Sir John Hegarty on the creative merits of constraints

Sir John Hegarty: There’s that wonderful line, which is “give me the freedom of a tight brief”, which I’ve always liked. Obviously, the constraints are there for very practical reasons, it might be budget, it might be media, it might be timeline, it might be all kinds of things. I’ve always found constraints are fundamentally important. That’s where you start. But actually, for me, great briefs are briefs that have ambition woven into it. The idea that we can go further. I think that opens up creative opportunities and creative thinking in a way that is productive and encourages the industry to imagine a better future.

Sir John Hegarty: We all put constraints in there – they’re often self-imposed – so the sense of complete freedom is kind of rare in a way. I remember the documentary on The Beatles, the Peter Jackson one, where you saw them come in and start working. There was a sense of freedom, in that they were coming together and one had a little tune or somebody else had another. But if you remember, that documentary was about [the fact] they had to come up with an album in a month’s time. They set themselves that task. So they had put constraints on their creativity. I often watch that and think, why did they do that? They didn’t need to do that – they have all these famous albums; they were the Beatles – but they did.

The wonderful thing about deadlines and about constraints is it forces the creative process into reacting. Without those, you kind of go, “well, what shall I do? I don’t know. I’ll think about it tomorrow”, as opposed to, “no, I’ve got to do something”. But as I say, what you want within that is ambition to go beyond.

My worry is about constraining as opposed to constraints. [That someone is saying] “don’t go beyond”. I think the idea of a brief is to solve a problem, but you might come up with something completely different and profound that solves that problem in a way we would have never thought of.

Sir John Hegarty: I suppose actually Flat Eric [for Levi’s] is a wonderful example of that, where we’d been running all these ads where you had a singular hero, and it was felt that perhaps what we should have is a duo. Maybe it could be about relationships, rather than that single macho character that dominates the screen. So that was part of the brief.

I remember when we were talking about it, we thought, well, we could very easily and very simply [use] Kerouac’s On the Road as an example of what could work, and within that book, his hero wears Levi’s, so there was a link. We used that as a basis for coming up with a relationship, but we made one of the characters a fluffy yellow puppet to take it beyond just a simple relationship. It was one of those where I had to go back three times to explain it to the client, because they just didn’t get it. It completely threw them. Eventually, to their great credit, they did buy the idea, and it was hugely successful. That’s a wonderful example of how you go beyond in some shape or form, where you capture the imagination and change the way people feel or think.

Sir John Hegarty: I think a huge amount of our work was part of that. It was about changing perceptions of a brand, from Audi to Whitbread, when they were making beer; Boddingtons; Levi’s, obviously; K Shoes; Lynx. Virtually everything we did was about changing perception.

I always like to use Oatly as an example of a brand that changed the way it was perceived and dominated the market. Milk made for humans, not cows. That wasn’t our work, but it’s a wonderful example of how they changed the way [people] approached that particular market. It became a brand leader.

By and large, when you win a new piece of business, it’s because a client is unhappy with the direction they’re going in and your job is to change the perception of that brand or that product in some shape or form. You look at every piece of work we did, the success of it was: you thought of it like this, now think of it in this way. Johnnie Walker “keep walking” is a wonderful example of that, of changing the way people viewed a whisky, from strategy through to execution and positioning.

Sir John Hegarty: I think it’s a number of factors, actually, and I don’t think you can ever put it down to one thing. As I’ve said, it’s about ambition. It’s about wanting to be noticed, the power of difference. It’s about enthusiasm. You can feel brands that are enthusiastic, that want to change things and have a cause behind them that they’re trying to communicate. That, I think, is fundamentally important. You can’t drag a brand to do that. You can’t drag a company to behave like that. They’ve got to want to behave like that.

If you look back at the great work that’s been done, all of it was in a way changing the way a market was perceived, right back to the famous VW advertising in the 60s. They were saying to think small, not big. Mike Cessario, the guy who started Liquid Death, is selling water but it just changes the way you look at water. That’s about an ambition to say, I’m not going to treat it the way it’s been treated before, and therefore [he] comes up with this idea of calling it Liquid Death and brazenly creates this hugely successful brand.

Thinking about your brand as a movement, not just as a brand, is fundamentally important. And then think like a movement. What does the movement do? What are you against? What are you for? What are you trying to change? How do people respond to what you’re doing? That’s where success lies.