Have we forgotten how to come up with genuinely original solutions?
As we approach winter and its fascinating collection of diseases, I have a piece of advice for you: if you get a sneezing fit, don’t look it up on the Internet, because it would be cancer. Actually, if you look it up further, your illness might even be more interesting, like a rare strain of the South Amazonian Leprosy-Meningitis hybrid virus and you are either about to be quarantined or you are already dead.
The Internet, you see, has gradually become a source of anxiety rather than humanity’s great leap into interconnectivity, shared solutions and world peace. Google will tell you anything you want to hear from a third party, including the fact that your favourite charity may be involved in a vast conspiracy to transfer all of Africa’s oil underground to Cyprus and that Ebola is actually spread by left handed people.
What the Internet won’t tell you, however, is how to solve your client’s business problem. It may tell you how similar cases have been dealt with, but if you think you can copy-paste one as is, then you may as well hand over your agency to researchers and lawyers. Every business issue is a multi-layered equation in which addressing the core problem itself is but a small part of a far more complex jigsaw.
And yet it is bewildering how many people’s first reflex is to do exactly the above. In our rush to provide quick answers,
The Internet won’t tell you how to solve your client’s business problem
we often spend more time on the kind of conversations that happened earlier rather than analyse exactly what it is we are talking about. Most of the world’s greatest and most celebrated advertising case studies were not concocted by archivists but by genuine pioneers, people who spent their time going forensic on their client’s business and their consumers but most importantly looked for genuinely original solutions. Existing or past case studies are education pieces, and this is precisely where their value lies and how they should be used. In fact, as any doctor will tell you, using the search engine to identify a patient’s treatment is a pretty poor form of medical practice. In our industry, it is often a disease by itself.