Gareth Kay, Chief Strategy Officer at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, gave this presentation at "Ambidexterity," the VCU Brandcenter's executive education program for account planning on July 18th, 2013 at the VCU Brandcenter in Richmond.

1. Edited Deck
Gareth Kay, Chief Strategy Officer
What Creativity Needs From Planning

2. 1. Make hacks, not ads

3. “Here’s the TV ad, now what’s the problem?”

4. “The task of any imaginative agency, any creative company, is to
understand and serve its client’s business problem. Too often, our
business has sliced and diced its tasks in the style of a sub-prime
mortgage bundler. A corporate task set by the chief executive,
reframed as a comms task by the marketing director, refined by
the brand consultancy and reduced by the ad agency to the stuff
advertising can do: grow awareness, nurture engagement.
Too many links, too indirect and weak a connection
between commercial possibilities and creative resolution.”
— Laurence Green, founding partner 101

5. We need to stop defining ourselves by output
and start defining ourselves by outcome

6. “The further backward you can look,
the farther forward you can see.”
— Sir Winston Churchill

9. We’re at our best when we’re hackers

10. hack (n.)
the most ingenious and effective solution
to a problem
Source: Merriam-Webster Disctionary

11. Occasionally, we still remember this

12. How might we get more people
registered as bone marrow donors?

14. How do you get people to use Hellman’s
as more than a sandwich spread?

16. HA CKS ARE M ORE POWERFU L TH AN AD S
Remove the gap between the commercial imperative and the creative solution.
Put people at the center.
Simplify and get out of the way.
Inbuilt disdain for the tired, old solutions of today.
Help us move as fast as culture.

17. EM BRACE TH E HACKER W AY
Break big problems apart and put them back together again
Ask ‘why’ until you can’t ask why anymore
Ask better questions to get to better answers
Put different people together in different ways to get to different ideas
Speed is good
Releasing and learning > perfecting
For every problem there’s a way to get something done better, faster and easier

18. 2. Put people first

19. The most narcissistic industry?

20. “Often our biggest mistake is believing
that, in general, customers care a lot
about your brand. They do not.”
— Patrick Barwise

21. “Nobody reads advertising.
People read what they want to read
and sometimes it’s an ad.”
— Howard Luck Gossage

22. Understand what people are interested in
and work back from there.

23. We need to build bridges

26. Have a cultural mission,
not just a commercial proposition.

29. Being people positive is much
better than being media neutral

30. 3. We need to build stuff from scratch again

36. Bloatvertsing

37. Focus on the MDP:
Minimum Delightful Product

38. 4. Cut back

39. You can actually cut your way to greatness

40. Media strategy by

41. “Too many brands have too many sub-brands
and too many SKUs.
They use too many agencies. Too many messages.
Too many media.
They invest in too many brand diagrams, with too many words.
They buy too many research reports, with too much useless data.
They pursue too many NPD initiatives, with too many dead ends.”
— Andy Nairn

42. Restriction is more powerful than proliferation

43. Growth comes from sacrifice

44. In summary

45. Have a healthy disregard for advertising

47. “Do interesting things and
interesting things will happen.”
— Sir John Hegarty

48. “If you don’t like change,
you’ll like irrelevance even less.”
— Gen. Eric Shinseki