The best advertising doesn’t always come from following the brief, it comes from challenging it. In his debut column, Trevor Robinson OBE and Founder + Executive Creative Director, Quiet Storm writes why the most memorable campaigns give audiences something they never knew they wanted.

Advertising isn’t art, but great advertising comes from creatives who think like artists. The key is being open to new ideas – the more surprising the better.

Great art rarely came out of sticking to a brief, and, often, the best advertising doesn’t either. And the best marketers we’ve worked with in the 30+ years since Quiet Storm started have all recognised this.

I won’t claim to have spent the vaunted 10,000 hours reading campaign briefs during that period, but I’ve definitely looked at hundreds and hundreds of them. For very good reason, few marketers will have seen anywhere near that amount.

So in my opinion, all this anxiety about how good clients need to be at writing briefs is a bit misplaced.

Actually, most marketers are great when it comes to conveying insights into the brand and business issues. The problem lies more with how willing they are to see a brief as a conversation starter, rather than an instruction manual.

Marketers spend so much time with their brands that they can sometimes lose sight of the outsider’s perspective, where some of the most interesting ideas may lie.

I’d go so far as to say that the creative team thoroughly picking apart the brief alongside the strategist is a fantastic way to unleash creative potential, where a creative perspective might unlock something that’s missing or open up the possibility of an answer that could be found elsewhere. 

The client and the consumer might think they know what they want, and they may even be happy to receive it. But they are often infinitely more delighted to get something they may have never imagined they wanted or needed. Let’s face it: the ad campaigns we love and remember – “You’ve been Tango’d”, Haribo Kids Voices, “Got Milk” and Cadbury “Gorilla” spring to mind – probably owe a lot more to creative possibilities than answering the brief exactly as it was written.

Trevor Robinson OBE is Founder and Executive Creative Director of Quiet Storm, the agency behind iconic campaigns including “You’ve Been Tango’d”, Haribo, Google, Vimto and Channel 4’s Black in Business. He founded Quiet Storm in 1995 and later launched Create Not Hate, helping underrepresented young people access careers in advertising. An Honorary Fellow of the University of the Arts London, Trevor was awarded an OBE in 2009 for services to advertising and charity, and is a regular speaker at Cannes Lions.