Grounded Innovation

Peter Lloyd , United States

Grounded Innovation I call this an innovation story because the creative team I led not only scored a long-lived creative victory, we worked as a team to innovate on three levels.

Three Degrees of Separation
A seemingly insignificant challenge arrived as a request to our ad agency from our biggest client, a maker of caskets. They had received a request from a customer funeral home in a small town in a Southern state. The local county sheriff had asked the home to spring for an ad in an anti-drug booklet they wanted to publish. We had 24 hours to produce it.

I was creative director of the ad agency. Steve Deiters and Dave Fagin, my writer and art director, jumped at the chance to do the work. In those days, ever since the legendary 80s "This is your brain on drugs" tv spot from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, anti-drug ads offered hot, upstart ad shops like ours the opportunity to produce advertising we could use to win awards and showcase in our portfolios. Work that research-weary, gun-shy, bigger clients never seemed able to summon the nerve to approve.



Time Is Money
On the other side of the fence, my bosses, the agency owners, eyes on the bottom line, warned me not to spend too much time on what they considered a bothersome, hand-me-down assignment.

Steve and Dave went to work. Their time quickly exceeded management's limits. Although the ad had to be delivered in a day, pressure came down on me to keep the available hours to a minimum. I had to manage management while the time clock ticked.

Working after hours on their own time, my team soon produced a powerful ad for the sheriff's booklet. "We still had to get an extension and spend hours not allocated in the job to sell it, defend it, and keep it from getting more cluttered," recalls Deiters. In short, the job took more time to produce than my bosses would have liked and introduced a third challenge.

groundedProduct of Death
Would a maker of caskets sign off on an ad that associated their product with death by drugs? To their credit, they listened to our pitch and signed on. And not just because we were out of time. The loved the ad as much as we did, but none of us knew that the wins were just beginning.

A local newspaper story soon featured the ad. The wires picked it up. Soon funeral homes around the country were requesting copies of "Grounded" from our client to run in their home towns. Then they asked for posters. Over the next few months our agency was filling orders for ads and posters all across our client's sales territory. And the company's sales force made a lot of new coffin buying friends.

adThe Ad that Keeps on Warning
As I researched this story, I found what some call the sincerest form of flattery. Turns out that some 14 years after our original ad ran, a funeral home in New York state began using coffin images to send anti-drug messages to high school students under a program they called "Sobering Thought."

But not just any anti-drug message. A story in the Queensbury Post Star, "New posters discourage student drug abuse," includes a poor imitation of "Grounded." Someone slaughtered Dave's design, popped in a different casket, but picked up Steve's headline word for word, plus almost every letter of his copy.

Lesson Learned
Innovative excellence backed by passionate commitment and a refusal to dismiss any creative challenge as insignificant can not only surprise clients, sell products, and bring home awards. It can continue to inspire minds toward noble ends for a long time. Here is Steve's original copy:

Grounded At Age 16. No sports. No parties. No dating. No phone calls. Like 12,000 other high school kids this year – get caught just once doing the wrong drug or the wrong combination and you're grounded. That's final.

Steve Deiters is partner and chief creative thinker of the Creative Department. Dave Fagin is creative director of Snap Advertising. Both shops are based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems. He writes Right Brain Workouts for the IdeaConnection.


Next Story »