Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.
I bow to no-one in my admiration for the great art director, creative director and ad agency founder Sir John Hegarty. Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the agency he founded back in 1982, has held onto its reputation for creative excellence ever since, both when Hegarty was in charge of its output and since he retired.
However, I’m not sure that my admiration is quite so unbounded when it comes to his talents as a blogger. He’s writing fairly frequent posts on LinkedIn at the moment, and I have to say that the few that aren’t rather boring and obvious are mostly more than a little misguided.
The other day, for example, he held forth on the subject of writing briefs. These, he said, should be very short, single-minded and in one way or another inspiring. He quoted the famous example of the brief for the Citroen 2CV – said to have been to design a vehicle which could be driven across a ploughed field without breaking any of a basket-full of eggs.
This is certainly a memorable and arguably inspiring idea, which I suppose is why it’s still quoted some 90 years or so after the 2CV was designed. But a moment’s thought makes it clear that there must have been a lot more to it than that. Imagine what a designer following nothing more and nothing less than that brief might have come up with. A tank would be an option. Or a hovercraft. Or a steamroller.
To get to the 2CV, and not to any of these unlikely vehicles, the brief has to include a lot of other stuff. It has to be a car, for a start. One built down to an affordably low price. With affordably low running costs. It must be easy and cheap to maintain and repair, in parts of rural France where sophisticated workshops are few. It has to run on low-quality fuel. It needs to provide protection from the elements, although it would be no bad thing if the roof can be opened in good weather. And so on.
Note that these are not “secondary” or minor points that can be dealt with after solving the basket-of-eggs issue. Well, perhaps the opening roof might be – but the others are fundamental to what the car is required to do. And it was meeting the brief in full that made the car such a great – and long-lasting – solution to the requirement.
So why has Hegarty got this so wrong? I think the answer is simple. He’s an ad man. And he thinks that what makes for a good advertising brief makes for a good brief in all circumstances. Which it absolutely doesn’t.
Ads are very short, very simple things. Overcomplication is their deadliest enemy. Very simple, single-minded ads can communicate pretty well. Complex, multi-faceted ads carrying lots of messages have little impact and even less memorability. There are famous examples of briefs consisting of one single word that led to great executions – you probably can’t remember a commercial for a brand of umbrellas called Knirps, in which a man took an open umbrella through a carwash and it emerged unscathed, but the brief supposedly just said “sturdy.”
But the rather esoteric task of writing the kind of ridiculously simple brief that leads to good ads really doesn’t apply in other fields. It quite definitely doesn’t apply in car design – and actually it doesn’t apply in briefing most other, more complex forms of marketing communication either.
There is, admittedly, a sort of half-way house that can work in briefing more complex or multi-faceted forms of marketing communication. The brief can ask for a thing called an “organising idea.” This provides a brand, or a product, with a kind of overarching concept which is simple and single-minded, but still leaves a fair bit of room for manoeuvre in the messages in the specific executions that can be fitted within (or beneath) it.
These “organising ideas” are often expressed in straplines, like “Every little helps” for Tesco, or “Vorsprung durch Technik” for Audi. Tesco can say anything it likes in an individual execution, provided that it can be said to be helpful to its customers in some way: Audi can say anything that has some kind of connection to technological progress. You might call ideas like these “superficially single-minded,” because they sound single-minded but actually they’re written with a cake-and-eat-it view to enabling the brand to say dozens of different things while maintaining some kind of appearance of single-mindedness.
But on the whole, the influence of the admen and their insistence on the simplest and most single-minded briefs has been pernicious and unhelpful when applied beyond advertising, and they’ve been allowed to get away with this folly for too long. (It was interesting that virtually all of the dozens of comments on Hegarty’s LinkedIn blog expressed enthusiasm and approval, and as far as I could see only one single comment began “Hang on a minute…”)
The creative output of his agency certainly proves that short, simple, single-minded briefs can lead to some truly outstanding commercials, but I’m sure it’s a good thing BBH has never been involved in car design. I don’t think those French poultry farmers would have appreciated some of the vehicles suggested for them to take their eggs to market.
