Creative
briefing and The Sistine Chapel – Damian O’Malley (and 2 tributes)
 Every time
there's a talk on writing a creative brief this story comes up. You can find
it in the APG blue book which is out of print. So people cobble things from
memory or work from photocopies. I even heard this story in the Middle East
attributed to someone else. This month I was requested to locate it for a
planning get together in Beijing of all places. Well it is a classic.
And Damian
O'Malley
has
given
me permission
to post it. Apparently everybody asks him where he got it from. And as he
said almost plaintively - It was my idea. I made it up! So enjoy... and remember
to give the correct attribution in future! The
brief for the Sistine Chapel - how to stop Michaelangelo hitting the roof.....
Once
you have a proposition you should try to express it in a way which will propel
your creative team towards a solution. A story will help
illustrate
what we mean.
You are no doubt
familiar with the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They are
one of the
greatest works of art of all time painted by the
Renaissance genius Michelangelo. We can imagine the briefs he might have been
given for this work by his client, Pope Julius II, or the Pope’s account
man, Cardinal Alidosi.
(a) ‘Please
paint
the ceiling’
There is no doubt that this is what Michelangelo was being asked to do but
this brief gives him no hints as too what the solution to the request might
be. It leaves all the decisions and thinking to the artist before be can put
paint to plaster.
b) ‘Please
paint
the ceiling using red green and yellow paint’
This brief is worse. Not only does it not tell him what to paint it gives
him a number of restrictions without justification; restrictions which will
inevitably prove irksome and which will distract him from his main task.
 (c) ‘We
have got terrible problems with damp and cracks in the ceiling and we would
be ever
so grateful if you could just cover it up for us’
This is much worse. It still does not tell him what to do and it gives him
irrelevant and depressing information which implies that no one is interested
in what he paints because it will not be long before the ceiling falls in anyway.
How much effort is he likely to put into it?
(d) ‘Please
paint biblical scenes on the ceiling incorporating some or all of the following:
God, Adam, Angels, Cupids devils and saints’
Better: now they are beginning to give Michelangelo a steer. They have not
given him the full picture yet (if you will pardon the pun) but at least he
know the important elements. This is the sort of brief that most of us would
have given. It contains everything the creative needs to know but it does not
go that step beyond towards and idea towards a solution.
Here is the brief
which
Michelangelo was actually given more or less…
‘Please paint our ceiling for the greater glory of God and as an inspiration
and lesson to his people. Frescoes which depict the creation of the world,
the Fall, mankinds’s degradation by sin, the divine wrath of the deluge
and the preservation of Noah and his family.’
Now he knows
what to do – and is inspired by the importance of the project – he
can devote his attention to executing the detail of the brief in the best way
he knows.
Words are little bombs: the right ones can explode inside us demanding an
original and exciting solution instead of a mediocre pedestrian one.
Always work very, very hard to find the right proposition and then even harder
to find the words which express it in the least ambiguous and most exciting
way.
Extract from Creative Briefing chapter in How to Plan Advertising - the Blue
Book published by the APG in 1987 and currently out of print. |
Planning Lexicon
The
Stark take 
A request came for a a planning summit in Beijing of all
places in 2006. I suggested they do a local variant as a kind of tribute. And Oliver
Cartwright obliged.