Welcome back to the tenth edition of this little thing that I enjoy jotting down at the end of the week. I hope you enjoy picking it up to begin your week with.
There are enough number crunchers out there who have this relationship with Excel. Everything that can be measured is on those sheets.
In our business, it’s the stuff that’s intangible that makes this business work. And there’s no measuring that.
Look at the Nike CEO. Didn’t care about shoes. About the Nike brand. About innovating. About pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. All this bean counter cared about was costs. Nike ended with a 27 billion USD crash in monetary value and cataclysmic damage to intangible brand value built over thirty years of amazing brand advertising.
You can’t always choose your leaders, but can the leaders choose wisely about what they choose as metrics?
You can’t measure productivity by presenteeism in the office. Or, by timesheets. We’re not lawyers. The idea itself is laughable. Or, by outcomes. While we’d love to correlate advertising success to the work directly and indeed, the Effies do a fantastic job of that, our value lies in the creativity we bring to the table. And because that’s intangible, our bean counters can’t comprehend how to monetise it. And thus, we are, where we are.
As a side effect, they can’t measure passion for going relentlessly beyond the basic obvious zones of ideas and pushing into new zones each time.
They can’t quantify the value of inspiration, rest and unplugging from a constant barrage of work-related whatsapp groups, especially on weekends. Switching off, is priceless. But the 24/7 hyper connectivity machine doesn’t allow for it.
I’ve touched lightly upon these themes earlier. Today I wanted to talk about the value of serendipity. Of inspiration as the wind beneath our creative wings.
Out there in this thing called Life, which most agency people seem to struggle with even having, inspiration can be found at every moment at every place.
Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits recounts how he was at a department store that sold white goods. A burly man was unloading heavy things like fridges. As he did so, MTV was playing on the big television screens at the other side of the store. He kept muttering about how that wasn’t working (real work) and what an easy life rock stars must have.
Mark ran to get some paper, and many of the things that the guy said, found their way into ‘Money For Nothing’, their smash hit.
I’ve written earlier about how another musician John Lennon found inspiration in a circus poster in a vintage shop to create the song ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite’. His inspiration came from everywhere, a breakfast cereal ad most famously created his song ‘Good Morning’, the news headlines created ‘A Day In The Life’ and I could go on but this isn’t a Ted talk on the Beatles inspiration for each song.
The Classic Coke commercial where a naughty creature swims up from the depths of the lagoon to snatch a Coke bottle away, was created by the creative team who remembered this one fascinating thing about elephants; they’re amazing swimmers. Who would have trunk?
Hip hop dancing came from black dancing a century prior to it.
Wodehouse got his inspiration to skewer the upper classes he was born into, from Saki’s style of satire just before him.
Oasis owe their entire career to trying to be the Beatles: 90s Edition.
Monet took one look at photography and liberated Art from the confines it had been shackled to, by the school of realism and went on to create Impressionism.
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Dua Lipa went and referenced the 80s and paid tribute to so many cult hits by sampling them in her album ‘Future Nostalgia’.
If Advertising has a superpower, it is to connect two things in ways they haven’t been connected before, or to show you the same old thing in an all new light. No idea generation technique can help with the raw ingredients for that process, unless you’re outside the office, hanging with real people who are as far away from advertising as can humanly be. It’s in their utterances, that our success lies. Just ask Mark Knopfler.
Inspiration is free, but to be inspired, needs time off from the office, time away from the 24/7 rigmarole and mind space and bandwidth to recharge those creative batteries for the week ahead.
After all, Diwali is coming up and those ideas for our desi Super Bowl won’t write themselves. Have a smashing week ahead, full of stuff that inspires you to attack a brief in an all new way. Something of immeasurable value, that.
Rayomand J Patell is an advertising veteran and InspiRAYtion is a weekend column on everything about advertising and marketing.