The goal of a Planner is always to help the Creative team come up with the right and great ideas. No matter what, you have to be on brief first, but to win the customer's heart, besides being right, it also has to be great. And one of the common ways, from a Planner's perspective, to help add a bit of luck for the Creative team is to share references (ref).
Can ref add bonus points for the Creative team?
I once shared in a blog post "Thinking in Templates" that when I first started the job, the first thing I usually did when receiving a client brief was to look for what already existed to see if I could 'learn' from it, or to be frank, to find case studies to see if I could steal anything. If I felt there was something decent, I would use it as a reference to guide the Creative team's creativity.
Feeling it wasn't enough, I would scrape across Adweek, Adage, Campaign Brief Asia, Spikes Asia, Cannes Lions, Advertising Vietnam, Brands Vietnam, etc. to gather about ten cases and then show them to the Creative team to feast their eyes. The time I actually spent thinking about the creative brief was probably only half compared to the time I spent reviewing what others had done.
That was my passion for finding refs, but almost all the Creative friends and colleagues I've had the opportunity to work with have never based their Creative Ideas on my refs, even though as a planner, I thought those refs were right. What's more, at that time I was fortunate to work with senior Creative colleagues who had been in the industry for a long time, and then one day a Creative Director told me like this:
"No 'sane creative' would want to do what someone else has already done. Because if you copy, you have to copy 100% of the idea to have any hope of being close to theirs."
After hearing him say that, I realized he had never paid attention to the refs I sent, yet his work was still right, great, and different.
I had an epiphany and also wondered, so what kind of refs should I share with the Creative team?
People still usually understand ref as 'advertising ref', taking someone else's work as ref. But there's another type of ref that's much, much better: ref from life materials (ref from life).
A scene from a movie.
A painting.
A blog post.
A song.
A chapter from a book.
A podcast.
A poem.
An overheard story.
A breakup story.
Something a child said.
A TopTop video (of course not an advertising clip)
And the list will go on and on.
For example, in a launch campaign I did for Vinamilk Super Nut, after all the analysis, in the Creative Way-in section, the ref I gave to the creative team was 'The meaning of the number 9 in numerology, Vietnamese folklore, Chinese characters, and Greek mythology' (because Vinamilk Super Nut has 9 types of nuts), and from that the Creative Idea was approved by the client, realized, and brought great success with "Not perfect but never stop perfecting".
From then on, I successfully quit the advertising ref habit. Advertising ref is only used to reference a certain treatment/execution capability, that's all.
By now, you probably have the answer from the beginning of the article, and I borrow the words of the Creative who taught me what ref from life materials is to conclude.
Feel free to send me refs, as long as they're from life. Never send me advertising refs.
I wish you all successful in quitting advertising refs. If possible, then also quit AI refs haha.
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