A book on creativity that's not ... boring!
"I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad."
-- Leo Burnett
During the 2002 elections, I read about a candidate for governor of Arizona who is a member of Mensa and boasted of having an IQ of more than 160. The article reported that, even so, his campaign never "caught fire with voters." Well, no kidding! How stupid do you have to be to publicly brag about your IQ?
You see such boomerang blunders in the book world, especially when the topic is creativity -- rarely are such books inventive, and rarer still do they make you more creative. Today, however, I'm pleased to report an exception: "Juicing the Orange" by two ad-agency guys, Pat Fallon and Fred Senn.
What makes "Orange" special is that the authors are candid about the origins of each of their ad campaigns, and thus are willing to let us see behind the curtain with the word "GENIUS" on it, and show us the practicalities of assembling a brilliant ad campaign. (And their agency's ads are brilliant -- you can see samples at juicingtheorange.com, or simply know that they did the campaigns for "But I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express," the Lee Jeans "Buddy Lee" action doll and
The book lets you understand that creativity isn't a matter of guys in black shirts and no socks waiting for inspiration, but rather, a matter of searching out an appealing market segment and then puzzling out how to appeal to it. The same website where you'll find the ads will also show you the 15-page questionnaire that the Fallon agency uses to help them better understand their clients and the clients' customers and noncustomers. (The questionnaire reminds me of "The Mackay 66," from Harvey Mackay's classic "Swim With the Sharks," a set of questions lovingly embraced by salespeople.)
So, inspiration starts with the dreary work of research, of learning the marketplace. Then, as the authors of "Orange" put it, having gathered all that information, you start tossing it aside, piece by piece, in a process of "relentless reductionism" to "find the ONE consumer insight that forms the basis of the solution to the [marketing] problem."
For example, when undertaking the Holiday Inn Express campaign, the agency folks not only studied the market and did focus groups, but sent people to ride along with business travelers. The relentless reductionism lead to one great insight -- that these business travelers didn't aspire to stay at a Ritz-Carlton; no, these were people who chose a "limited service" hotel and felt good about it, felt smart for having made such a decision, and that led to the now-famous "But" campaign.
I've had experience searching for the one insight. For instance, when doing a creativity project for a chain of repair shops, we not only visited stores and talked to customers, but gathered pictures of all types of repair shops around the world. And the one thing all the shops had in common was the counter. You meekly approach the altar and ask the repair gods for intervention. So we suggested getting rid of the counter and replacing it with "partner desks," where customer and expert would sit together in a Starbuckslike environment and figure out what would be done.
Where can you see such a shop? You can't. The client hated the idea. They didn't let their employees sit down, for one thing. And that brings me back to the book "Orange" -- the authors do a fine job of explaining how they sell ideas to clients. It's a fact that those of us who generate ideas need to never forget -- the customers can't buy the new idea if you can't sell it to the client.
One Fallon client reacted to a pitch with: "I get it, but do we have to do this?" Another was less tactful: "This is a bunch of crap." That's where all the research comes in -- all that data that seemed to have been wasted in the reductionism comes back to make the case for testing the idea. All that research is the shelter in which the client and agency hide while sending forth a lonely new idea to see if it survives in the marketplace, or at least, a focus group.
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com. 
