When It Comes to Creative, Be More PhoneShop

Jordan did a bit of a Van Wilder and graduated at 30 (although it was his first degree, he just started at 26). Since then, he’s become a multi-award winning creative, leading the earned media charge on some huge global brands, including KFC, Lidl, The Cabinet Office, OTO and more.

When he’s not at work, he’s wasting money on trainers and fried chicken.

My working life started young. When I was 13, I waited tables at a local pub in Dorset. By 15, I worked in a Papa John’s making pizzas. At 16 I left education with a few GCSE’s and took an apprenticeship as an industrial gas engineer (which I hated, believe it or not).

At 18, I entered the world of retail and within three months became the top regional seller at o2 in Queensgate, Peterborough, and what a time it was to be in mobile sales. It was post Nokia customised cases but pre Apple domination. You had the Samsung D500 competing with Sony Ericsson walkman phones - playing music at the back of the bus wasn’t annoying yet - with new models dropping every month.

Phones4U (RIP), our competitive rivals, had 15 sales executives on the floor at any given time. The hustle and bustle of the mobile world was alive and well and I was slinging 12 and 18-month contracts out like Channel U did polyphonic ringtones. Life was good.

Over the coming years I did all sorts of retail and call centre jobs. It wasn’t until 25 I returned to education and at the tender age of 30 graduated with a degree in PR and Communications. Why am I telling you this? Because life before PR taught me something I think is missing in the average creative repertoire today = the art of the sell.

Selling is the secret sauce that takes campaigns from dying by the wayside to being spoken about down the pub by mates over a pint. It's the string to the bow that takes a creative from being creatively good to commercially brilliant. Of course, selling alone can’t do the job, but I’d argue it's just as important as the “outside the box thinking” workshops that are 10 a penny.

Let’s presume, in this instance, that all creatives are brimming with ideas and have solid clients. Why is it we only see a handful consistently making brave and game changing work?

This is where Jerwayne and Ashley could help creatives.. They are veteran sellers. They know to flip the script to Zizzi on a Tuesday lunchtime. They know the highstreet and the customer, and they adapt and change their sales approach depending on who they are selling to. They don’t just sell the function of the phone, nah, they sell a world in which that phone elevates the person buying it. Not only that, but they are likeable. They sell themselves.

When it comes to our work, we’re doing the same. We’re selling our agency, ourselves and our ideas, and we’re doing it all in a client's world.

A good idea is a good idea like a good phone is a good phone, but what part can you sell that you know the head of comms will care about? There can be a lot of reasons for clients to back brilliant work, but creatives fall into the trap of only focusing on the creative ones. Here’s what I’d tell a Newman:

Sell them on the bits you think will excite them. Sell them on how it shifts the dial for them in culture. Sell them on why it ticks more boxes than just your creative ones and meet their motivators as brand leads. Sell it back in their own words. Sell them on why you love it, because they are buying you too. Sell it in a way that makes it feel like it's yours and theirs and you dreamt it up together. But like all good sales people - and in the words of Pan’Ashley - you can’t be doing too much. Don’t make it feel like you’re selling it, or they are being sold to. Don’t over promise or be unrealistic. Just focus on what matters.

You want them to leave that meeting thinking that’s exactly what they wanted to buy, they just needed to see it to believe it.

So, my advice to creatives when it comes to process is this: Factor in time to think about all the ways you can channel your inner Jerwayne and Ashley for every client presentation. When you practise (and everyone should rehearse presentations, but that’s for another time), forget the slides and the functional stuff, they will no doubt read that, instead, ask yourself, “If I wasn’t a ‘creative’, would I buy this if it was being sold to me?”.

And remember, If you say it’s a ting, it’s a ting.