By Adam Wakefield

The beginning of King’s presentation focused on the element of surprise, and why it is so essential to great advertising. King referred to it as a “glorious element” and a “most remarkable word. It’s one of the only words that you actually amplify when you say it. It’s a word that polarises everyone”.

The best advertising in the world uses surprise well, keeping its audience in suspense until the surprise lands “sweetly” at the end.

The element of surprise took on a new meaning for King when he was a judge at the Cannes Lions for the first time, where judging 400 beer commercials back-to-back exhibited to him a sameness among the vast majority of entrants, bar three which stood out.

“When we work with stories and our brands, we often start with exactly the same ideas. It’s very hard to create something unexpected when you are given ingredients that are so predictable,” King said almost wistfully.

“Iconic ideas, by their very nature, break the rules of their own category. I think that human beings respond to things that surprise them, things that are fresh and invigorating and unexpected.”

King believed some of the best words to hear from a client are “It’s not what I expected”, even if it means the client is going to bomb the idea.

“The only way to do something iconic is to destroy the rules and break them apart and do something that no one saw coming. It’s one of the great contradictions in our industry,” King said.

“We tend to celebrate anyone or anything that defies convention and bucks the trend” but day-to-day, those in the industry gravitate towards their comfort zones.

“We delude ourselves to a degree and I think it is one of the great contradictions in our business. Process is the problem. Process cuts the life and soul from everything that we do,” King argued.

The industry is grappling with what they do, building mechanisms which fundamentally make themselves “ploddy”, thinking they can go halfway to brilliance.

“In no other creative industry is process so engrained and institutionalised. It’s ideas-led, yet our industry retreats to this security blanket and I think this security blanket affects us in the wholly two ways that matter: it affects us mentally and it affects us physically,” King said.

While advertising agencies charge clients by the hour, they do not charge for the idea. The idea is what sometimes makes their clients a fortune. Great ideas are never assembled, they are conjured.

King has noticed many brands living with an alter ego that breaks their own rules, with their best adverts, in his opinion, appearing online instead of traditional media forms. 

“There’s a freedom happening in the digital space which is not being expressed in traditional advertising. It’s a very serious business and it is becoming seriously boring,” King said.

It warranted the question from King that if some of the best ideas are taking place outside the traditional system, maybe something is wrong with the system?

Another issue within the industry is the expectation by clients that great ideas can be reached on deadline. An example King gave was where the creatives would be given three weeks to come up with an entire campaign, even though the work leading up to that point had taken six months, with the deadline often set in relation to a conference the client is attending or hosting.

“Great ideas are born, not induced. The chance of coming up with a truly remarkable idea on cue to deadline is remote, to say the least,” he said.

“The chance of getting an honest and spontaneous response for an idea that has been thought about, anticipated and half assembled is unlikely. You have to fully appreciate how intangible it is with what we work with. You have to accept that affairs of the imagination are clumsy and chaotic.”

King suggested that agencies not wait for the brief, have a point of view before they are told what their point of view should be, think and fiddle constantly, and be brutal with their ideas, discarding the weak ones as they generate new ones.

Ultimately, while agencies sell methodology to clients, what clients are actually paying for is the intuition of the five people in the room.

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