It All Comes Down to Creative The Hal Lewis Group Inc. VIEW on Advertising March 2006 Creative work must be the sound, smart, clever, intuitive, provocative, compelling expression of the brand strategy. Separate them at your peril. Peter Siegel, Executive Creative Director The Hal Lewis Group Inc., Philadelphia, is a full-service healthcare advertising and communications agency. For more information, visit hlg.com. We all know that strategy, positioning, and creative need to be inextricably linked. But instead of imagining these three as equal building blocks, consider strategy and positioning as the means to the creative end. After all, that’s really what clients pay for — the product, the brand. Creative work must be the sound, smart, clever, intuitive, provocative, compelling expression of the brand strategy. Let’s not forget that the reason for spending beaucoup bucks and shedding buckets of tears and pints of blood laboring over positioning and strategy is to produce creative work that sells and changes customer’s buying behavior in the brand’s favor. Unfortunately, that investment doesn’t always pan out. Take a good look around. The marketplace is exploding with brands that are practically indistinguishable from one another. And so is the creative that’s charged with creating those distinctions. Practically every healthcare journal is virtually littered with mediocrity, or worse. It’s shocking to consider the amount of time and money that was spent creating and testing these ads. And chances are these ads tested great. Marketers wouldn’t dare run them if they didn’t. Mediocrity may be attributed to various considerations, including the connections, or lack thereof, to the strategy/positioning mentioned above; the work not being very creative or compelling; or personal bias that may get in the way. Cement the Connection Between Strategy, Positioning, and Creative All great creative folks must be strategic. Creatives who are charged with developing branding executions must understand, depend on, and participate in the creation of — not just obedience to — great strategy and singular positioning to do what they do. This is what clients are paying for. Strategy and positioning are vital to the creative process. They shouldn’t be separate. Agencies should make sure they are married. Strategy, positioning, and research hours should be built into the creative staff’s time. Budgets are tight, to be sure, but this isn’t the place to skimp. Make Sure It’s Great, Then Resist the Temptation to Kill It Assuming the agency’s creative department is worth its salt, is testing killing the good stuff? Asking doctors to be creative directors is like asking creative directors to perform brain surgery. Agencies should be looking for physicians’ insights, not their art directing abilities. Granted their aesthetic appreciation is just waiting to emerge. Physicians go to the symphony, buy art, read magazines other than JAMA, and while their art direction and copywriting talents are, let’s say, suspect, they need to feel safe enough to make those kinds of comments. In a testing situation when physicians are often placed in the “I’m-A-Doctor” spotlight, they often say all they want are data and what they don’t want is “…all this Madison Avenue stuff.” They’re doctors; they’re supposed to say that. Don’t believe them. Give them great creative that gets them to feel something for your brand, not just “know” something about your brand. Ask them the right questions, take their insights, but leave their creative “direction” behind. Clients should trust and believe an agency’s creative department that tells them to do that. Step Aside Don’t let personal bias get in the way of good creative. When creative teams present their ideas, the marketer or agency creative director must take himself or herself out of the equation. It can’t be about what we like. It’s got to be about what works and what moves. It has to be about great creative ideas, generated by the team that built the strategy, which provokes a profitable commercial response. Personal bias may end up killing the very thing that’s going to differentiate a brand in the marketplace. Great creative is the crucial link between what physicians should know about the brand and what they should feel about the brand. In the final analysis, great creative is the one thing that actually, and ultimately, brings the strategy to life; it’s what results in a prescription being written or a recommendation being made. It’s the difference between producing a successful brand and a great one.

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