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Creativity Squared in association withPeople on LBB
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Creativity Squared: Pairing Product and Human Insights with Ben Williams and Dan Griffiths

11/01/2023
Advertising Agency
London, UK
311
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The senior creative team at Brave are firm believers in how the right insights are emotional, not just strategic

According to creativity researchers, there are four sides to creativity. Person (personality, habits, thoughts), product (the thing that results from creative activity), process (how you work), and press (environment factors, education and other external factors) all play a part. So, we figured, let’s follow the science to understand your art. Creativity Squared is a feature that aims to build a more well-rounded profile of creative people. 

Ben and Dan are a senior creative team with over eight years experience in the industry. After starting out at VCCP Blue, they moved onto GTB, M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment and can now be found at Brave. They know each other so well that they don’t just work together, they holiday together.


Person


We spend a fair bit of time locked in a booth listening to Lofi Girl and perusing the latest memes for inspiration. Some might say we come across as a little introverted for a senior team, but we like it that way. Shouting louder than the next person doesn’t make the work any better. And yes, we still get frustrated if the client doesn’t buy our idea, but in the end the free beer, working with like-minded people and the occasional ‘sholiday’ help remind us we have it pretty good. 

As a creative team, it’s helpful to have two different ways of looking at things. Ben (that’s me) can sometimes fall into the sickeningly, optimistic dreamer camp, whereas Dan often takes the cynical, realist approach. To be honest, it helps us both stay rooted in reality and manage expectations.

We just googled it and the mind isn’t actually a muscle – it’s an organ apparently – but it certainly can be trained like one. You just need to look back to some of the awful ideas we had back in the day and how it often felt like you were banging your head against a reinforced brick wall. Now it’s only as painful as getting that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. A definite improvement. So, there is hope for the creatively challenged out there. 

Personality is fluid and is relative to where you are. Sure, we’re quite the introverted pair, but if we’re presenting an idea we think is banging, then we up our excitement levels. I 
mean we’re not talking Francis Bourgeois seeing a class 33 tear through Stockport levels of excitement, but you get the idea. 

Most creativity comes from chaos and being ‘organised’ isn’t ‘cool’ and the key to great. Saying that, we don’t know whether it’s because we’ve just hit 30 and are feeling the need to slow down a bit (not talking pipe and slippers here) but we’ve found some solace in structure. My new morning routine has given me some fresh vigour in the concepting department. Whereas Dan’s fastidiousness for formatting decks helps ideas sing. 

It’s cliché, but we both dabble in extracurricular creative outlets. 
We don’t believe it’s essential to developing better creative ‘stuff’, but we do think it’s crucial to surviving in this industry. Here’s why; when you’re working on so many campaigns and concepts that are devoured by account teams, clients and CDs it can be tough to rear your head for the next ‘this is the biggest opportunity you’ll ever have!’ briefing. So, the creative ‘stuff’ we do outside of work is our outlet for that. Because the only people making it better (or occasionally worse) are us. 


Product


With enough money, anything can be covered in glitter (Elon Musk and Twitter aside). 
But if you take money out of the equation, we’re firm believers of insight-led work. And that’s not just product truths crafted by a planner. It’s those ideas that pair the product insight perfectly with a human insight. Because those ideas stir something. They involuntarily make you feel, because, to put it simply, they’re relatable and tap into your own experiences. So even if the production budget has been put together by Kwasi Kwarteng, it can’t detract from the emotional impact a well paired insight delivers. 

Our media has changed. Swipe-away socials with shorter dwell time mean we can’t stick to the tried and tested methods, which had the luxury of time to tell a brand’s story. Sure, this can lead to more visually striking work, which is great for designers, but often lacks that juicy emotional hook we all stare at our creative partner’s trainers for hours on end for. However, that doesn’t mean the need for emotionally insightful work has gone, it just means we need to think of smarter ways around it.

Another cliché, but some of our best work is the stuff that never got to see the light of day. But from the work that has, our adidas 4D work comes to mind. Not only is adidas a brand that makes the repressed student team in us giggle excitedly, but we successfully helped them avoid the pitfalls of an influencer-led campaign, and produced a set of slick films that educated the audience on a particularly drab product feature in a relatable and engaging way. I just said relatable and engaging didn’t I…

Our platforms have changed, yet for the most part, the traditional ad formula hasn’t. We can’t simply stick 30” films onto socials and expect to have the same impact, agencies and brands need to realise the strength in unconventional media and find new places to reach our audience. Heinz’s ‘Hidden Spots’ campaign is a great example – they added value to CoD Warzone by finding all the best spots to hide, whilst you could snack on some tasty beans. Genius! Ultimately, it comes down to bravery – ironic to say as a creative working at Brave, I know. But those brands and agencies that manage to delve into the unknown first will flourish.


Process


Usually, about halfway through the brief, I (Ben) start daydreaming about overly ambitious and off-brief solutions, before chewing Dan’s ear off for 20 minutes afterwards. Then once the silly stuff is out of the way, we really start to look properly at the problem, familiarising ourselves with the brand (a creative team that does research. I know, go figure) and the bit that needs cracking. The overnight test - when you have time for it - works wonders too. 

A particularly useful tool is Thesaurus.com – great for hiding the fact that you were terrible at English, and fully intended on being an art director until you found out your creative partner is better than you at Photoshop. Dan loves a bit of Behance too.

One technique that we’ve tried that just didn’t gel with is mind mapping. WTAF?! And please never invite us to a group brainstorm. 

Every creative has a bottom drawer, so it’s inevitable you’ll have a starting point even before you begin to scour lovetheworkmore.com for some inspo.

We like working as just the two of us for as long as possible, but then after a couple of rounds, a good collab always helps craft the finer details – as long as it's not a brainstorm…

When it comes to the hard bits of a project, when we’re stumped, we stop. When you’re constantly thinking, you only go in one direction. If you take a break, move onto another project and come back to it later, it’s easier to turn around and explore somewhere else. 

When it comes to knowing when a piece of work is done, the typical response would be 'it's never done'. But we all know it's when your mum messages you saying she saw it scrolling through her ‘Facebooks’ account.


Press


I’m (Ben) from up north and was pretty good with a pencil back in the day. I also used to put together ‘Art Attack’ style dioramas with the piles of dirty clothes left on my bedroom floor. My mum says Neil Buchanan has a lot to answer for… Dan’s from Bristol and didn’t want to work with his dad in insurance. Fair.

We’re not really  sure how we honed our craft… life?  Hearing the word ‘no’ a lot helped too.

Having a creative outlet outside of work helps satisfy those creative itches you can’t reach when clients have tied your hands with brand guidelines and gagged you with an oversized logo. That being said, an early morning deadline can squeeze those creative juices into full flow, don’t tell the account team that though. 

Advice we’d give to clients looking to get the best out of the teams and agencies they worked with would be: Try to simplify what you want to say – asking for 10 different message points in one ad is never going to end well. The other big thing is for clients to be open to proactive projects that agencies put forward. The best campaigns start this way. We’d bet Dan’s designer trainer collection that Burger King’s ‘Mouldy Whopper’ wasn’t a real brief.

A big part of what we’ve valued here at Brave is the relationship between creative and design. We all sit together, so the work on screens is seen by all. It results in art direction that’s properly pondered, and hierarchy is kept to a bare minimum. 


Credits