Creativity's no substitute for persuasion

Take five minutes to read Brian Millar's treatise on how Bill Bernbach ruined advertising (PDF download). It's written for prospective creatives, and intends to teach them a thing or two that they didn't learn in college. But even if you're not part of that crowd you'll find it worthwhile. I promise.

An excerpt:

"Want to see some great creative? Look
at the Romans. They understood persuasion
better than anybody. It wasn’t a craft to
them: it was the highest art, the key to
power and fortune. Check out Quintilian’s
Training of an Orator. It’s a manual for
persuading anybody to do anything.
There’s a particularly excellent chapter
explaining How to Talk an Angry Crowd
out of Tearing You Limb from Limb. You
don’t get that in Ogilvy on Advertising."

Millar gets at an essential truth. We spend a lot of time talking about headlines. About how a home page looks. About whether a logo should be blue, or dark blue. But we spend much less time talking about ways to change human behavior. That's understandable - clients (or in-house marketers) often lack the perspective to see this and change it (I'm guilty - I've been there). And agencies often don't push this approach, because they're not aware of it, or believe in the power of more and better creative, or simply prefer to take the path of least resistance.