Insights / Client relationships

Take a leap of faith creatively

I think generally clients want to be brave, but when you put it to them, they freeze. It's understandable, if I put myself in their position, nobody wants to be remembered as the person who failed at something. I think you need to make a judgment call, as a client, assessing all of the information and looking at it and everything, sometimes people just need to make a call, be brave, and do something that's interesting.

I think you've definitely got to push it, particularly creatively you need to do that. In the other areas and other disciplines you can be assured that we're measuring, and everything is okay in that space, but take a leap creatively. I keep saying to clients "let's pilot projects", which is a term that they feel safe with, so if we say crawl, walk, run, let's look at something where we can make a small impact to demonstrate, or sandbox an idea, let's explore something in a live environment.

l've used terminology more from the development and tech startup place, but an awful lot of the principles can be applied to the advertising and communications space. Social is a great channel to prototype an idea, or explore at a minimal cost, but you're able to get feedback, so that's one way of doing it, you can demonstrate performance in that way.

Having a good process in place is really good, getting your research up front, and really understanding the problem, that classic planning piece. Understand the consumer, understand the product, or the business, understand culturally what's happening and going on, developing great insight, an insight that can actually unlock growth. Understanding the consumer and your target audience, where are they? touchpoints, channels, content that they're in to, so you can build up a case for the client whereby, you're giving them enough assurances.

Really where you want them to take that risk or leap is in the creative space, and sometimes there's no logic there, there's no logic in that place. For example, the Cadbury's gorilla, who would have thought that was going to be so successful? You couldn't measure that. "We're going to have a gorilla playing drums", there's no measurement for that, but what you can put in place is a framework, and a structure around that, that will give them the necessary assurance to take the leap.