Dr Bob Isherwood

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Dr Bob Isherwood give a freebie talk in Melbourne. No doubt he’s a pretty clever guy - from humble beginnings as a mechanic at age 13, to worldwide Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi for 12 years, he’s the one that “reinvented” the agency to an “ideas” one - and thus influencing many others for years to come. He’s now using his powers for good, figuring out creative ways to melt ice from the mountains and transport fresh water to small Indian villages - or something to that extent. Inspirational stuff.

He gave a talk which was simply phenomenal in my view. How many times have you watched a presentation which was full of charts, numbers & figures, with a babbling speaker, drowning you with information you’ll forget within a few days - or hours? The better presentations are ones which turn tradition on its head. The best ones, however, use traditional methods in new ways. Afterall, everything has a purpose, right?

The topic was “The 3 keys to success” - well trodden, fluffy territory. In Dr Bobs book, they are “Originality”, “Relevance” and “Emotional Connection”. Pretty self explanatory stuff, but how do you make it stick?

Here’s where it got interesting.

Originality

Dr Bob has been talked up a lot - the MC did a charismatically spectacular job of building him up. He showed us a string of videos and images - everything from the pyramids outside the Louvre, to the Simpsons intro sequence. Lots of early video’s from the 1940’s. Sure it had a white man’s America touch, but it was interesting to see what inspires a creative big wig in terms of originality. His messages afterwards was simple - Originality inspires originality.

The amusing thing was this could have been said within 10 seconds, but no one would have remembered it. Instead we were subjected to probably 20 minutes of videos - and not of Bob talking. Disappointed students soon put their notebooks away.

Relevance

Bob closed the doors and effectively locked us in. He began to ramble about… science! For a bunch of creative industry students, this was tedious at best, and as he went into the history of micro-conductors, you could see the agitation on peoples faces. Many felt cheated - we’d just watched 20 minutes of a video, and now the topic seems to be “Dr Bob discovers Wikipedia”, as my friend said.

He stopped after 10 minutes of extremely long-winded reading and declared that the speech was actually very interesting. It was given to an engineering conference (my details of this are hazy - basically something of great world-wide importance (BBC awards perhaps?)). The speech was even given by someone very important within the industry, and is a milestone in human endeavour.

And thus the second lesson was learnt - Relevance to your target audience.

Emotional Connection

The third part of Bob’s speech was less gripping - he overlayed music over famous scenes of history - but i guess we were already aware of his tactic at this stage, and this one felt more a combination of the first two points. Either way, Bob didn’t spend long on this point, but it was easy to remember anyway, as by that stage, he had our complete attention.

Other Questions

It would be nice to sit down and have a coffee with this man, and i’ll just quickly go over a few points which stuck in my mind.

The Single Minded Proposition vs Solving the Business Problems
This was interesting in that for me, personally, i’ve found working without a SMP to be pretty irritating. Without it, it gives me less to hold onto. It gives a focus. But that focus is also a closed way of thinking - it doesn’t encourage you to look elsewhere. Without a SMP, a brief is more general, so it’s up to the thinker to identify what the business problems are. More often than not, they aren’t really written in the brief.

SMP’s also have a tendency to use these generic words, like funky, fresh, dynamic, young, vibrant - words which everyone wants to be perceived as. SMP’s are an art within themselves - written well they can be fantastic, but when was the last time you came across one which was truly open and unique? Dr Bob said once everyone started using SMP’s, briefs all across the world became the same.

Creativity starts with the client
They start the work. Educate them on originality, relevance and emotional connection and your job is half done already.

And last but not least, work with great people. Bob talked of people as a pyramid. There’s never one person at the top who’s amazingly awesome - there’s a whole heap of people in that apex. Some of them you won’t get along with, so keep looking until you find ones you can.