(this is the punchline.. a photo from Kevin Lim.  Keep reading below for the monologue.)

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to grad students about the age-old creative topic:

..”The Brief”.
A conversational debate that probably started a week into the dawn of account planning, somewhere between the second and third martini.

A big part of this conversation centered around the inadequacy of a creative brief to inspire creative interactions, inability to help multi-disciplinary teams snap media component parts together in meaningful ways, or move our industry folks towards towards value creation and empathy of  “the journey” people follow in a brand interaction.   Not easy stuff.. not that planning has ever been easy, but definitely more complex than “positioning”.  And unfortunately there’s a common belief that positioning, messaging, etc will get the inspiration job done.

On a parallel path, I had the opportunity to meet someone brilliantly smart last week.  She specializes in sales consulting, helping large sales orgs realize the disconnect they have with their customers, realizing customers needs through self discovered empathy and taking organizations through a process of personalizing how to ask the right questions to understand what value you can provide to customers.  Then.. she puts this through the lens of “what are the underlying beliefs/assumptions of the company culture?”, “how does the organization system work in ways that inherently impedes a company from selling.. to move to value creation culture?”  On the surface.. this seems fairly straight forward in the organizational behavior, marketing-sales world.  ….BUT, her approach is much deeper and applies to so many things going in on our social, technology and capitalism fueled culture.  And it’s huge.

So what does this have to do with students, creative briefs or creative marketing.  Two simple truths.

1) If the creative brief is supposed to be the inspiration for effective communication it has to based on beliefs.  Things like a “big idea” will attract viewers and change perception.  That short broadcast narratives will inspire people to react.  That repetition of  a message will drive persuasion.  Or more important, that anyone really gives a sh*t about your advertising because they’re a captive audience.  But I suppose that’s all old news.. you’ve heard that rant before.  Yet.. most agencys comms folks are still holding onto these beliefs.  These beliefs have been or are in the midst of being picked apart to oblivion, but still remain in most marketing/organization cultures.

2) The creative brief is supposed to be a starting point into the system of how we build communications, to then disseminate into a social ecosytem in which we release our work.  But, our system of manufacturing “ideas” does not align with the value we need to create for people anymore… and the understanding the industry has of the new system that (we) the customer works within is totally lacking.

Tonight Faris outlined eloquently the underpinnings of what’s going on and why the system of communication and information transfer has, and will continue to change enormously.  … And figuring it’s all true, we need to start addressing how to change our belief systems, our creative thinking styles and “manufacturing” process first.  We need to do so with a better understanding of how our beliefs and systems are disconnected to the beliefs and ecosytems of real people.  Not segments, not consumers or faceless customers, but real people in real time.

That’s where a SYSTEMS PLAN, driven off of new communication systems theory will drive value, inspiration and create interactions.  I’d not thought about it in these terms before, but I do know my planning output looks a hell alot more like a systems plan than a positioning statement.

Exhibit A:

(fyi.. I have no freakin clue what this diagram means, but I do know it’s a systems schematic, and looks like some of the connections planning work I’ve outlined in the past.  Check out more detailed geekery.. a “a Nationwide Surface Transportation Weather Observing and Forecasting System” here.)

Granted there’s not a lot of emotion or inspiration built into the information flow chart above.. but there can be.  And inherently there’s more context now to where information is going, to whom and where he points of interaction are to take advantage of.  More than how we express it, let’s look at the philosophy and beliefs behind this systems design, systems strategy.

Exhibit B: Systems Engineering Definition & Systems Theory

“Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem.  Systems Engineering integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation. Systems Engineering considers both the business and the technical needs of all customers with the goal of providing a quality product that meets the user needs.” from the International Council on Systems Engineering.

“Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field of science and the study of the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or society, or any electro-mechanical or informational artifact. Systems theory first originated in biology in the 1920s out of the need to explain the interrelatedness of organisms in ecosystems. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to the science of systems that resulted from Bertalanffy‘s General System Theory (GST), among others, in initiating what became a project of systems research and practice. (from Wikipedia)”

(now this sounds a little bit more productive than positioning, ad messaging or media planning in a socially connected web ecosystem eh?)

God knows we don’t need another buzzword, discipline or crackpot process — but we definetly need something more than advertising and account planning strategy.  If we take a crack at thinking more like social scientists, engineers and systems designers before we write the next viral video brief, “integrated marketing”, or information architecture plan we might create more inventive and meaningful comms.  And if we can step back and challenge our own conventional beliefs and rebuild the systems we work within our work will be alot more fun.