The NINO Principle: Nothing In, Nothing Out

BIMINI AND NOTHING MORE 

“We need you to write a brochure about Bimini.”

IT WAS MORE THAN A DECADE AGO and I was a copywriter at a small advertising/marketing firm specializing in hospitality — hotels, airlines, tourist destinations and such — and a young account executive who didn’t know any better had stopped by to give me one of my first assignments.

“Great. What’s a Bimini?” (OK, I was a bit young myself …)

Turns out it’s an island famous for being one of Ernest Hemingway’s get-aways. A client about to open a new resort there needed a marketing brochure — and soon. I asked when I could get briefed on the details of the resort, find out what would appeal to visitors, maybe even go see the place. The AE told me she didn’t have any information, had only enough budget to give me two-and-half billable hours to write the thing and was hoping to see a first draft that afternoon.

I was puzzled and thought surely I was misunderstanding something. “How am I supposed to write a brochure about something I don’t know anything about?”

“Uhm, I’ll see if I can’t find out the rates and stuff,” she said. “But why don’t you go ahead and get started writing.”

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF NOTHING

With those words I came face to face with the impossibility of working with nothing. In fact, that moment may have planted the seed for my THINK INSIDE THE BOX philosophy, which is based on the notion that you can’t create something from nothing, that if there’s nothing inside the box, nothing can come out of it.

I recently posted an entry about the power of constraints in the creative process, but lack of knowledge isn’t a constraint, it’s a deficit.

I still stumble, professionally and personally, into situations where I catch myself trying to work with nothing. I’ve found that sometimes I bring nothing to the table; sometimes my colleagues hand me nothing; and sometimes my clients think nothing is actually something.

A couple of weekends ago I was informally brainstorming with an entertainer friend about the logistics of staging performances at a rather nontraditional venue. We weren’t getting very far and I finally had a “duh” moment. “You know what our problem is? We don’t know what we’re talking about.” (I once said the same thing in the middle of a college debate tournament I’d been drafted into at the last minute with no preparation. The judges literally were speechless as I walked out of the room. You can fake only so much.) We agreed to do some research before returning to the conversation. That’s the best way to deal with nothing: Go learn something.

More recently I was in a brainstorm at the office working from a client brief that had very few details about who the target consumer is and what motivates them. We didn’t get very far and pretty much everyone around the table was frustrated. This is a harder situation to deal with because the client isn’t going to supply anything else and we don’t have time or budget to do our own research. Candidly in those situations you just do the best you can. As my brilliant former colleague, Ron Arp, used to say, “Sometimes you get to shoot your arrows at a target, other times you have to draw circles around where they hit.”

FROM NOTHING TO SOMETHING … AND SOMETHING MEANINGFUL

I think one of the characteristics of effective creative professionals is the ability to recognize the difference between not only nothing and something, but also something and something meaningful. Entire organizations are spending a lot of time thinking about this these days. “Consumer insights” is so frequent in conversations among communications pros it runs the risk of becoming an empty buzz phrase, but it reflects an urgency shared by companies as towering as P&G and as humble as your local supermarket.

One of the hottest trends in this area is ethnographic research, which entails researchers virtually living with consumers to understand any aspect of their life that has to do with interacting with a particular product or brand. It represents a significant shift from most market research, which tends to focus on consumers self-reporting their attitudes and opinions and generally confines itself to the “buying moment.”

A leading exponent of this “immersion” approach is IDEO, an experiential design firm in Palo Alto that started out as an industrial design firm and made its name as the designer of iconic products such as the Palm Pilot. I’ve had the good fortune of working with them on an [tag]integrated marketing[/tag] project for a client recently and they move so rapidly from nothing to something to something meaningful it’ll make your head spin. They’re relentless about filling up their “box” before trying to take something new out of it. And they do brilliant work as a result.

The truth is, working from a position of deep knowledge isn’t only more effective (in fact, the only way to be effective) it’s simply more fun and rewarding.

Writing that brochure for Bimini was neither fun nor rewarding, and I can pretty much guarantee it wasn’t effective either.

    

© 2007 John Armato