This one's just for planners and serious adgeeks. Sorry.
In his post about Colin Drummond's speech at this year's American account planning conference, Russell Davies raises some interesting points about post-rationalisation.
Post-rationalisation does get a bad name, particularly when it's used to justify ineffective creative work. I'll argue, however, that it's the expedience and cynicism of making something defective appear not so - not the act of post-rationalisation itself - that is the problem.
I'm going to go one step further and say that post-rationalisation should be a part of the conversation between creative work and strategy. It's not just acceptable, it's vital.
I've seen the other end of the spectrum: planners who refuse to engage creatives when the work doesn't match the brief. They don't even bother looking at the work to see what's working; instead, you'll hear hard-line criticism: "it's off-brief" or "we need another route".
If there's time, post-rationalisation should happen more than once in creative development. The brief, ideally, should be thwarted by a startling creative leap, followed by strategic sharpening that should change the direction of the creative. There's a military maxim - "no plan survives battle" - and similarly, no brief should survive creative development.
I'm convinced that agencies that create great work find the time for these conversational detours. That time is found when people working there feel strongly enough about doing what's right to spend late hours on the account, collaborating, disagreeing, and developing; the client and agency budget extra time in for chaos; or, more than likely, a combination of both of these.
Last week on a pitch, the potential client wanted a strategic summary of the creative work. The urge would have been to e-mail the summary directly to the client without creative review and then it really would have been the cynical and expedient sort of post-rationalisation that everyone hates.
We started by taking a brief from the creative teams, and then a junior planner and I took our notes and divided the ideas between us, trying to find what was best about each.
If you've ever tried to do this sort of thing, you'll know it's a bit like tracing perspective lines over a Renaissance painting; you might reveal a structure that you hadn't seen before, or indeed a structure that the creative teams themselves hadn't seen before. (OK, not a painting by a Renaissance master, maybe, but at least one of the poorly executed ones where you can still see the perspective lines.)
When the summaries were done, they were sent back to the studio, where they sparked some more creative changes, and only then did the whole thing get produced into a slick booklet for the client.
In the end, the answer isn't always what was expected, but isn't that the reason clients hire us? Otherwise they could create a more predictable business process in-house that could be cost-managed better.
And if we're not here to get involved with creative work, then aren't we just brief-writing monkeys? On those days when things are bad, I often think about dividing a dartboard radially into the Seven Strategies so that briefs could write themselves, leaving more time for blogging, ummm, I mean tracking study analyses.
