The pitch: When it comes to effective communication, clarity begins at home

By HOWARD RUSSELL*

At the end of an iterative process where a constellation of inputs are duly considered and processed both rationally and intuitively to arrive at a point of distilled directionality we create intelligibility and lucidity. What?

Clarity. That's what this article's about.

You mean there's something meaningful and relevant, not to say efficacious and downright valuable, about clarity when it comes to producing effective communication? Yes. Exactly.

The real problem often comes in the communication that happens even before the advertising gets produced - between agency and client or in the creative brief.

You have to do the homework on what the advertising needs to do for the brand (and if you want to develop really effective advertising, you need be sure about what the advertising has to do for the consumer).

But then you have to distil it. If you put in too many instructions, the creative team is likely to get lost and uninterested. Can you put the advertising task in two simple sentences? Could you explain it to your mum? If not, why not?

Advertising is a blunt instrument. It's not like knitting a jumper. Imagine a brief for a blunt instrument - it wouldn't run to many pages. It would say something like: "about two feet long, wider at one end than the other, made of wood".

Instead people produce knitting patterns. An example: "A distinctive and different treatment from any other ground coffee advertising that gives contemporary relevance to the brand in the real lives of our target audience."

People don't really write briefs like that, do they? Yes they do. That one was written for a British brand.

The brief led to a TV campaign. After $3 million was spent, prompted awareness was 1 per cent. The brand didn't move and was withdrawn.

So why do communication processes get woolly?

Sometimes people use complexity in an attempt to prove "guru" status. The creative brief is only there to give the creative team direction and a springboard, not a literary work.

Sometimes clients/agencies believe that you'll get what you need if you fill in enough boxes on a form - as if creating advertising is like trying to get money from Winz. It isn't. Some people just love forms.

Often a horrible swamp develops when an agency thinks X should go in the brief, but the client says Y is all-important.

Both go in, and the poor creative team gets dumped with the responsibility of ensuring some kind of half-human creature emerges from this primeval slime. Remember: fudge plus mush equals monster.

Or clients believe that elaborate charts and conceptual models are all part of advertising mystique which justifies the fee. I think the job of an agency is to sort the wheat from the chaff and make things plain and clear, actually a whole lot more arduous. Maybe you should pay your agency more the more it clarifies things.

* Email Howard Russell

* Howard Russell runs Auckland brand strategy consultancy Strategic Insight.

* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions.
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