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THE CAT SPEWED AND THE DOG ATE IT

And other musings from a Saatchi & Saatchi Creative internship. Matt Lumb, Advertising Development, Sep 2002
After spending 4 weeks as a junior copywriter at Saatchi, I thought I would jot down some of the things I took away from
my time on the other side. For those wondering about the title to this piece its borrowed from the training on ideas that
Saatchi handed me on my first morning in the office.
My deepest thanks go to the team at Saatchi & Saatchi Philippines (Manila) for allowing me this experience.
Please see extended explanation of these statements in the document attached. I would be more than happy to talk my
experiences further as it is impossible to outline everything I learned in just a few pages.

SHOW ME THE MONEY
Communicating one thing brilliantly is much more inspiring
and realistic for creatives than communicating everything.
Creatives look for nuggets in the briefing process the
one thing that they need to accomplish (essentially the
challenge) and this is what they set out to do. We need to
help inspire the creative teams on our business via simple,
focused and clear creative briefs. Mandatories on a brief
are viewed as the enemy by creatives. We need to
provide a briefing experience that wins the battle for
creative thinking time no matter what other priorities they
have. Our commenting needs to be succinct and strategic.
The longest meeting I had internally at Saatchi lasted
about 20 minutes (in which time we talked several print
executions, some radio spots, some posters and a
billboard idea with the account team). After adjusting to
this, it was difficult to sit through a long P&G copy meeting.
Keeping our comments succinct and on strategy/ideas will
maximize these meetings.

PERSPIRATION FOLLOWS INSPIRATION
Unless we win the hearts and minds of our creative team,
then we will never truly win the hearts and minds of our
consumers. Creative ideas can come from anywhere and
at anytime we want our project to be top of mind to help
connect those ideas to our brand. Specific to Saatchi, it is
crucial to have an inspiring challenge statement. For other
agencies, the same opportunity exists but is often referred
to by another name. P&G needs to succinctly capture what
we are asking the creatives to do (what is the consumer
reaction or takeaway we want) when enrolling the agency
in a project. In my internship, I wrote creative for several
briefs/brands concurrently and I found it easier to recall the
simple and clear challenges and hence they probably
received a disproportionate amount of my creative
energies as they excited and inspired me the most.
Attachment 1 contains a number of challenge statements
(generally good ones) on briefs at Saatchi. What ones
inspire you? If you were working as a creative on several
briefs at the one time which one would you think about in
the shower, in front of TV, at the movies etc?

UNDERSTAND THE IDEA, RESPECT THE IDEA, TALK
ABOUT THE IDEA
A creative lives, breathes and is evaluated by his or her
ideas. They are hired, fired and judged by their ideas. To
speak their language, make sure you understand their
ideas and react to their ideas. When commenting always
direct your comments towards the idea. Remember that
the creative has spent many hours talking, defending,
expanding and shredding the idea already so make sure
you benefit from this by first seeking to truly understand
the idea and why it has been crafted as it is.

THE NAMES BOND, JAMES BOND
Get to know your agency and account team personally.
The agency is much more of a personality driven business
than what we are used to at P&G. Understanding what
interests your creative team, who they are and what they
have done/do outside of work will all help you figure out
ways to inspire them in the briefing process and help you
to build a good relationship. Who knows you might even
find some new friends.

HAVE THE GUTS TO USE THE GUTS
The agency creatives I worked with recognized the
discipline and strategic thinking that goes with working for
P&G. However they would like to get more of our human
reactions to the ideas (our gut reactions as potential
consumers). Creating great equity communication and
breakthrough copy is more art than science and as a
result we need to encourage more emotional involvement
from all team members in the process (use our gut
reactions) rather than letting the process dictate our
reactions and thinking. We have a responsibility to use
consumer research like OAT, FGDs etc judiciously to get
to better advertising verses simply using research tools as
a matter of course. Setting clear objectives and reasons
for the use of the various research tools and
understanding the role research plays in the advertising
development process is important.

HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?
In many ways the creatives and P&G will always approach
copy development differently. At P&G, we get assigned to
brands and/or categories and are expected to go deep in
our understanding. Creatives are encouraged to have a
very broad perspective to help create relationships that
were unexpected or present things in a new way. The role




of the creative is to push boundaries and to come up with
new ideas/ways of looking at the world (in essence
maximizing risk), while the role of a brand manager is to
maximize business results while minimizing risk. Agencies
spend most of their time looking forward, imagining what
the future will be like, while often we spend a lot of time
understanding what worked in the past. I feel it is important
to recognize these differences and embrace them by
seeking a great working relationship with our agencies
built on trust and honest / strategic discussions. Embrace
the different viewpoints and learn to see the world through
someone elses eyes.

EXECUTED BY THE EXECUTIONAL
It is easy to frustrate a creative by being too executional in
your comments or briefs (i.e. numerous mandatories)
and/or allowing an over-engineered process to ruin the
intent of their original idea. While many creatives may
respect the strategic nature of the approach P&G takes for
copy development, it can also be seen as a negative in
that the process can prevent truly breakthrough ideas
getting to market. This typically occurs in projects where
we stop providing strategic guidance and begin mandating
execution (become prescriptive in our direction vs.
strategic). We need to use our strategic thinking
capabilities to provide solid strategic comments to the
creative proposals on a project. Simple and clear strategic
choices will help creatives deliver against the project
challenge (see section 1 above).
IDEAS ARE CONTAGIOUS
I found Saatchi used the work environment to encourage
and foster ideas. An agency lives and dies by its ideas
(Saatchi even call themselves the ideas company) hence
the work environment needs to be inspiring for the
employees (this is where the ideas come from). Saatchi
really utilize the open plan environment to create a buzz
and energy that is infectious and ideas/discussion spreads
quickly amongst the creative teams. I think we have an
opportunity at P&G to utilize our open plan environment to
create more of an infectious buzz and spend more time
discussing ideas and our business informally. I enjoyed
learning how Saatchi creatives approach briefs and
problems as well as the different work-styles at Saatchi
that enabled me to pick up several new ideas and
approaches that I can incorporate into my own personal
work style (at a minimum I have come away with a new
hair colour!)



One final thought. Writing brilliant creative all day, every day with a deadline was tough!! The team I worked with wrote a
lot of ideas. Most of these did not even pass the internal Saatchi reviews. Hence it was not always easy to keep coming
up with brilliant new ideas on every brief, every day.

SAATCHI IDEAS BRIEF CHALLENGE STATEMENTS
P&G Challenge statements Other statements
Make Dash the love of every Italian womans life To intrigue people enough that they have to give x a try.
Re-invent dishwashing as a one-step process. To empower a nation to succeed.
Woo her back To eliminate some of the worry.
To make breathability as important as dryness. Bring performance to an upgrade package that is only styling.
Get her to rediscover Ariel as Egypts best detergent, worthy
of her trust.
To inspire people with a vision of what it means to be connected.
To cause owners of overweight pets to take action to
prolong their pets life by feeding them Iams less active.
To see the criminal rather than the child.
To make Head & Shoulders the immediate dandruff killer To encourage young Singaporeans to challenge themselves
To present y as the unbank.
Fear the consequences of drink-driving.
To make China see the value of their children.
Make Thailand smile more about tomorrow
Own (a bit of) happiness
To make z playground currency.
To marry the connection between your world and my potential.
Keep the fans and the team connected.
Make me an award winning commercial!
Capture the reality of a teens life










15 WAYS TO HELP (KILL) A CREATIVE


1. Put plenty of mandatories in the brief to guide them in the right direction (or call them executional considerations if
it makes you feel better about it).

2. Get the account person to agree with you in the name of agency-client relationship so that they can kill the creative
idea. That way no one will know you did it.

3. You can always cut time from a project by reducing the creative lead-time or giving the agency a late briefing. After
all they are just sitting around thinking right?

4. Show them how smart you are by giving them the idea for the ad you just had 5 minutes ago. They will respect the
fact that your idea is better than the ideas they have spent weeks crafting.

5. If your wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, brother, sister, mother etc does not happen to like the idea then it
definitely wont work and you should let them know (to heck with the target market theyre all consumers right)

6. Ask them for new ideas but just hope that they dont stray too far in execution from that really really successful ad
campaign we had in 1987.

7. Make sure you always give them plenty of meaningless executional changes. Its good to keep them busy and the
revisions will give them good practice on layouts.

8. Give them a strong competitive claim that we cant support. Theyre good at coming up with creative ways around
these technicalities.

9. Because they are allowed to go to cafs during work hours, make sure that whenever we have them in for a
meeting we have no decent coffee and never ever feed them (you have seen Gremlins havent you??.)

10. Never look at your creatives work on other accounts, particularly if it wins one of those creative award
thingamies. Congratulating them would only encourage them to bring some of that crazy/wild and wacky stuff to our
brands.

11. Never take your agency teams out for a meal or casual drink to let them see the real you. They live pretty
sheltered lives and the real us may scare them.

12. If you dont like an idea or a board, use an FGD or OAT result to kill it, as its much kinder than doing it yourself.

13. Particular to print executions, make sure there is so much mandatory copy, legals and an oversized logo that the
spot almost writes itself. Youd never know what theyd come up with otherwise.

14. If we cant decide what exactly we want to communicate then its best to write all the benefits we could possibly
use in the brief as the creatives get paid to come up with interesting ways of capturing them all effectively i n 30
seconds.

15. Simple, focused briefs are only for brands that dont have much to say or have an unimaginative brand team.


Matt Lumb, Advertising Development, Sep 2002

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