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In this edition:

• Column: Planning Advertising That Yields Great Ideas

• Inspiration: Honda Takes Over Paris Fashion Week

• Timeless Wisdom: Socrates on Love & Friendship

Column: Planning Advertising That Yields Great Ideas

Earlier this week I shared a meme on LinkedIn that captured many strategists’ pain when it comes to planning advertising.

“Rogue ideas” as I’ve come to call them, it’s when the initial concepting of a campaign comes back from the creative department but it has completely missed the key insight written on the brief.

For one reason or another, the ideas are not reflective of the strategy, which ends up becoming more of a media brief then a creative one.

This is no dig at creatives — oftentimes the insight just isn’t meaty enough for them to chew on. Ideation is not a science and it takes several turns, and before you know it concepts have reached a different continent altogether from the initial insight where they started at.

To address this common issue, I’d like to unpack the advertising planning process and touch on how a strategist might be able to improve their batting average when it comes to heavy-hitting insights.

Research Phase

When a client comes to an agency with a brief, the elements enclosed in it typically include business objectives, marketing objectives, a description of the challenge they’re currently dealing with and some sort of desired outcome.

For bigger brands, some primary research data points might be included but they serve more so as a starting point for strategic exploration.

Through a series of brand stakeholder conversations the strategist begins mapping out a picture of the situation. This is when lots of questions begin to appear.

Contrary to common belief, a planner’s biggest weapon are not answers — but instead surgical questions.

You see, in today’s world where we have access to instant answers for just about anything under the Sun on the internet, the challenge becomes what doors should we open to get to the desired territories in the informational landscape.

While in the past those who had the answers were rewarded with financial gain and career progression, today the equation has flipped. It’s those who can ask great questions that get rewarded with success — financial, professional, and of course strategic success.

So, by leveraging the client’s brief the planner can begin forming hypotheses of what the real problem might be. To further their intuition’s pull, they might go out into the field and conduct ethnographic studies (aka, talking to customers in real buying situations), commission focus groups to unpack a set of questions, then take the insights from those qualitative instruments and put them into a survey that gets sent to a representative population sample that’s relevant to the brand.

This research phase is excellent to uncover the right questions that must be answered by the strategy — aka, where to play. And it’s the interpretation of the outcomes of these research instruments that lead to fertile grounds for insight formation (aka, how to win).

Insight Formation

This is arguably the toughest part of advertising planning.

There’s no formula to get to the right insight. It’s often a trial and error exercise that’s more art than science (the scientific portion largely lives at the research phase).

Interpretation skills are what separate the great strategists from the rest. It’s about one’s ability to process immense amounts of data, signals, conversations, and hunches and translate them into “truths”.

There are four core types of truths in account planning:

• Human Truths: these are universal insights about human nature—innate emotions, desires, motivations, and behaviors that transcend cultural or demographic boundaries. Human truths tap into basic human needs, such as the need for belonging, love, safety, or achievement. They are often deeply emotional and relate to the fundamental aspects of life.

• Category Truths: these are common beliefs or perceptions specific to a particular industry or product category. These truths often highlight what consumers expect from a product or service in that sector. Understanding these truths helps brands position themselves either by aligning with consumer expectations or by offering something distinct.

• Cultural Truths: these reflect the values, norms, and behaviors that are prevalent in a particular society, community, or group. These are shaped by social, economic, and historical factors and can vary significantly across regions or social groups. Cultural truths are essential for creating advertising that might resolve a particular tension that’s prelevant in a current point in time.

• Brand Truths: these are the unique strengths, attributes, and values that define a brand’s identity. These are things that are true about the brand itself—its heritage, values, mission, or what it authentically represents to consumers. A brand truth can differentiate a brand from competitors and build a connection with consumers who share similar values.

Each project might demand the planner to lean more heavily into one of the above truths, but advertising that truly transcends its place in time are those that capture an insight at the right intersection coordinates of these four truths. It’s where they perfectly converge and share something in common.

So much of this exercise hinges on the planner’s unconscious processing of information and collaboration with other folks in the agency, client, and consumer base.

Briefing

Once the planner has asked the right questions, determined which angle the campaign should attack the problem from, and uncovered a key insight that effectively serves as a diving board for creatives to launch from, next comes the communication of this complex work through a simple and clear brief.

There is a difference between BRIEFS and BRIEFINGS that we must address first.

• Briefs are Word documents that capture the entirety of the account planning process into a single page. It’s an incredibly difficult document to write because one must distill loads of information into its most essential elements that will give creatives the “sandbox” which they must work within.

• Briefings are the meetings in which the planner communicates their findings to creatives and set the tone for the project. These can be presentations, immersive in different settings, or even conversational. But what they cannot be are a Word document screen sharing Zoom meetings that bores the entire project team to death. Get creative here to bring your findings to life.

After the strategy is briefed and creatives go into their pods to ideate concepts, the strategist must remain “on-call” to support with further research, answer new questions that might arise, and at times even participate in the ideation sessions.

Where Things Go Wrong

So, how can creative come back with concepts that miss the brief? After all this work, how is that possible?

Well, in my experience I’ve identified 3 critical junctures where things might derail.

Weak Insight

When the insight is not that strong, it actually becomes an obstacle for creatives. They feel the need to stick to it, but the ideas that are coming out of it are not good enough. While this might at times be a creative challenge, more often than not this happens because the insight isn’t fresh or relevant enough.

To address this weakness, I encourage strategists to bring their creative directors in after the research phase to talk through the findings. This is a practice that Jon Steel talks about in this interview, and it has proven to yield some of the strongest campaign ideas he’s ever worked on.

While strategists might be hesitant to bring their CDs into the fold at this point, feeling like they’ve “failed” at their job, this sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth.

Making your CD part of this process will not only lead to amazing insights that you may have never even thought of (in the end of the day, your creative director is pretty good a creativity), but it will also save you the hassle from gaining buy in later on.

Uninspiring Briefing

If after all this work, you get to the 1-yard mark and you just walk across the line with zero energy, you’ve fumbled the ball.

This is your time to shine! Theatrics come in handy here — bring your insight to life in novel and impactful ways. I’ve lost count of how many times in my career the winning creative idea came straight from the briefing meeting conversations.

If you’re working on a campaign for a hotel, brief your creatives AT the hotel. Order some drinks by the pool, take them for a walk around the facility, show guests using the amenities in real time.

If you’re working on a campaign for a museum, take them on a tour of the museum. Show them the different exhibits, point out the moments in which the truths come to life, make it a multi-sensory experience.

Show your passion behind the plan. Bring it to life and spike that football into the end zone like Travis Kelce when Taylor Swift is watching him from the stands.

Wrong Questions

Finally, if you set up primary research instruments that aim to answer the wrong questions, well everything that follows will end up missing the mark.

Getting the “right” information in modern times is incredibly difficult. There’s no shortage of it and since strategy isn’t about making operational imperative decisions (those are obvious choices one must make and require zero strategic thinking), there are an infinite number of directions an advertising plan could take and still be (relatively) successful.

But beware, this doesn’t mean that there’s no going wrong. As a matter of fact, not all directions are made equal and therefore will yield varying levels of success — some which will over-deliver on the campaign’s objectives, others that will come up short.

To increase your chances of asking the right questions I recommend giving yourself plenty of time at this stage of the process. While this is not always possible due to tight timelines, it’s something always worth fighting for as a strategist.

So many great questions arise while you’re in the shower, walking the dog, or talking to a friend at the pub. Advertising is one of those industries that genius can strike at any moment, so parking a project in the back of your brain for a few days and going about your life while your unconscious mind is chewing away at the problem can be a highly effective way to land on great questions.

If time is not on your side, then I recommend you setting up a few meetings with your CD, account director, and other strategy colleagues to talk through the challenge. You don’t have to go at it alone, lean on the brilliant people around you to get you there.

The Chase

What makes this profession so exciting is that the quality of one’s work cannot always be “standardized” into a process. While agency processes do exist to increase their batting average, it often involves getting more experienced staff to review the work and ensure it’s clearing the bar.

Agencies that are too process-oriented end up pumping out repetitive and dull work in an industry that’s constantly evolving and changing.

And this chase for the illusive “perfect” insight is what keeps so many strategists excited about this line of work.

It’s like in golf when you hit a perfect swing — for amateurs it’s a feeling that keeps them coming back for more. But for pros, it’s a feeling that they’re well accustomed to.

Inspiration: Honda Takes Over Paris Fashion Week

Before Honda was known in North America for its amazingly reliable and efficient cars, they were known for their motorcycles.

So much so that to this day celebrities around the world are still often caught wearing Honda moto jackets.

Leading up to the Paris Fashion week Honda had the ingenious idea to capture this cultural trend and finally capitalize on it.

What I love about this campaign is the “door” through which the brand chose to enter the minds of consumers — it’s quite an unconventional category entry point for their industry, and it paid off.

Timeless Wisdom: Socrates on Love & Friendship

“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” — Socrates

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • The Strategic Backbone Behind Brand Hierarchy Trees

  • The Strategic Importance of Knowing Your Numbers

  • What Marketers Get Wrong About Social Media

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.