Total Football

The best creatives are better at strategy than average strategists are.

By the same token, gifted strategists will have better creative ideas than average creatives, and the best suits will reliably put average planners to shame when crafting a plan.

This is something that we’d prefer not to admit, publicly at least.

We don’t like it when someone else is better at ‘our thing’, especially when they’re already great at ‘their thing’ to begin with. It’s like being the butt of the apocryphal John Lennon quote, “Ringo isn’t the best drummer in the world, he’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles”.

We often treat the threat of multifunctional brilliance as either an infuriating karmic injustice, or jet fuel for the type of neurosis that saps away our professional self esteem.

Advertising is a precarious business; it’s very competitive, highly subjective, and offers little in the way of job security. Acknowledging that somebody else, somebody from a different department no less, can do the thing you’re there to do better than you can seem like painting a target on your own back.

The discomfort doesn’t make this phenomenon any less true. Other people, in other departments, will quite often do your job better than you do it - and ironically, the better you get at your job the more true it gets. When you move to the best agencies there’s going to be even more people who won’t share your job function but nevertheless are, on occasion, better than you at what you do.

Multifunctional brilliance does more than make us uncomfortable, it’s also an affront to the managerialist instincts that seep into middling agencies. If an account manager is thinking on an awesome social idea then they aren’t furiously writing emails and frantically trafficking banners.

Bean counters desperately want to keep their beans separate; the creative pintos in a neat pile over here, strategic baked beans slopped over there, experiential kidney beans in the corner - kept well away from the digital garbanzos who are destined for programmatic hummus.

Neither of those reasons, whether personal heebie-jeebies or the consternation of timesheet tyrants, are particularly good reasons to uphold the pretense that the only people capable of doing what you do well share the same title.

Agencies shouldn’t be rejecting the multifunctional brilliance of their talent, they should be expecting it of them.

To illustrate why I’m going to turn to Dutch soccer legend, and the patron of “Total Football”; Johan Cruyff.

I hope the sports reference doesn’t put anyone off, not only because Cruyff is up there on my own strategy pantheon, but because Total Football is the purest articulation of something that completely transcends sport - it’s philosophy, it’s art, it’s beauty - but before I get into all that, let me provide a very basic explanation of what Total Football is for anybody unfamiliar.

Though Total Football’s genealogy as a strategic system traces further back, Cruyff is emblematic of it, and most will argue that he perfected it across his career as player and manager first at Ajax, then with the Dutch national squad of the 1970s and subsequently as a coach at Barcelona. In the most simple sense it’s a system involving the maximum degree of fluidity and flexibility for outfield players.

Rather than the more fixed and rigid traditional system where each player conforms to a distinct role tightly defined by their position, Cruyff’s approach was defined by the idea that everyone on the team should possess foundational excellence in their specified position as well as the multifunctional brilliance needed drift into other roles as opportunities and problems presented themselves.

The output was breathtakingly fluid and cohesive teamwork, a dynamic and creative style of play that was elegant and beautiful to watch.

Cruyff’s insight is as relevant to advertising as it is to football, in fact it’s relevant to any scenario where a group of human beings are working together to accomplish a goal - and it’s also wonderfully simple. “Choose the best player for every position, and you’ll end up not with a strong eleven, but with eleven strong ones”

Rigid systems with tightly defined individual roles limit what the team as a whole can achieve. The more ways a system allows the people within it to be brilliant, the more the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Inflexible systems make even less sense in advertising than they do in football. The labels that we slap onto departments, whether that’s strategy, creative, communications planning, client services, all of those things are emergent properties of the collective just as much as they are individual responsibilities.

I say all of this while working with a fantastic creative department who are at the very same time one of the best strategy departments I’ve ever worked with - departmental titles notwithstanding.

Likewise, I’ve written more than my fair share of campaign endlines, digital activations, print, and poster copy, and radio scripts in my time - which isn’t hard considering my fair share as a strategist would be zero.

I’ve been lucky enough to work in fantastic agencies that recognize departmental titles should define responsibilities, but should never place limitations on anyone. Mother’s ‘put the problem in the middle’ ethos, or Hegarty’s “We’re a creative company, not a company with a creative department” wisdom that permeates BBH.

The best agencies understand that the best talent needs to be liberated from structure more so than defined by it.

Here at Quality Meats Creative we have ‘getting rid of the bad stuff that gets in the way of the good stuff’ - and what could be more bad than ignoring a good strategic or creative idea because it came from someone who didn’t have the right word on their email footer?

Of course some people will be quick to point out that ‘strategy is a craft, something that must be honed’ - and yeah I suppose it is to an extent, but some people are just naturally gifted - not just at strategy, or creative, or account handling - they’re gifted at advertising. Some people are just pure magic at what we do, and those are the people I want to be working with.