Lose the Shotguns and Pick Up the Pins

Kevin Roberts is chief executive officer of Saatchi & Saatchi, headquartered in New York. I've spent most of my life in a quest to obliterate the ordinary, demolish the dull and bomb the bland. In advertising, the ordinary is our enemy. Our mission is to inspire and emotionally captivate consumers with the unexpected and the extraordinary. I've been the client, and now I'm the agency. My fundamental beliefs about advertising, though, remain the same: looking for a foolproof formula for writing successful ads is about as realistic as finding the foolproof formula for living life; by trying to tame, we destroy; by trying to analyze, we lose touch; by refusing to trust our instincts, we lose them; by trying to eliminate the risk of failure, we eliminate the chance of success. Questioning what we do, and how we do it, means that we must constantly strive for the extraordinary insights that are the essence of great advertising. The search for new insights in a rapidly changing world means that we must constantly adjust our most basic assumptions and not get caught up in the illusion of prediction. Instead of trying to predict, we need insights into the mind and mood of the consumer; insights Into a consumer's predisposition, values, needs, aspirations and behavior as an integral part of the creative process. Responding to change 15 years ago, Saatchi & Saatchi created anthropological tools that brought observational and interviewing skills to the study of consumer culture, helping us to identify culturally relevant ways to establish brand differentiation. We have also utilized psychological probing to understand the consumer's emotional motivations and how to create communications that are anchored in the deeper level of the consumer's psyche. A place we will be looking next is the human brain. Our knowledge of the brain sciences-neurology, cognition and psychology-has blossomed alongside information technology. Neurology, for example, is producing some of the most exciting insights which have the potential to smash a fundamental assumption of our industry: that humans are rational. The insights I'm after don't come from standard practices and neat numbers. We need to know not what people say, but what they actually do. We are seeking low cost, fast mechanisms to actually understand behavior, not intent. We need to know the consumer of one, for in a market which is segmenting so fast, we need a pin-prick approach, not a shotgun. And we need to know not what the herd thinks and says they want, but who the leaders are, and what they are going to do next. Let me give you a personal example of an exploration I have been undertaking with colleagues from the Management School at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where I teach in their MBA program. For the past year, our team has been searching to identify the essential elements of organizations that maintain leadership over long periods of time. We call this "Peak Performance." Our contention is that championship sports organizations are the ideal vehicle to study peak performance culture. Among the organizations we've visited are the Atlanta Braves, the San Francisco 49ers, New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team, Britain's Williams Formula One motor racing team and Germany's Bayern Munich soccer team (soon to come: the Chicago Bulls), At the bedrock of our learning was listening, observing, storytelling, intuition, judgment and simply "hanging out." In other words, we took an anthropological search for cultural imperatives. What we found is that inside peak performance organizations is an overwhelming passion to win. We also found a very strong practice of "exceeding personal best." We found gamebreaking ideas, incremental contributions to the way things are done. In fact, all peak performance organizations have enabled their people to continually push for these new ideas. Finally, we have identified a peak practice called "the last detail." Without the last detail in place, all else is a waste of time. In sum, the best companies are driven by ideas, imagination, innovation, instinct, intuition and inspiration. The challenge is to insure that these great big "I" words do not get stifled by outmoded, deductive and structurally flawed processes. The distinct risk to advertising, in fact all communications in the attention economy, is a crisis point of too many options. The challenge for advertising agencies is to be at the simplicity and clarity end, the understanding end, the ideas and insight end, not at the volume end. These are the challenges which are shaking the floorboards of our industry. The moral of the study: trust in yourself and have courage.

COPYRIGHT 1998 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group