I think we can agree that I’m not a big fan of ad agencies, so imagine how much I was looking forward to skewering this book by two of the Fallon Agency’s founding partners.
Bastards. They’ve torn even that small joy from my hands by writing a book that is useful, insightful and really very readable. If you’re struggling with the terrifying beginning of a new year or you’ve been told to turn around a floundering line of business, product or small country, Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage should be on your desk.
First, let’s get the creativity thing out of the way. Just about every great ad guy (are there any great ad girls?) has written a monument to his towering genius, which is mostly a name-dropping dip in the hot tub of hubris to fill the first six months of retirement. Whatever creative elixir our genius has been swigging is not, generally, for sharing and the subtext is that if you were also a Towering Creative Genius you would not be reading their book.
But Fallon and Senn run at it differently. They assert that creative leverage (as opposed to media leverage) is what we need now. Juicing the Orange is the metaphor for creative leverage which “combines the thoroughness of the left brain and the artistry of the right.” Naturally, the path to most peoples’ right brains is through their left brains which is why things sometimes get stuck. Happily, the authors have a set of principles that unstick things rather nicely:
The Seven Principles of Creative Leverage
- Always start from scratch.
- Demand a ruthlessly simple definition of the business problem.
- Discover a proprietary emotion.
- Focus on the size of the idea, not the size of the budget.
- Seek out strategic risk.
- Collaborate or perish.
- Listen hard to your customers (then listen some more).
The rest of the book, basically illustrates the application of the principles in a variety of well-known campaigns including Citi’s Live Richly theme. This is a wonderful case of both finding and owning a proprietary emotion and of “the importance of continuing to listen to your customer even when you think you’ve got them figured out.” A skill most agencies, in my experience could use a lot more of.
The United Airlines story has four things to teach, even to B2B folks. The first is to look to your niches – just nine percent of United’s passengers represented 48 percent of their revenue and it was these frequent business travellers who eventually provided a proprietary emotional space where the brand promise could be aligned with success, freedom and the bleak reality of business travel. The second, and it’s one that we see in a few other cases as well, is the need to sell the external thing internally before you unleash it on the world. United did this nicely and it served them well as they rode out 9/11 and a trip to Bankruptcyland. By selling the concepts throughout the organization they prevented the idea from becoming a rallying point for the disgruntled and made it instead into a customer service mantra. The third is that it’s okay to apologize. In 2000 following months of truly dreadful performance, the chairman of the airline taped a paid announcement apologizing for the whole mess. The result was a reversal in sliding revenue and business passenger loads. The final lesson here is one that’s tacked on to the end of the story and it deals with whether or not to roll a single brand message globally. “Here’s where we stand on the emerging trend toward creating advertising that can run in several markets around the world: it’s a bad idea.” Thank you for saying it out loud.
The rescue of Lee Jeans, the repositioning of BMW and the rebranding of Bahamas are all instructive tales told well and with a minimum of chest-thumping. There is, of course, a token B2B client and that, needless to say, is EDS. In case you had forgotten, it was Fallon that famously launched the Herding Cats ad on the Super Bowl in 2000. This is the ad that had the president of every B2B company standing in the marketing VP’s office the next day asking one or more of the following:
- Why didn’t you/our agency think of that?
- Why didn’t we advertise on the Super Bowl?
- I want something more brilliant, can you please have it done by Wednesday?
- By the way, did you see I cut another 16% off your budget for next year?
Turns out this genius ad I’ve been resenting all these years has a pretty interesting back-story. It would seem there was a bit of a Whimstorm just before the ad broke when EDS CEO Dick Brown was told by some buddies that the idea was a vain waste of money and promptly pulled the plug on the whole thing. It was refreshing (and familiar) to see the only reason it went ahead was the prohibitive cost to stop it. And you have to like the serious I-Told-You-So-Dance the agency gets to do as the kudos roll in.
As in the United story, the true success of this campaign lay in the internal sales job within EDS more than it did the brilliant execution of a so-so idea. “You have to have buy-in throughout the organization to get the long-term business results you need to justify the expense.” And EDS, Holiday Inn and Bahamas are all excellent reminders of this imperative. In the Bahamas example, the agency had the smarts to present the new identity to key tourism players with an unexpected result:
That series of presentations was the key to mobilizing everyone in the industry. People saw the power of the brand, and they saw their role. It reinforced to the Bahamian people that their government was innovative – and working hard to help them. They felt, for the first time, that they had a point of difference, and an advantage. It prompted the individual tourism businesses to start thinking like a brand.
The other critical lesson we can take away is from principle number two. Marketers are too often accused by engineers, product managers and others of over-simplifying things or reducing ideas to the point where all the technical details are lost. Fallon and Senn make the case here for “…relentless reductionism. In a marketplace where real product differences can be hard to find, much less communicate, simplifying the marketing problem is essential.” So go ahead and over-simplify. You have permission. The agency is well-known for its 127 questions document and it’s this they use to drive out the single insight around which creative leverage is built.
The writing in the book is solid enough, succinct and moves things along nicely. Some copy editing around punctuation and missing words would have been helpful, but doesn’t detract from the overall experience. There are plenty of visuals, sidebars are used sparingly and the whole thing is just 200 pages so it’s an easy read.
Some final lessons for marketers: Share of market no longer depends on share of voice, you should fire assholes even if they’re brilliant, you should create a culture of fun in your workplace and, finally, obviously, “You can’t buy creativity but you can unlock it… Rather than hire more creative people, first unleash the creativity in the people you already have on the payroll.”
And a big one for agencies: “Clients always have a bigger stake in the work than we do. It’s their money, their brand’s reputation, their marketing goals, and their resumes that are on the line.”
Amen.
Related Posts
Resentful Client Cringing Agency Part One
Resentful Client Cringing Agency Part Two
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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