DON Draper reclines on his soft pad office chair, knocks back a large Canadian Club and takes a long drag on a smouldering Lucky Strike.
Then – ‘Eureka!’ – ideas for revolutionary advertising campaigns for Heinz and General Motors pop into his head simultaneously and he smiles, knowing he can take the rest of the week off.
If only it was that simple.
Mad Men might make great television, and it is compulsive viewing for millions, but it’s far removed from reality and that creates a problem for people like me who work in the creative design industry.
Few will imagine that that the show’s image of sharp-suited hedonism, interrupted only by the occasional flash of creative brilliance, reflects what goes on in the real world.
But it does play into a growing popular belief that brand building and creative design are somehow ‘lesser disciplines’ than the ‘big boys’ of law, business development and financial planning.
While instinct and inspiration continue to play a large part in any design solution – that’s what you pay a great agency for – today’s ‘Mad Men’ are as much businessmen as ‘creatives’, focusing heavily on market research, hard-headed business planning and return-on-investment to ensure the best chances of success for any advertising or branding campaign.
With the UK economy facing the prospect of a triple-dip recession, we can all agree that the only way out of the doldrums is for businesses, large and small, to generate growth by continuing to invest and take risks on new products and services.
Peculiarly, it is in times of hardship that the advertising and creative design industries do well as companies seek to achieve whatever marginal benefit they can over their competitors.
The problem comes when clients base their expectations on myths, including those perpetrated by Mad Men, that ‘quick ideas’ will produce the same returns as properly-researched and considered campaigns.
We’re often approached about ‘quick ideas’ as the potential client feels that this will somehow be ‘cheaper’. They have little or no understanding that, while an idea can only take a second to become clear, it’s the weeks and months of preparation and understanding that make that second truly relevant and valuable.
Another scourge of creative design has been the popularisation of the Apple Mac which has created one of the lowest barriers of entry to any industry. For £700, anyone can set themselves up as a designer, throwing together a myriad of typefaces, logos, colours, photographs and layout templates.
There are 10,000 registered design consultancies in the UK but only 64 have been awarded Design Effectiveness Awards this year – 16 of them Gold – by the Design Business Association, gatekeeper of standards for the industry.
The modern design consultancy has evolved and matured into a strategic, thinking, problem solver, employing a range of disciplines including design, marketing, planning and digital specialism.
Like other professionally-recognised practitioners, such as legal and accountancy firms, design consultancies prove their impact when their services are properly integrated into a client’s business.
In autumn 2009, the Design Council conducted its second comprehensive survey of the UK design industry – of more than 2,200 design businesses, including in-house design teams, design consultancies and freelance designers.
It found that, during the previous three years, 56 per cent of design businesses had seen their client base grow while business had remained the same for a further 22 per cent. Some 93 per cent of design businesses did work for overseas clients.
The Design in Britain Review, a Government-commissioned study in 2004-05, tracked a group of UK-quoted companies, identified as effective users of design, over a ten-year period.
It found that this group of companies outperformed the FTSE 100 by 200 per cent. The more successful a business, the more likely it was to use design to drive competitiveness, the study found.
Of the companies that launched a new product or service in the period, 67 per cent saw design as integral. Some 45 per cent of companies that didn’t use design competed mainly on price, while where design was significant, only 21 per cent competed on price.
Design was the second most important ingredient of success for rapidly-growing businesses and the seventh most important for companies overall. Some 57 per cent of companies that invested in design had no accounting mechanism to measure their return on investment.
Two of our most effective recent campaigns included designing new packaging for Angostura 1824 Rum, a simple business change that helped lead to an immediate 66 per cent increase in sales and helped the product to outperform the market by 54 per cent. A global rebrand of AEG Powertools contributed towards a 54 per cent increase in sales volume and helped its products to outperform the market by 37 per cent in launch year.
So, when buying design, in a downturn or otherwise, what should you be looking for?
If you were purchasing legal or financial services, you would look for personal referrals, you might approach the professional or governing body for a recommendation, seek to establish a history of success in solving your particular problem and ask for pertinent case studies to back up any claim.
So why should buying creative services be any different? Instead of pitching for ideas, clients would do better to look for proof of expertise. Quantity doesn’t mean quality. When you get to the proposal stage, look for one thought-through idea that the agency really believes in.
Creative doesn’t mean unprofessional. Anything in any proposal or presentation should be justifiable, from typefaces and colours to straplines and language. Every element should have good, sound reasoning behind it.
Finally, look to set criteria and ideally achievable targets against which any activity can be measured.
Good design thinking is always driven by the ‘end game’. What does the client want to achieve? Good work is always evaluated and measured against that end goal. Too few designers ask why, they just do.
Don Draper and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce will continue to keep us glued to our screens but they shouldn’t influence what goes on in our industry. That would be madness.
Keith Forbes is creative director of Glasgow-based Good Creative and a former board member of the Design Business Association.
