Page 177 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

168 SELLING CREATIVE IDEAS REQUIRES ITS OWN CREATIVITY

I believe that an idea is not great if it doesn’t ultimately see the light
of day. That, to me, is like hitting a home run in batting practice. It
doesn’t count for anything. The real superstars in baseball are the play-
ers who do it in prime time, just as the real winners in any other indus-
try are the people who have new ideas that actually become reality.
The One Club for Copy and Art, one of the largest (if not the
largest) organizations of advertising creatives in the world, has an
event called “The night of the living dead.” At this event they honor
great ads that never ran. With all due respect to the One Club, which
as a former board member I’m very supportive of, I’m sorry, but if an
ad never ran, it simply can’t be a great ad. To glorify these failures to
sell “great” ideas is to encourage laziness (or at least not to encourage
the selling of great ideas). The proof? The so-called winners of these
awards are not the real shakers and movers in the ad business.
You have to perform in the real world, my friends, if you want to
succeed at anything. All unqualified, uncompromised success? Well,
no, not totally. I may be an idealist, but I’m not a raving idealist. I will
admit that there are inevitably some concessions in the process of
bringing almost any idea to maturity. And I suppose I should never
expect any company to have absolutely all of its ideas slip totally
unscathed through the obstacle course of reality. But I can tell you
from my extensive experience in this area that the most highly realized
individuals and organizations, from a creativity standpoint, don’t do it
solely with brute creative strength, forcing their ideas upon others;
they also know how to sell their ideas. To use a phrase I much prefer,
“They know how to get others to embrace their ideas.”
Staying on the topic of advertising for a moment, a number of
years ago I did an informal analysis of what accounts for exemplary
creative achievement in advertising. I did a general but fairly far-
reaching ad-industry-wide Creative ForceField Analysis (see page
251). What I discovered is that the agencies and companies doing the
most creative work don’t necessarily have a corner on the best cre-
ative people, copywriters, and art directors. As it was, their people
mostly came and went, but didn’t always perform as well elsewhere.
However, those companies did overachieve in the area of selling their
best work. To put an exclamation mark on that point, the then-
reigning ad agency of the year, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, hired
away two people from my ad agency, an agency that many people con-
sidered “creatively driven.” But they weren’t creative people per se
who were cherry-picked from my staff—they were account people
who could sell great work.