The subject was tackled in the opening presentation, about the advantages of having constraints by marketing consultant and author Adam Morgan, and came up again throughout the morning in various insights from the other speakers.
Morgan argued that people could improve as leaders and thinkers by "getting better at imposing constraints on ourselves and our teams".
He backed his argument by, among other things, playing a video clip of W+K co-founder Dan Wieden admitting that when the agency gave its creative teams carte blanche on a certain Nike project "it was a disaster … and it all added up to nothing".
However, Morgan said, it is important to go further than thinking that people only need constraints to lead them to better outcomes. They also need ambition.
He outlined the importance of what he calls in his new book, A Beautiful Constraint, ‘propelling questions’, such as Audi’s racing team asking themselves "How do we win the Le Mans race with a car that is no faster than anyone else’s?" or President Obama setting the US the challenge of fitting 10 years’ worth of research into finding a cure for cancer in five years.
A propelling question forces people away from patterns and data they normally rely on, he claimed.
The following session featured its own propelling question: What does it mean to be a 21st century brand? This was the title of this year’s IPA dissertation and Thinkbox invited three of the students (Scott Brennan from MEC, John Scott from Drum and Susanna Cousins from MEC) to present their papers.
Brennan asked himself what he would need to build a 21st century brand and concluded that no one genius could do so. It requires a team of people and the right work environment, a subject he paid particular attention to. He argued for the importance of the physical locations in which teams behind Barcelona FC, Pixar, the Manhattan Project and W+K’s famed ‘Cog’ ad for Honda produced their work, and advised people working on new briefs "to think practically about physical space and its consistency".
Cousins’ paper was called ‘Learning from the quiet ones’ and argued there are extroverted brands (who direct their focus and energy outwards) and introverted brands (who direct inwards), and that social media has led the former to display almost ADHD-like behaviour, such as wading into big stories about celebrity deaths with no tact. She advised that some brands might want to aim more for the qualities she listed in introverted brands: a strong self-concept, autonomy of thought and action, and high degrees of control and consistency of communication.
It was praised by Mark Earls, the director of Herd Consultancy, as a "wonderful paper" that taught us that "shouting, shouting, shouting is not advertising" and reminded us the brands we most admire "tend not to get distracted by the outside world". Earls was on a panel to discuss the papers with Nationwide CMO Sara Bennison and OMD UK chief strategy officer Rian Shah.
Focus and constraint versus the modern unbounded world of social media and ‘content’ cropped up again in the final session, featuring creative chiefs Kate Stanners and Peter Souter in conversation with Thinkbox chair Tess Alps around examples of TV ads they felt worked well.
"There is pressure these days to make a lot of stuff," said Stanners, the global chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi. "Just because you can doesn’t mean you should."
Stanners and Souter, the chairman and chief creative officer of TBWA, picked a number of old (and new) ‘constrained’ 30 and 60-second TV ads to showcase.
However, they also held up more recent work in longer-form film, integrated campaigns and marketing around real-world moments.
Souter offered a film shot to document Adidas’ experiential stunt of opening a basketball shoe store fronted by professional player Derek Rose, in which customers had to jump up high to get their shoes, while Stanners talked through Pampers’ #EveryBaby film following the births of babies on the same day as the Royal Family’s Princess Charlotte in 2015, which was released to television news the same day.
And Souter possibly put his finger on another constraint when he explained why it was that he saw 10 great ads in single night of watching TV in the US recently.
"Clients over there have realised the only way they will get something seen is if it’s shared. I think it’s coming here too. It has to be funnier than the comedy shows, more newsworthy than the news and more dramatic than the dramas."