The subtle art of stepping into an idea

Is this what I was expecting? Why is it what I was expecting? Why is it not what I was expecting? Is this what we talked about in the briefing? Is it on brief? Is it on brand? Is it to true our brand value? Does it fit with our brand on a page? Does it communicate the value proposition/key message? Where’s the insight? Does it leverage the key brand assets? Is it true to the design system we’ve slaved over for so long? Can I sell it up the chain to the senior execs? Can I get the stakeholders on board? What about the distributors? And the trade? Will it test well? What if it doesn’t test well? Is it ‘ownable’? Will it alienate existing consumers? How much will it cost to produce? Is this just going to be a one off? Can I get it past legal? How will I get local markets to put media monies behind it? Can we get this produced in time? What is the idea? Is there an idea? Does this matter? Does this have legs? Is this something that my other agency partners can work with? Is this going to move the dial?

At some point these are questions that need to be asked and answered. And yet for all that, the delta between what we believe/know (or say we believe/know) about how brand-building communications works and how we first respond in our roles as commissioners and developers of brand-building communications to new and unfamiliar ideas is a very strange and weird land.

Without even mentioning the words ‘Gestalt theory’, Bill Bernbach spoke of ideas working as aesthetic wholes:

Most readers come away from their reading not with a clear, precise, detailed registration of its contents on their minds, but rather with a vague, misty idea which was formed as much by the pace, the proportions, the music of the writings as by the literal words themselves.”

I think many (most?) of us would nod along to that.

Stephen King for his part, put it thus in his ‘Planning Guide’:

An advertisement as a stimulus is a combination of medium, words, pictures, movements, symbols, associations, tones of voice, etc. The stimulus is received as a totality; the receiver does not separate content and form. The individual elements of an advertisement have no meaning on their own. They can only be judged in combination.” 

Again, I think many (most?) of us would nod along to that too. 

In their rather excellently titled book Pragmatics of Human Communication – A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes, the psychologists Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson have distinguished between what they characterize as ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ human communication. ‘Digital’ communication they argue is logical, conscious, explicit and intellectual. This is used for the sharing of information about objects and for the transmission of knowledge. In contrast, ‘analogue' communication, encompasses virtually all non-verbal communication. It is implied rather than stated, open to interpretation, and is experienced to a large extent unconsciously. Concluding their analysis, Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson state:

Wherever relationship is the central issue of communication, we find that digital language is almost meaningless. This is not only the case between animals and between man and animals, but in many other contingencies in human life, e.g. courtship, love, succor, combat…”

I think many (most?) of us would nod along to the notion that how we communicate it at least as important (if not more important) than what we communicate.

And yet far too often it seems that we’re looking at ideas through entirely the wrong lens. Is this what I was expecting? Why is it what I was expecting? Why is it not what I was expecting? Is this what we talked about in the briefing? Is it on brief? Is it on brand? Is it to true our brand value? Does it fit with our brand on a page? Does it communicate the value proposition/key message? Where’s the insight? Does it leverage the key brand assets? Etc. It’s a bit like listening to hardcore audiophiles (is there any other kind?) use say, Ashkenazy's recording of Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto to test out the audio capabilities of their new speakers. An experience that leaves one wondering if they actually enjoy music. As I said,  the delta between what we believe/know (or say we believe/know) about how brand-building communications works and our first reponses to new and unfamiliar ideas is a very strange and weird land indeed.

The American writer and critic Susan Sontag famously mounted a resistance against what she saw as the impoverishing effects of interpreting works of art.  The insistence on interpreting art, Sontag argued in her seminal essay ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), ignored the experience of art’s form and reduced it to a question of its decipherable, decodable content. What we today would probably call its story, or message, or narrative, or meaning, or intent. The depleting effects of this insistence on finding understanding, and interpreting art’s content had for Sontag urgent consequences and implications (and she could have been writing about today’s supersaturated over-serviced advertising environment):

“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties…. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Paul Feldwick has argued something very similar, contending that we’ve got this thing we call ‘creativity’ a bit wrong:

“Our common conception of ‘creativity’ has been reduced to originality has been redefined so as to airbrush aesthetic quality right out of the picture. Yet I argue that it is this aesthetic quality that generally makes most of the difference when people choose designs, advertisements, or brands… we ought to redefine creativity, so that it is primarily about aesthetic quality rather than originality for its own sake. And we need to recognise that it is manifested in tangible images, sound and performance, not in abstract ideas.”

Sontag wanted us to stop thinking about art and its content so much, and start feeling and experiencing its form more.  And here’s the rub. We say that the most powerful work operates through evoking visceral, emotional responses, yet we’ve been seemingly conditioned to believe that critiquing and evaluating is the professional necessary first step. But the fact is that we can’t truly feel an idea, we can’t truly live an idea if we’re standing on the outside and looking in being clever about it. We have to step inside.

In her classic essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926) Virginia Wolf had some good advice on the art of stepping inside:

“Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string. To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.”

There will be a time and a place to critique, analyze, assess, deconstruct, refine, improve. For let’s be clear - subjecting ideas to scrutiny and critique can and does make them better. Ideas get tightened, more focused, more fit for purpose. Energies and resources get focused on the points of greatest leverage.  Fluff gets whittled away.  SNAFUs and landmines are spotted and dodged. Wishful thinking gets rooted out. The gaps get filled. The easy wins get spotted and addressed. The ugly duckling gets recognised as the swan it really is. The half-baked becomes fully baked. Rationales become persuasive. Reasons not to approve get dismantled. The neglected, will-o’-the-wisp doodle gets rescued from oblivion and transformed into the game-changer.  All that can and does happen. But the first task is not to feedback or critique.  The first task is to fully step into the idea.  Yet far too often, nascent, half-baked, vaguely sketched out ideas find themselves in the dock, alone. Surrounded not by accomplices, but by judges.

Stepping into an idea, becoming its accomplice not merely its judge begins with listening and watching with an uncritical mind, all filters and checklists and biases and prejudices and expectations set aside.  Approaching new and unfamiliar ideas with a fully uncritical mind and open mind in this way is arguably one of the hardest behaviors for their developers and commissioners to practice. Not least of all when for some unfathomable reason, the creative process and development of new, supposedly exciting and game-changing ideas is reduced down to… a ‘sprint’.

The art of stepping into an idea continues with seeking to understand. To spend the time to ensure that we have correctly understood the creative intent. For the fact of the matter is that until work is fully produced much of that intent resides in creative minds - not on the page or on the screen. Found imagery and footage, Midjourney renders, stock photography, reference material, the gems and flotsam of the internet, paragraphs of copy describing the executional vision… They all can and do help. But they all fall far, far short of what is in the creative imagination.  Under these circumstances, the most dangerous thing that can be done is to make assumptions.  Indeed critiquing the details of rough prototypes without putting in the effort to question and understand the intent and know we understand the intent properly is almost entirely worthless.  It is of course incumbent on the originators of these ideas to be clear and articulate on what precisely that intent is.

The ratio of opinions to questions in most creative discussions (both internal and with marketing teams) probably hovers somewhere around the depressing 80:20 mark. Yet the only way to determine if we understand the idea the same way creatives understand the idea is to ask questions. Questions like why are the team excited about the idea? How will it work? What will it look/sound/feel like? How reliant is is on technique? What cultural and aesthetic traditions and tropes does it steal from, borrow, or remix? What emergent cultural language does is channel? What are the most important parts? How will it unroll? How will it scale? For the fact of the matter is that if we’re feeding back on new ideas in the absence of asking questions of them, we’re starting at the wrong end of the process. 

The rule of thumb should be simple. If we don’t know the creative intent, we shouldn’t speculate. Agency and marketing teams are encouraged to liberate themselves from the need to critique and to use initial creative presentations to fully air and understand ideas. Only then following up with considered and consolidated feedback and considerations on how the work can be developed. 

Listen so that we feel, ask so that we understand. If we can do that - if we can actually create the space, take the time, and exercise the discipline to properly step into an idea - I’d contend that the chances of us actually being able to then contribute to the development and improvement of it will be vastly improved.

TL;DR: Just sit with it for a while.