Last week, I wrote up a superb campaign from Mischief @ No Fixed Address. It was a campaign for Jay-Z’s top-end cannabis brand. A difficult brief one can assume. Mischief’s solution is strikingly simple. Ingeniously compelling. Brilliantly copy-led. (When did the industry forget about the power of words? And what a shame it did?)
Not a one-off by the agency. Not at all.
The agency is less than one year old. To have both the confidence and the clout to produce hit after hit is remarkable. I wanted to know what its secret is. So I asked.
Here is executive creative director, Kevin Mulroy’s answer:
My old friends at The Stable wanted someone to write an op-ed on the secret ingredients of great advertising. When Greg Hahn was busy, they got me. So I’ll let you in on a little secret: I have no idea.
What I do have are guidelines. Years of trial and error. The deep fear of sucking. The last one helps a lot.
I once heard someone describe breaking into Hollywood as a massive medieval turret you feel around until one stone retracts and opens a door that never opens again. Sometimes finding great ideas feels like that.
But the more you do it the less it feels like that. Especially if you follow these rules that always sometimes work depending on the situation no matter what usually.
The first step is getting a strategist who is basically a creative that does all the homework and writes a brief that makes your job a Manute Bol dunk. That’s a key ingredient. Ours is Jeff McCrory, so you can’t have him.
The second step is working with people who are better than you. It should be hard to get ideas through to the client because someone is being very hard on the ideas. It sucks, but it makes you way better. Ours is Greg Hahn. You’ll have to find your own.
The third step is working with people you really, really trust, because no matter where you are in your career, the process of creativity is sloppy, chaotic, scary, and most importantly, iterative. So you have to trust that it’s going to get there, whether it’s 48, 24, 12, or 2 hours before a meeting. Mine are Bianca Guimaraes and Kerry McKibbin. Back off.
Hey that’s great, I hear you saying. I don’t have any of those things. Thanks for nothing.
Ok fine.
The formula at Mischief is far from a secret. It goes like this: 1. What are we trying to say? 2. What’s the most interesting way to say it? That’s our whole job, in that order, never the other way around.
We spend the vast majority of our time on the what are we trying to say part. What is the actual problem? What is the insight? I know that can sound like a groany advertising buzzword, but it just means: 1. What is a true or recognisable thing about the brand or the people who use it? 2. Did I just make up some bullshit to sell a cool execution? Go back to 1.
I always really liked the original, Don’t get mad, get E*trade, campaign, because it’s such a simple insight: The world is full of rich idiots. Yes. Even a rich idiot would agree with that.
Examples from our own work? People are comforted by comfort food in uncomfortable times. The idea? Send Noods.
Which leads me to my last point. Figure out the PR headline first. This is more productive way to say: why does anyone care? Which is a nicer way of saying nobody cares. A great director or DP can’t make people care about a boring or stock idea. Trust me, I’ve tried. There has to be something in the work that makes a morning news anchor say, “this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” or makes someone on Twitter call you a paedophile.
Until then, keep going.
