The audacity of craft

The audacity of craft

Why great work is worth fighting for

By Nicholas Capanear, Senior VP, Executive Craft Director, Intouch Group

 

Imagine if James Cameron had made Titanic by drawing simple stick figures on white pages. Stick figure ship, stick figure captain, stick figure passengers, stick figures of Leo and Kate professing their love until stick Leo dies of stick hypothermia, stick figure old Kate tossing a stick Heart of the Ocean into the stick water. 

Would the story have still come across? Probably. Would it have still made $2.2 billion in sales worldwide and won 11 Oscars? Probably not. 

Why not? Because James Cameron chose his medium for maximum emotional impact, and he invested an enormous amount of artistic craft into that same goal. Scale models, CGI, a reconstruction of the ship, footage of the actual wreck, not to mention spectacular period costumes and brilliant acting and lots else – he pulled out every tool from the director’s toolbox to create something that would affect his audience. 

Why does this matter for health care marketing agencies?

Because artistic craft, the same skill James Cameron brought to bear in Titanic, is the secret ingredient to what we do. We don’t talk about it enough, and clients don’t talk about it enough either. But it’s the keystone on which everything else rests. No matter how great our ideas are, no matter how clever our messaging is, no matter how much customer insight we bring to the table, our campaigns live and sometimes die on how effectively they can draw in and inspire their audiences. And doing that takes craft. 

What is craft? It’s the road from idea to finished product. We all start with ideas for our work. But then we have to write them or draw them or paint them or shoot them. What will it look like, what will it sound like, how will it act, how will it behave out in the world, how and why will it impact its audience, what choices do you make along the way to make it so? Musicians do it, chefs, painters, film directors. Any expressional art form starts with an idea and then moves into the process of making the idea live in the world. And that’s craft. 

We all like to grumble about how ours is the most heavily regulated marketing space in the known universe. Fine. But legal and regulatory isn’t regulating your craft. To them a beautiful, inspiring, well-crafted image or video is no different than a boring one. Which means that pure artistic craft is a tool we can bring to bear without fear of it being shot down further on down the line for regulatory reasons. Because healthcare regulates everything except for the craft. And no client will ever say to you, “Don’t hire that photographer,” “Don’t use that illustrator,” “Don’t make it so damn pretty!”

Even so, it’s taken a while for craft to catch on in pharma. Twenty years ago, at the beginning of my career in health care marketing, I remember seeing great ideas, great thinking, that just went nowhere, because craft simply wasn’t a priority. The priority was don’t spend too much, keep it simple, get it out the door, and move on to the next campaign. For some agencies, that’s still the priority. 

Some, but certainly not all. Agencies doing it right, in my opinion, are able to grow their revenue and earn industry awards by—among other things— emphasizing craft. It’s not necessarily about having more or better talent than other shops, it’s about having the desire to do the best, most beautiful, most impactful work, from the top down, and empowering your people to make and stick to memorable and powerful artistic choices. If a brand doesn’t invest energy and effort into presenting itself as something of value, it can’t expect its audience to believe that it offers something of value.

So what goes into great craft? The first step, of course, is desire. The next step is control. In my view anyone who is aiming for a high-craft output has to control how the work gets produced, to be able to choose who is doing the photography or the camera work or the illustrations. So be wary of leaving the finding and selection of talent to others. As a creative person you know what you want – you know your vision. You should also know, if you’ve been looking, who out there has the capacity to help you achieve that vision. I’m always scouring the annuals and the award shows and anywhere else to see who out there is creating beautiful, distinctive, affecting work, people who have talent but are also going the extra mile to make it special. Those are the people I want working on my brands. They might not even be in the advertising world. Don’t ever forget that some of the greatest advertisements ever made were shot or photographed or drawn by people who’d never created an advertisement before. Great storytellers are great storytellers, wherever they might be found. 

Another necessity is a willingness to pump the brakes. It’s very easy for agencies to get into the grind of just pushing work out and moving on to the next thing as quickly as possible. As a creative it’s your obligation to occasionally stand athwart that inertia and yell, “Stop!” Speed and automation definitely have an important place in what we do, but when developing the primary components of your campaigns, the way that your audience will be seeing and remembering your brand for the next year or three or five, sometimes more time or more money or more engaged talent is more important than having it done in a week. So you as a creative must have the courage to slow things down sometimes.

And most clients will get that, if you are willing to fight for your vision. They may not see it at first, and they may not understand the importance of every tiny piece of the puzzle. But clients can see when something is powerful, when something is going to be effective, just as audiences could see that Titanic was powerful even without knowing all the details of the CGI and scale models and whatnot. They will know that powerful work means greater ROI, just as it did for James Cameron. 

Don’t think I’m not aware of the struggle. We have multibillion-dollar brands on our hands, being managed by companies who’ve made gigantic investments in them before they even show up at our doors. There is enormous pressure to do what worked last time, to avoid the unusual or the outlandish, to not take too many risks. Big pharma brands have every reason to be conservative, and great craft is the opposite of conservative. That’s the natural tension we all must face. But we need to have the courage to fight for what we believe is best for our brands. 

The good news is that it’s getting easier. Pharma brands are far more aware today of the value of craft than they were 20 or 10 or even five years ago, even if they might not know all the ins and outs. Brand managers are younger and less tradition-bound than ever, and they see beautifully crafted work and understand its power and aren’t afraid to say, “I want something like that.” People from the broader consumer space are appearing on pharma brand teams and in healthcare agencies, people with exceptional talent and vision and none of the inbred caution that folks in our industry used to have. As a creative leader in healthcare I am thrilled to be alive and working at this exact moment in time, because what we do has never been more important and the people working alongside me have never been more eager or more able to create great things. What comes next is up to us, up to whether we have the audacity to craft.