Focus finding
A handful of times over the years I’ve heard seasoned ad people say something to the effect of, “If you get some smart people in a room they’ll all comes to the same ideas first.” It’s not an advocation but a warning of dead-ends.
There’s a linear logic to coming up with the right ideas that appeals to the post-rationalizing parts of our brains. When I worked on cars, my GOAT collaborator, Leigh, and I looked at top purchase reasons across categories. We noticed that it didn’t matter if it was a sporty car or a big SUV, after buying, people said those chose their cars for almost all of the same reasons: quality, value, safety, and then one category-specific one like versatility or performance. The right thing to do was to say that a car ticked all those boxes.
I was recently listening to a podcast interview with William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days, the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir on his surfing life. He’s also a The New Yorker staff writer, and he goes into how he gets to the publishable product:
Sometimes they’ll take a year or more, or hopefully less. And they’re often out of focus for long period while I’m working on them… Reporting long-form pieces has often been a whiplash experience for me. I often go into them a bunch of preconceptions: “These guys are fighting those guys and they represent that and here’s what this war is.” But I really don’t know what I’m gonna find, not just in conflict reporting but in all kinds of stories. The villain of the story as I’ve pitched it to my editors turns out over a long process, to be the hero… Trying to get my head around that, and understand what’s really going on, is often the story I end telling.
Another legendary collaborator, Doug, recently sent me a post from the indispensable Praveen, which quotes Rory Sutherland’s book. “There are many problems which are logic-proof, and which will never be solved by the kind of people who aspire to go to the World Economic Forum at Davos.” People are not the rational actors depicted in economics textbooks.
My instinct is to write the right brief. The “this truck is unbreakable because you are too” brief. That’s the tidy explanation, rational-led, not-yet-in-focus brief. The initial villain is the villain in the end.
Back to Leigh, and the brilliant Rachael, whose focus-finding led to one of my favorite briefs. In the process of researching Jetta, amidst focus groups and product testing and barroom interviews with people in their twenties, they noticed in the purchase data that Jetta drivers were several times more likely to buy a luxury car next. The unspoken truth was that Jetta served as a symbol to its drivers that a lot more was coming their way. We didn’t get to make work off of this and I’m not still upset about it at all, but it was so thoughtful and fresh. It only came from pushing beyond how you’re supposed to launch a car; not an arrival, but a checkpoint.
A lot of my projects now start with pretty fuzzy definition, things like positioning and organizational design that take longer to define than solve. (Now, when I get the simplicity of a creative brief, I get a runner’s high.) Built into each of these things is adaptability. A new role needs to take into account the unique skills of the person we hire, and how they’ll interact with other team members. A positioning needs to translate into a brand brief, but also into future ones, and also artifacts that will be generated by social, media, partnerships, B2B, PR, and teams I’ll never even meet.
So the story that’s obvious from the outset isn’t the story at the end. The relative irrationality of the output reflects the irrationality of the people and process that will use it. The real product isn’t the document, but the document plus how it gets implemented.
Written while listening to Classical Bangers.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
