Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [77]
A Road Map Called Desire
Several years ago, a creative team at a large agency beginning a new assignment would typically get a one-page brief from a strategic planner. For more important, higher-billing assignments, the brief would be the end product of a period of concept testing, or behavioral research geared to glean a salient insight about the target, combined with common sense.
For instance, on the AT&T consumer business, while formulating a brief, a planner would speak to current customers or the competition and determine what they liked and disliked most about their phone service, and about AT&T in particular. Sometimes this would lead to a straightforward rational target insight such as customers want a simpler bill, or a headier nugget about their desire for “anytime, anywhere communication,” or, in an age where individuals feel increasingly marginalized and alienated, a greater desire to have a voice or be part of a community. For the client, however, the business opportunity (read: obstacle to overcome) would be framed differently. For instance, “Establish leadership in this new era of communications by empowering users via our network capabilities, or become obsolete.” Or, “Increase minutes on the network.”
For AT&T’s business clients, planners discovered that on a functional level, reliability was the most coveted attribute, but on a more behavioral level time was the thing they valued most in their lives. It was the planners’ job to take this information, distill it down to a brief, and share it with us. Sometimes our eyes would light up with the opportunity to work against a compelling behavioral insight or desire; other times our eyes would simply roll because, while the better insights often lead to legitimate trends, the more pedestrian observations sink to the level of cliché.
In basic terms, there have always been two reasons to conduct advertising research: to discover what your consumers want or feel in relation to a product or service; and to confirm if a campaign will work or is working.
I was always a big fan of up-front research. To make great work, I found it helped to know as much as possible about the target, the product, and the relation between the two. But the latter, testing that critiqued storyboards or finished spots, I saw as nothing more than a way to kill good and especially breakthrough work, rather than give it life. In fact, many of the best ads I was ever a part of suffered brutal, torturous deaths in focus groups, often while I sat on the other side of a one-way mirror, apoplectically gorging M&M’s and berating the twelve men from Teaneck who held my fate in their hands. For a while I even put a video clip of a focus group participant’s response to my work at the front of my commercial show reel: after watching a video storyboard for a proposed commercial for AT&T’s innovative products that I loved, and which, until that moment, the client loved, too, a thirty-five-year-old homemaker said, “What kind of drugs was the guy who wrote this taking?”
For the record, the spot, to the best of my knowledge a drug-free idea, was a surreal tale of a futuristic traveling bubble-wrap salesman who, after tucking in his children by teleport, liked to say things such as “Living in the future is sweet, baby!”
If you think this is sour grapes on my part (which it is), there’s a telling video on YouTube that brilliantly demonstrates the way in which even a classic commercial can be nibbled to death by the ducks of a focus group. In the video, created by Arnold Communications in Boston, a focus group is exposed to an exact storyboard version of Chiat\Day’s “1984” Super Bowl spot for Apple Computer, arguably the most provocative and powerful commercial of all time. After the commercial