Thread by @unclebernbach

A HUGE thread with Sir John Hegarty’s incredible advertising wisdom.

Sir John Hegarty is one of the founders of BBH London, one of the best ad agencies of all time. The success of brands such as Audi, Levi’s, Axe/Lynx, The Guardian and many others can be traced back to John’s incredible creative mind.

1) “Always remember: a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world; a corner of someone's mind.”

2) “Obsessing about one medium versus another is a waste of energy - it is the cultivation and management of ideas, and the people who generate them, that is the crucial factor.”

3) “If the French could inspire a revolution with just three words, why should you need any more than that to sell a soap powder?”

4) “The function of advertising is simply to promote and sustain competitive advantage for brands.”

5) “You have to accept that the creative process is completely dysfunctional. If you deny that fact, you will ultimately fail.”

6) Hegarty on the dangers of digital advertising.

7) “You cannot create great work unless a little bit of you goes into it, be it your heart, your soul or your beliefs. Whatever you create – it could be a painting, writing, designing or even advertising – the work that results is an expression of you.”

8) “The industry has to understand that there are two factors: persuasion and promotion. What we’ve become obsessed with over the last 20 years is promotion.”

9) Sir John Hegarty’s 3 step formula to produce great creative work.

10) “Cynicism is the death of creativity – you have to be an optimist. You can’t change the world if you don’t believe it.“

11) "Information goes in through the heart. We are emotional creatures. We are not logical."

12) "The originality of an idea depends on the obscurity of sources."

13) Hegarty on the problems of the industry not recognising for its past.

14) "In the end there is only one media space, despite what happens in technology; that space is the one between someone's ears – that's the space I want to occupy and simplicity is profoundly important in getting it in there."

15) “You don’t have consumer understanding. That’s bullshit. You have consumer knowledge. We have knowledge of what’s happening out there and we can use that. But the idea that you can understand someone else (is absurd).”

16) “You have to tell the truth in advertising. Find a funny, engaging way to tell the truth. But truth is the fundamental strategy.”

17) "Consistency wins every time in advertising. Nike has been using ‘Just do it!’ since 1987, but giving a refreshing perspective every time.”

18) What John Hegarty looks for in a creative brief.

19) Hegarty likes to say that, in pitching, clients buy the thinking, not the creative work you do.

“The clients are buying the relationship when they are choosing a partner; they are buying the thinking. Not the actual work you are putting in front of them.”

20) “Clients can smell weakness.”

21) “Criticising a new agency for doing something different is madness. It’s the constant evolution and the constant innovation that keep our industry fresh and relevant. The challenge for new businesses is to ensure their innovation is relevant and not just a gimmick.”

22) "The great skill in communication is simplicity"

23) Hegarty on some of the challenges the ad industry has today. (from Campaign)

24) “Agencies are creative organisations and as such have been changing and adjusting since their inception. You can always tell when an organisation is in decline. When it values process over innovation. As long as agencies remember that they’ll be here for a long time.”

25) “Advertising has to engage before it can inform.”

26) “A brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but also by the people who know about it”

27) John Hegarty on why the ad industry is still about ideas in the first place.

28) “(The secret is to) Wrap up logic in emotion.”

29) “My view on briefs: accept nothing and question everything. After all, the brief is nothing but a bit of paper that has been crafted by someone who too often wants to try to close, and sadly, control the process. I’m always trying to open the process.”

30) “The intelligent brief is the one that understands the limitations of the process and functions as a way of kick-starting the search for that simple, elusive idea that can capture the public imagination.”

31) “I’ve always believed the function of an advertising pitch is to redefine a brand’s future. It’s never just a pitch for the advertising account. It’s a pitch for the company, and its business.”

33) “One of the things that creativity does is to take a number of known assets and reassemble them in a way that stimulates our imagination.”

34) On The Economist poster:

"Most brilliant example of how advertising can take a complex thought, reduce it down and make it memorable.

That’s part of what we do. We take complicated briefs and we make it simple and memorable."

35) “I watch ads all of the time and they don’t feel real. They have stupid people doing stupid things. To make your communicates feel more real and thus more powerful is to use stuff around you as I used to say. That’s how we made all of the Levi’s ads feel more real.”

36) “What made the work at BBH so powerful is that we tried to use visual narrative as much as possible, meaning we didn’t use many words in our films. We let the images tell the story and that made the work so powerful.”

37) “Principles remain. Practices change. The fact that we now have digital technology, social media, does not change the principles. Changes the practices. Changes how we can communicate, just how Television changed how advertising was made.”

38) What made BBH great:

“We made people realise that the only thing that mattered was the work. If you wanted to be a hero at BBH, you made the work great and it didn’t matter what your title was.”

39) “But as an industry we have to regain our skill of taking a complicated message and telling it memorably in 60 seconds. There’s a delusion – it’s a kind of madness – that seems to have overtaken our industry. We always seem to want to make everything longer.”

40) “Creativity isn’t an occupation, it’s a pre-occupation.”

41) “There is no point in me saying research is a waste of time. It can be interesting, it can provide information. By the way, most of the great ideas I have had and executed were panned by research.”

42) Hegarty on his concerns about the direction of the ad industry.

43) Sir John Hegarty spoke about what creativity means to him and why 'shock the audience' is the wrong approach. “I don’t view creativity as about creating shock. Creativity is about helping us engage.”

44) “The greatest advertising tells the truth. That’s why it’s so powerful. The job of advertising is not to disguise the truth, the great advertising goes on to find that truth.”

45) “One of the most important lessons to be learned by any communicator (and one of the most easily forgotten) is that you don’t instruct people to do something: you inspire them.”