Is campaign reverse engineering really useful?

Yesterday, a planner asked me about a campaign reverse engineering task. What does it mean? You take an existing ad or campaign and try to understand what the problem, audience, insight, and other important elements of that ad or campaign were.

To answer the planner's question, I reviewed my research that I created some time ago.  And I said it's not universally recognized as the best teaching practice in strategy. To hear your point of view on this, I wanted to share my findings and hear your opinion on the value of this exercise.

In favor:

1/ You see an ad on TV, do not stop thinking about how and what the creative team did. If you do that constantly, you will get a much better understanding of how the ads actually work. Skill in itself of recognizing why that work was good, helps you to work faster. It helps you to understand what the creative team was thinking and why it matters to the audience.

2/ The more you deconstruct, the more your brain is working around different patterns to solve problems. If you've done it 5000 times, the next time you will get a problem, you will probably have a similar problem in your pocket and your brain will just go - “Oh, maybe it's a little bit like this.” 

3/ If we don't do reverse engineering, we're losing a lot of craft of what planning was about. Planning was all about analysis and research. We seem to have lost a lot of that. Now we don't do that at all. We have ended up as Google planners. Information hackers, not learners. 

4/ Do some investigation. What do we see here? Do we agree with what we see? What do we think that means? How can we pressure to test and create a sort of robust insight from that?

Against:

1/ It's only your own interpretation of what the brief looked like. You will never know the truth. If only you'll be lucky to meet the strategy team one day. And more often than not, you will interpret the brief wrongly. What you're doing is you're actually making it harder for yourself. My perspective - I want to create new things, not just recreate old things. Getting inside people's heads is more important because it will help you take the pressure off and help you come up with better ideas.

2/ I think you should spend time immersed in campaigns and understand how they work. Guessing how they got there is sort of a bit pointless. Read sort of the case studies (for ex., IPA or APG Creative strategy award papers), rather than try and guess what the strategy was. And remember, there's an element of fiction, in case studies. People like to tell a story, not of how they arrived there, but how they want you to feel they arrived there. It's a cleaner story. Often, the reality of getting the work done is very messy. And whenever we write award entries, we never talk about all the other variables that helped. Everything is about “Oh, you know, look how well my drink sales did”. I don't mention it was the hottest summer on record. There are always other variables and outside stuff that you can't know if you do a retrofit of the campaign.

Honestly, 90% of all advertising is post-rationalized. You rationalize industry, so your senior planners are kind of BS because when they write their Canne piece, they are post-rationalizing the problem, the strategy, the solution, the results, and everything. They're not going to say, “Ah, the client was a nightmare. They didn't want to do this campaign.” You will hear the beautiful problem that makes you almost cry. Beautiful solution with some piano music playing in the background on the case film, and then all these magical numbers of a million lights, impressions, and sales going on.

3/ People spend too much time in the work that is out there rather than understanding how the world works. Better immerse yourself in culture and how people are living, to understand people. Especially, people that are different from you. The bit that you can't shortcut is your ability to understand people.

4/ If you individually ask 5 strategists or 100 strategists to do this task, they will all come back with different answers. There might be some similarities or some crossover but ultimately, they wouldn't all be the same. 

5/ If you will do reverse engineering for one campaign every month for one year, you will get 12 different explanations of how this campaign was put together. And if you will go back to your own findings after 3 or 6 months, you can see that you can polish them. There's something that you can add or edit because now you're thinking in a little bit different way, and you will see these things in a little bit different light. So it can become like an endless loop.

6/ You can't use these big effectiveness campaigns for average brands. Especially, if you are working in a small agency and working with the local market and average brands. You can't take Nike's “Dream like crazy” campaign, do the reverse engineering, and then adapt it to some local campaign. The budgets are different.

Let’s spice things up. Let’s recreate:

1/ Take some product or service and just try to take something out of that - like a brand asset or something. And take something from a totally different discipline and put it there, mix it up. Create something a little bit innovative and it will also train your mind on how to look at things. 

For example, Nike's “Just do it” and Johnnie Walker's “Keep Walking”. They're kind of the same thing but set in different ways. They're both saying “Keep doing, keep moving, keep advancing”. This could be another good exercise, to take the strategy of Nike and apply it to whiskey or a bank. How can “Just do it” live in a bank branch that cannot have a TV ad?

2/ The challenge that we have is to recognize what's the good stuff from the past. How do you mix the good stuff of the past with the stuff that everyone wants today? If you can map, merge, and meld those two together you still have a use. But if you try and say “It's like it used to be” then you're probably wrong.

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Please be so kind and share your opinion in the comments section. Let's talk about it together.