UK users

A chatty and entertaining consideration of the skills required to produce great ads, with plenty of illustrative examples, mostly taken from the UK market. Gettins is currently creative director of Euro RSCG London, and his approach is grounded firmly in the everyday realities of agency life. Rather than taking upon himself the role of a guru, Gettins' book is about the real process of creating ads, a far more mundane process than many in the business are prepared to admit to outsiders. Indeed he tackles the problems inherent in Big Advertising Concepts upfront, referring to those situations with which most advertising industry employees are familiar: the occasional appearance of a network's global chairman "who will gather everyone in the organization together in a conference venue and badger them with talk of rule breaking, anarchy and a constant will to challenge the world order". (He could mean you, Jean-Marie Dru.) 

"But after the downward jet of hot air we are all back on the cold streets and returning to the quotidian dilemmas of creating advertising ideas, a process that is, as anyone who contributes will testify, actually conducted in straightforward problem-solving language, as one would use when designing a washing machine or planning an ascent of a mountain." 

As a result, Gettins offers no Big Concepts himself. Indeed some readers exploring this book in the search for a magical key that will unlock for them a career in advertising may be disappointed by the simplicity of his advice. Gettins offers a sensible and well-argued analysis of the eight key rules to creating great ads. Know your target market. Do research. Answer the brief. Be relevant. Be objective. Keep it simple. Know your medium. Be ambitious. Hardly rocket science, is it? 

The point, of course, is that great advertising creativity, for the vast majority of those who practise it, does not come from a sudden startling revelation or the mystical knowledge of a secret skill. It comes from plain old hard work. "The idea of rewriting something over and over, even the very notion of stopping in mid flow to spend 10 seconds trying to find a better word may seem wasteful. That's because it is. Waste, in copywriting, is a fuel. When friends tell me they like an ad of mine, they seem to think I'm a very clever person. [But if, later,] I let drop that I wrote over a hundred scripts for a particular brief, with every word and visual carefully thought out, they look at me with something approaching disgust."

Incidentally, the book is almost worth buying for the foreword alone, supplied by Euro RSCG's head of creativity Gerry Moira. He points out how outmoded the title copywriter is nowadays, and suggests a more appropriate title would be "concepteur" if it didn't sound so "hopelessly French and pretentious". He also offers a brilliantly succinct categorisation of the three remaining types of word-dependent TV advertising in an age increasingly dominated by post-production trickery, MTV cliché and minimalist cool. He describes them as the Persuasion Model ("from advertising's Jurassic period" - 30 seconds of rational argument), the Corporate Philosopher (a US native, suggesting "let's talk about us"), and above all the British favourite, the comic Sponsored Sketch, "the preferred form for most UK copywriters". Wonderful stuff! Now for a book of your own, please Gerry.

Added 18th May 2006