Espresso - Sir John Hegarty's WILD Creative Process REVEALED

0:00That's one thing I wanted to talk to you about is again, it's in your book is it's all about the work and making the work better. and like you know i do i write every day i write a newsletter and i'm obsessed with writing one of my favorite quotes is by ernest hemingway which the first draft of everything is shit and a lot of comedians have it on their laptops when they write because it's like just just get it out your head yeah yeah sure um and actually the you know an idea may be a seed it may start here and it could take you here or there or anywhere but i love the i'd love to get into how you guys and it can be any point in your career make the work better because is it is it a question of you know going on a walk or doing something completely random then coming back to the work is it just locking yourself in a room any example of how you make work creative work better well there are a number of things yeah um the first is constant dissatisfaction yes it's never good enough so you're always trying to make it better and that's where when you have a deadline you have to stop you know this is it now you know you um the other thing is taste and you can't teach that you can't teach that's good it's not great um it's okay and a lot of people would stop with okay no it's okay that's good you've done a really good job that only took you know two days right really brilliant but taste comes into it is that great is that really really great and of course then on top of that is ambition.

1:31You know, the ambition to be better than anything else out there. And that's what drives you forward, those things. And, I mean, it's a sort of a constant struggle because it's easy just to go, yeah, okay, that's good. I've always said, you know, creativity needs bad weather because, you know, if it's lovely and sunny outside and hey it's wonderful and the beach is over there and surf's up and hey it's okay it's good you know let's go to the beach let's go there have a few beers you know what are we worrying about here it's only whatever you know uh we're not we're not you know solving we're not finding a cure for cancer and so that sense of wanting to go on is fundamentally and i always jokingly say bad weather's good for creativity there's empirical evidence on this if you look at the nobel prize winners both in in science in arts and in all those things there is a preponderance for it to be from north the northern hemisphere really yeah if you do an analysis of of all the nobel prize because it's you know for an obvious reason isn't it yeah yeah i mean if it's a beautiful you live in a beautiful sunny climate and you're sitting under a banana tree and a banana pulls off you eat it and you're going it's life's good i'll go for a swim now don't worry about that well you know go inside and do what you know um and you know because it also it drives you how are we going to solve this problem there isn't a problem you're sitting under a bloody banana tree you know it's where's the problem here i've just got food i've got a beach i've got water i can swim i can do that you know so that sense of kind of you know um it's almost the grit that you need to get something going you know you've got to there's a problem here we've got to solve it this satisfaction yeah the is there any examples of how you've made the work better and I'd love to almost almost kind of reverse engineer it in the sense of what we ended up with so we could pick any example and then what it actually started with because that creative process is well there are a huge number of examples of that about how you kind of um you took the work and it was okay.

3:50And I remember we were working on Boddington's, the cream of Manchester. And we started as a print campaign. It got awarded and all sorts of things. It was lovely. And we decided to focus on cream. And I was away and the brief for a TV campaign came up and everybody said, oh, just put the print ads on TV. Just, you know, no, that's a single visual. TV is narrative. So you've got to convert that idea, the cream of Manchester, into a narrative. And they'd done a series of scripts. And I looked at them and I thought, they're okay. They're okay. They're not great. And everybody was like, yeah, no, they're good, John.

4:36They're good. And I went, no, guys, these are just no, no, no. And so I called the client up and I said, look, I have something to say. I can understand why you've been sold these scripts. I can understand why everybody in the team liked them. They're good. We would never do anything that wasn't, but they're not great. And a lovely guy who was marketing, his name was Steve, and I can't remember his surname now, said to me, okay, John, I'll give you a week. Come back next week with what you think we should do. And so I went back and I talked about how do you convert cream as a print ad. You can show it if you wanted to.

5:17The ice cream cone was a classic one, cream of Manchester. How do you convert that idea now into a narrative? And the team came up with a brilliant idea and it was called face cream. So that's how you convert it. And it went on to be an award-winning campaign. So when you move from one medium to another, you've got to recalibrate how you execute the idea. Yes. What works in print, the principle works. Cream of Manchester, that's the idea. This is how I express it in print. Now how do I express it as a piece of narrative? And that's what we did with that. Yeah, I'll put it up on the screen because it's a gorgeous...

5:56Yeah, the one about she dips her hand in and puts her on cream. Yeah. In terms of the selling of ideas, two months free, Yep, that's what Espresso sponsors Unleashed are offering. They are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software. It's helped Ireland's cut admin time in half, get granular clarity on your margins, know where your stock is, don't miss availability. Brands like Candy Kittens, Tarquin's Gin, Minor Figures and Trip all use Unleashed. And I reckon you should too. As I said, two months free in the show notes. click there and you get two months for free