Having a brilliant idea is hard, and often brilliance alone is not enough. It takes doggedness, creativity, perfect mastery of your brief – and, usually, a little serendipity. In advertising, for your idea to see daylight and make the great escape into the minds of real consumers it will have to be plucky, lucky and tough. Tough enough to dodge the client's rewritten copy; plucky enough to subvert the findings of the bizarre focus group; lucky enough to slip the drastic budget cut.
Alistair Ross, head of ideas at DraftFCB, has run the gauntlet on behalf of his ideas all too often, most memorably with a campaign for a whisky brand. "The idea was based on a series of fictional characters who would create amazing things," he recalls. "It tested well as a concept. We shot two TV ads and six print ads, close to a million pounds of production. Then it was shelved because it got 'orange lights, not green' in research. A braver client would have run it."
It's not the first, and it most certainly won't be the last, brilliant idea that didn't quite make it. So what does Ross think an idea needs to make the great escape? Trust, trust, and yet more trust. And when you have it, it shows. Ross worked closely with the then marketing director for the British Army for four years, through six integrated campaigns – and the last campaign they did together was not even scripted.
"The work was based on the insight that people around the world respected the British Army more than we did at home. Working more like a journalist, I travelled to Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Afghanistan with a producer and a cameraman and interviewed people who had positive messages to send back to British soldiers," Ross says. "It was the toughest assignment I have ever undertaken and way beyond the realms of conventional advertising. We had a direct line into [the head of marketing]. He was the guy who could say yes. He trusted us to deliver what he needed, and left us to get on with it."
Not every client is ready to put their budget and reputation into your hands, however. Perhaps that is why Emma Perkins, creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi X, reckons that the key to the great escape starts even before you pitch, by finding the right client for your agency. "You need to identify clients who share your agenda," she says. "Originality can make people nervous, so they need to trust your instincts."
Perkins points to Saatchi & Saatchi X's work with Diageo, the drinks business giant, as an example of a relationship where risk-taking has resulted in great ideas being put into practice – going on to have a huge impact on business results, such as with the advertising campaigns for Guinness, which is a Diageo product. But she also thinks that big risks require big hitters. "It's easier to sell ideas when you've got senior people at meetings – when you're working with junior staff, they have to go back and sell it themselves."
For Shaun McIlrath, creative director at iris, getting an idea from drawing board to billboard is about solving all the problems – not just the ones you are presented with in the brief.
"Some problems can be undefined and unspoken," he says. "If the organisation commissioning the idea is internally focused (with politics and job protection high on the agenda) a brilliant idea may be one that looks like the category leader, appeases all stakeholders and doesn't rock the boat – or, in other words, an idea that brilliantly solves the wrong problem.
"If, however, the organisation is externally focused – one that obsesses about its consumers and competitors – it is much more likely to appreciate the need for bravery and genuine innovation. This is almost always the kind of company that delivers what is commonly defined by the wider world as a brilliant idea."
Lastly, it's important to remember that no idea, no matter how brilliant, is set in stone. All ideas will face opposition at some point – the real creative skill is in knowing when to oppose, when to backtrack and, above all, when to do some more thinking, as Ross points out. "Delivering great ideas requires a commitment to continually review and improve them until the moment they are published," he says. "Positive dissatisfaction is what it was called at Lowe where I learned my trade. Good is the enemy of great."
