I have a few contenders for my least favourite kind of brief. I struggle with a rigid, constrictive brief not rooted in a core business problem or an existential reputational challenge. The most common is "We should do some PR around our advertising campaign". Now I'm sure your new campaign is excellent. Still, depending on the concept, it might give your comms agency little latitude to develop something newsworthy or interesting.
That is not always the case, of course. I worked with Sony and Fallon on their BRAVIA 2008 campaign with Kaka, and we added the classic "Guinness world record" lens to the mix. A nice but very fastidious man from Guinness came along to the shoot to confirm that, yes, this was the world's largest-ever zoetrope.
Just recently, Pot Noodle's team worked with the "Mr Pothole" to tap into one of THE topics of conversation in the UK and generate some coverage for the new "Nothing fills a hole like a Pot Noodle" spot.
In addition to "PR our ad", the other kind of brief I've been burned by over the years are those where "innovation" features heavily.
At the risk of going all Frank Costanza at Festivus, I have a real problem with the word innovation.
The problem is that, on its own, innovation is an empty concept. Anyone can say that they're innovative or working on innovation. I could breezily write every week about how I'm innovating my routines or coming up with the most innovative way to get a toddler to eat food that isn't cheese or blueberries (I wish).
Innovation has to have substance behind it. How are you innovating your routines, Mark? What are you actually doing that's so innovative it's getting a toddler to eat some food that isn't salty or sweet?
I heard the phrase "you have to prove innovation and earn trust" at some point (I don't remember where), and it's been a touchstone for me any time I see the "I" word appear as the focus in the brief.
Too often, innovation appears in a brief on its own, without the crucial proof points. A company wants to improve its reputation as an innovative business or plans to launch a new "innovation lab" to generate new ideas and ways of thinking. But probing deeper exposes a dearth of examples.
Anything that really is innovative doesn't generally come with that label. We call it "new" - it's a new product. More specifically, if we follow one dictionary's advice, it's an update or refinement of an existing product or service. If the word "innovative" is included in the supporting material around that product, it focuses on a specific feature. An innovative new way of reducing plastic waste from multipacks of cans (that glue that sticks cans together, for example).
Innovation without specificity is just an empty promise.
Many years ago, I worked with a big brand on its "innovation workstream" (this is probably the root cause of my aversion to the word). The workstream was divorced from the company's highly innovative product updates happening right across its portfolio. Our brief focused on more theoretical examples of innovation. Concepts in development; the technology behind the tech. In other words, the bits that no one cared about - they only wanted to get their hands on the exciting new products. It was a nightmare involving one highly successful event (marred by tears), one event cancelled by geopolitical instability (seriously) and very few tangible social media assets.
The concept of an "innovation workstream" crystallised through the 2010s into the slightly-less abstract idea of an "innovation lab". A group of people given a mandate within a business to put aside bureaucracy, corporate inertia and "the curse of knowledge" to come up with new ideas. Those ideas might come from a working group, a partnership, or a competition to bring in new ideas from budding start-ups (there are hundreds of those competitions). It's a compelling idea, particularly for businesses that struggle to encourage entrepreneurial thinking.
Over the past few years, the idea has fallen out of favour. Partly that's down to the effects of the pandemic and subsequent recessionary tightening. An innovation lab will be one of the first things to go in a business looking to trim its fat.
According to this report in ICT Works, the concept has particularly lost its shine in the humanitarian and development sectors. While the evidence that these labs have quietly closed may speak to organisations like UNICEF and USAID, the lessons are universal.
The first focuses on the "radical's dilemma"; a separate entity provides freedom of direction and thought. However, when it lacks connection to the broader business, it inevitably becomes disconnected and struggles to have any impact.
A connected second point is that innovation labs, like any good internal workstream, need a senior sponsor with enough clout to make them happen. If that senior sponsor leaves or changes role (an often inevitable change), the lab loses its foothold and becomes even more isolated.
My favourite point from the ICT Works report is the third - that innovation is a "magic concept". "An idea that has powerful appeal but which is also highly ambiguous in its meaning. Everyone can easily be a supporter of "innovation" – which allows lab initiatives to flourish – but it is not always clear to everyone what "innovation" actually means."
In other words, innovation without substance can be interpreted in many different ways, leading to the cardinal crime of misaligned expectations and getting lost in the mire of theoretical concepts.
Any successful drive towards being innovative, whether based around a lab, a "skunk works", or (god help us all) a "hackathon", needs to be built on substance. It needs to have a pathway for ideas to be implemented. It requires buy-in at a senior level across the organisation. And it needs, above all, it needs clarity of direction and purpose.
If you want an example of how innovation can be done right, look no further than this long read in the New Yorker about Taco Bell's innovation kitchen (sourced via Matt Muir's peerless Web Curios. Do yourself a favour and sign-up here, it's the best newsletter around IMO).
What's clear from an even cursory scan of the article is that the innovation kitchen has a clear pathway from development to restaurant. It deals with specific challenges set by the business. It carefully considers the difficulties of scaling new ideas and making them practical. Regardless of your feelings towards the brand (I myself have never eaten there), it's a rich case study on putting the proper substance into your innovation to generate tangible business value.
The big question I need to ask myself is, if Taco Bell's innovation kitchen came across my desk as a brief, would I do my best to get out of working on it? Is innovation, like the one brand I refuse ever to work on again, my kryptonite?
Given the amount of substance involved and the fact that the substance is cheese, I'd find it very hard to turn down. But I'll always be wary of innovation brief that is more hot air than hot cheese.