Thinking inside the box

If you're going to be anywhere in advertising nowadays, the only place to be found is outside the box. The industry perceives thinking outside the box to mean you've broken free. You've defied convention. You're exploring new and uncharted territory. You're being modern and iconoclastic.

Well today, perhaps a little unexpectedly, I'd like to speak up for the Cinderella of this scenario. That place that nowadays we are all told we should avoid with fear and loathing. I'd like to talk about the kind of thinking you can achieve inside the box.

It's long been a theory of mine that being stuck inside the box, being constrained in this cramped unfashionable little cupboard, can have an extraordinarily liberating effect on the way people think.

Walls

Now I know what will happen if I invite a creative team to willingly allow themselves to be led into any kind of box. How, creative people wail, how can we create if you don't give us the space and freedom in which to express ourselves fully?

Well now here's the thing. Boundless space and total freedom simply don't exist in the world of advertising. The truth is, we spend our entire working lives inside boxes.

And the walls of those boxes are constructed from the kind of stuff that's very difficult to break out of, however much we pretend otherwise. Let's look at the basic materials that go into making the standard advertising box. There are walls like: The Brief. Research. The Budget. And Timing.

Whatever we might like to think, we can't totally ignore any of these. We might want to change them or argue with them, but even if we're successful, they don't actually go away. There will always be a brief, research, a budget and a timing.

Another familiar box construction has walls of global strategy on one side and local client's wishes on the other, which, as many of us know to our cost, are not necessarily one and the same thing. The third wall of this particular box is regulatory bodies, and the fourth wall I've dubbed the chairman's wife, that factor of an outside opinion adding its 2c worth.

I'm sure we're all familiar with this box that has walls of boring product, conservative client, tedious brief and suicide NOT being an option.

Boxed in

My point is, whether we like it or not, in advertising we are boxed in on all sides by professional disciplines and commercial realities. By the everyday requirements of timings, budgets and political expediency. And by the need for us all to make money.

However, my point is, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe boxes can be a good thing. We can do interesting and ingenious stuff in there, precisely because the constraints imposed upon us force us to. Apparently impossible constraints force us to come up with the ingenious solution.

Is this perhaps a model for advertising where there is no brief, no budget constraints, no client imperatives and no mad rush to get things done?

Here is an example of the box driving people to perform more cleverly. Take the tennis court. What is the thing that most frustrates the players in this picture? The boxes defined by those white lines. Boxes that are there to simply dictate that a ball is either too wide, too long or too short. If we lost the lines, we'd give the players boundless space, limitless freedom. Hey, we could even remove the net if you prefer.

But how do these players play a great game of tennis now? How do you serve an ace on that court? Or deliver a fantastic return that's just in by millimetres? The answer is, you can't. You need the boxes, the limitations so that you have something to work against, something that forces you to perform.

Constraints

In terms of practical examples of the box actually having a beneficial effect on the creative process, I'd like to cite Smirnoff, an account that the Lowe agency won back in 1992. When we started work on the brief, we immediately saw we were faced with some very tricky limitations.

Firstly, whatever we did had to be a global idea that would work in many different countries. This meant we couldn't use language, word play or references to local culture.

Secondly, the advertising brief itself was very challenging. It was a two-part brief. We had to talk about the fact that Smirnoff Vodka was 'Pure'. Colourless. Tasteless. Crystal clear.

Then the client said our problem is that Smirnoff is seen as 'your father's vodka'. It's a bit safe and boring. So can you instill it with some sense of excitement or edginess? This they summed up as 'Thrill'. Pure Thrill. Two apparently paradoxical things, but that was their brief to us.

Set against that requirement was the fact that we had to bear in mind the strict regulatory regime within which all alcohol advertising had to operate. A tricky, tricky box indeed.

However, I believe, precisely because of those constraints, the creative team did something quite extraordinary inside that box.

I was creative director on this project at the time, and the writer and art director duly walked into my room with a layout that depicted an ordinary garden hosepipe, that turned into a snake behind the glass of the Smirnoff bottle in the centre.

This one flimsy piece of A2 layout paper was worth literally millions of dollars to us and many more millions of dollars to our client. It was going to win countless awards, produce a campaign that ran in 52 countries, and reverse the declining fortunes of a brand that had been eclipsed by the far groovier Absolut. It was a fantastic breakthrough, and would turn into one of the agency's most famous campaigns.

When asked what I thought, I eventually replied, "Yeah, why don't you knock out a few more and see if there's something in this?" And of course there was something in it. The client liked these, too. And they said 'does it work in TV?' Well, it might, we said. This translated into the award-winning Smirnoff TV commercial.

Success

Another brilliant example took place in the year 2004, and involved a brand of deodorant spray called Axe. A famous global brand with a famous global campaign, the Axe Effect. It's one of Unilever's great success stories.

The basic premise for Axe is that ordinary guys spray themselves with the product, whereupon they suddenly become physically irresistible to exotic members of the opposite sex. It's a basic enough proposition, but when carried off with wit and charm, produces some very nice advertising.

For our agency in Dubai however, the story wasn't going to be quite so simple. Yes...it's all about seduction, yes .... the girl makes the first move, yes ... let's getsexually edgy. There was one little problem to contend with: the Muslim culture did not under any circumstances allow for Girl/Boy Scenes.

Those are the rules in Saudi Arabia, the market where this advertising was supposed to run. So how the hell do you sell Axe, which is all about girls clambering over boys, without being able to show either girls or boys, let alone any suggestion of clambering?

Our Dubai agency's response was to produce commercials featuring plugs all rushing towards a socket, and pencil sharpeners all drawn towards the pencil. Restriction? This looks more like liberation, to me.

We've suddenly stepped forward to a creative solution that collaborates and conspires with the audience, and flatters them into decoding the message for themselves.

In closing, I hope my remarks will provide some comfort next time you find yourself stuck inside one of these. And while you're in there, console yourself with this thought: if your mission is to produce great creative work, 'inside the box' can prove to be one of the most out-of-the-box places that there is.