Where is the value?

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There are two questions that always fascinate me about this crazy business of ours. One is: what are the activities on which we spend the most time, yet offer the least value? The other is: what are the activities that offer the most value on which we spend the least time?

One candidate for the first category is process. To be honest, I don’t much believe in it. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Paul Feyerabend’s book Against Method, in which he turns a sceptical eye on scientific methodology.

His argument is that, when you unearth the real events that led to the important scientific discoveries in history, you find they bear little resemblance to the pure approach to which scientists claim to adhere. They are, instead, a surprisingly messy mixture of happenstance, serendipity, reversals, blind alleys, red herrings and lucky guesses – made to look like logical process when narrated in hindsight.

You find the same randomness in the origins of many of the greatest moments in film. Stanley Kubrick had commissioned an original score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The music of Johann Strauss was added to silent footage of rotating spacecraft by a model-maker who wanted to present his initial work to the director. Feeling silence made the presentation a little stark, he grabbed the first classical recording he could find for the presentation, and apologised for the arbitrary soundtrack. Kubrick leaned back in his chair: “They’re going to call me a genius.”

Many creative campaigns are no different. I recently learned that the Dulux dog came about by accident. In one story, it belonged to the owner of the home where a Dulux advertisement was being filmed and wandered onto the set – so the director decided to keep it. In another, it was recruited at the last minute to make a cold set seem a bit warmer. Either way, it was not planned.

Although I am sceptical about process, I am a great believer in checklists – they impose order on what you do without imposing an order on how you do it. I have never believed that, in the creation of something new, Activity A must always precede Activity B.

The process-fetish arises from self-deception. An agency naturally wants to reverse-engineer its latest successful campaign to pretend it has hit the creative mother lode and can replicate that success unfailingly. The client likes the idea of process because it feels as if it is de-risking the random business of producing an ad.

But what is the opposite of this? The activity that could be so valuable on which we spend too little time?

If creativity is the search for something that works but doesn’t make sense, its neglected twin is the search for things that make sense, yet don’t work.

The reason this is neglected is because we automatically trust anything that seems to make logical sense. This leads to an asymmetry in business decision-making.

When you propose something creative, the burden of proof is set very high. ‘How can you be absolutely sure this animated meerkat is going to sell insurance?’ On the other hand, when you do something consonant with received economic theory, the burden of proof is set very low. ‘The product is underperforming, so we’re going to drop the price.’

Not a penny is spent trying to isolate and eliminate the costs of unpoliced logic. But if you talk to anyone in direct marketing or programmatic advertising – or any field where behaviour is richly measured – you realise that the correlation between ‘works in theory’ and ‘works in practice’ is far weaker than we like to believe. $20-off vouchers often reduce a product’s sales. A bizarre 40% fall in charity donations happened recently when we tested highlighting Gift Aid. In numerous cases, smaller discounts are more effective than large ones.

Too often, these discoveries emerge by accident; because it is naively assumed that a money-off voucher must increase sales, no one tests the alternative. It is only when a software glitch causes the mention of the offer to be removed that the scary truth emerges.

Rational decisions should be tested and measured with exactly the same rigour as imaginative ones. Millions of pounds are wasted every year because ideas that make sense in theory are given a free pass.

If you think creativity’s expensive, you should try rationality.