people are out there,  crushed within bureaucratic organizations, just waiting for a chance to join a truly creative organization unafraid to call its R&D by that precise word.    

       

 

[1] The concept of head-in-the-clouds, feet-on-the-ground was first taught to me by former Intel executive Avinoam Kolodny, now in the EE faculty at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.