Triple-distilled brand poetry, for true clarity

First, some provocation...

If you've ever worked in an agency, or in marketing in general, you will already know that we lack a common tongue. New words and phrases are constantly invented, often to describe concepts as old as the craft itself.

All of these words, phrases, acronyms, and tools are used interchangeably to describe distinct phases of a process that everyone approaches differently. It's no wonder we are drowning in jargon when we can't even agree on the basics.

None of this helps to clarify or simplify our thinking, which is essential to the process of generating anything remotely poetic. We get hung up on the language we use to overengineer and describe the process, often neglecting the heart of the process itself.

My working life began in a creative agency founded by three copywriters. As a result, I have always prized precision of thought, language and idea. Stories that bear retelling need to stick in the brain. For a brand to achieve the resonance of poetry in a billboard or 30s TVC, it needs to hit you in the gut.

We spend a lot of time trying to make the process of generating campaigns scientific. But at the heart of any creative strategist's job is the pursuit and crystallisation of truth. And that requires us to be philosophers, as well as poets.

In our brave new world of timesheets, task lists and Teams pinging, it's hard to find time to quietly meditate on our own existence. But without this meditation, we kill our own craft, and hand it over willingly to the machines, having degenerated into automatons ourselves.

So what is the solution to this paradox? I have a proposal. And like so many poets and philosophers before me, I have taken my inspiration from whisky.

All following diagrams are clickable - they will take you to a Google slides deck you can download and modify for your own use.

Insights are just the start of our process

Mining insight is a scientific process, guided by research, with a healthy dollop of intuition. And the output is an excellent place to start generating a strategic platform. But so often, we put this in the creative brief and pass it over, and there is so much more room to refine from here. What we intended as provocation can be taken quite literally by time-pressed creative teams. And we don't push the work as far as it can go.

Our insight provides a chink of light, but it does not unlock the door to great work by itself. There are three distinct phases we need to work through before we can create work that will capture imaginations and grab mind-share. Sometimes these phases happen all at once in a lightning-bolt of inspiration. Sometimes it's a real slog to get there. Nonetheless, all three elements are essential.

Emotion is the key to creating salience

We have statistics upon statistics, slides upon slides, to prove that emotive creative is more effective. But to evoke emotion is an art form, and a daunting one at that. However, there are shortcuts, and they start with being really specific about what that emotion needs to feel like. Once we have identified our emotional territory, and know how we want to make people feel, we can search for cultural references where this has already been achieved and leverage them. Because we are advertisers, not artists, we can indulge in pastiche and even plagiarism to deliver the effects we need. We can shamelessly exploit nostalgia, collective memories, and our deepest desires to make people feel the emotion we want them to associate with a brand.

The best way to show this is with some examples.

I am the captain of my soul

AMV BBDO have shared the process behind the creation of the Guinness Made of More campaign. So this gives us a head start on interpreting it into this format. It also gives us a window into how the creative platform had to go through three distinct phases of distillation, and we can even see the resulting creative output in Clock, Cloud and Surge, before they ended up with their iconic TVC Sapeurs. The platform Made of More is a wonderful expression of their proposition. But it's not until they connect it to both emotion and culture that it really comes to life.

There are many compelling cultural references in this advert, from the instantly recognisable music by The Heavy, to the quoted lines from the poem Invictus, to the dazzling fashions of the Sapeurs themselves. All of these come together in a glorious explosion of emotion - a clear declaration of identity that sears itself into your brain to be triggered by sights, sounds and thoughts for decades to come.

Watch the final iconic advert below: