Damon Stapleton: That’s not a knife. That’s a creative team.
A blog by Damon Stapleton, Chief Creative Officer, Droga5 ANZ
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh
Advertising is a strange place at the moment. Much is changing and will probably continue to do so. A lot of fear and concern. Many questions and uncertainty. So, to cheer us all up I thought I would start to celebrate the ingredients that have made advertising great. One of those ingredients is ‘the team’. The creative team. Bill Bernbach put copywriters and art directors together in the 60’s and that changed advertising forever.
But it also had another strange unintended effect. It gave creatives a kind and gentle first audience. Your partner. In a great creative team you don’t have a critic but a collaborator. I think this changed advertising more than we will ever know. In those hard, very silent meetings, you had at least one person laughing at your script. The value of the team is that it keeps ideas alive a little longer. You can come up with stuff you couldn’t come up with individually. You get confidence to give things a crack. And on a good day you genuinely believe you can achieve anything. Belief. Something many think is not vital. Until of course they don’t have it. And then your world is paralysed. You have all the work but you still don’t know what to do.
So, yes things are changing. But for a brief moment let’s acknowledge the power and mystery of what truly great creative teams have created. If you have ever worked with any you will know how astonishing they can be.
While I was thinking about this I started watching a documentary about the making of a very famous movie on the plane. I didn’t know anything about this particular film but sometimes you get lucky. I don’t think I could have found a better example of the power of a creative team and what belief can do.
In 1986, three amateurs made a film in the Australian outback.
The director Peter Faiman had never directed a film. The writers John Cornell and Paul Hogan had never written a movie. Paul Hogan had also never acted in one. But John Cornell and Paul Hogan believed in each other. This project was based purely on friendship and trust.
The budget for this independent film? $8 million Aussie dollars. Much of this came from mom and pop investors in Australia who also believed.
The return? $370 million US. Second only to Top Gun in the USA in 1986.
The movie was Crocodile Dundee.
By the rules of the industry, it should have failed. But it didn’t. And the reason is brutally simple: two people believed in each other enough to try. And that sentence might be the most important sentence I have ever written. In a world of data and certainty, trying, is one of the most important and underrated qualities of a creative team. They go where others will not. And that’s how you do something new.
It’s also what makes ideas live. Not process. Not pedigree. Not 100 page decks. Relationships. Trust. That tiny flicker of “I see what you see” when the rest of the room is rolling their eyes. And believe me that moment is everything. When one person says I will go with you. It can change everything.
Every piece of great work or idea in advertising is born the same way. It starts with a conversation that doesn’t make sense to anyone else. It lives because one creative pushes and another protects. It gets made because enough people believe in it. But that journey begins with two creatives believing in it and each other first. The beginning is everything.
Ideas are fragile. They get killed by fear, by compromise and by ego and politics. The only thing that gets them through the storm is people who believe enough to risk looking stupid. Those creative teams that are willing to be stunt doubles for their ideas.
That’s why people will always matter in this business. Because they have belief.
And belief lets you get conquer fear. It lets you go to places you didn’t know you could. Or do things that go against conventional wisdom. It lets you do what has never been done. New things, like making one of the biggest movies in the world with the first film script you have ever written.
It doesn’t make sense.
Until it does.