Creative work should be fresh but also familiar. Raymond Loewy’s Maya theory explains why.

The Account Planning Group’s inspirational Creative Strategy Awards closed for entries this week. At the risk of imperilling 101’s entries, and at odds with the prevailing awards tide, I hope the venerable judges find time to salute those strategies that demonstrate caution as well as creative daring.

It’s a contrary position to take with regard to an awards scheme now dedicated to transformational thinking, I’ll grant you, so let me explain.

When Raymond Loewy first proposed his masterful Maya theory, he wrote the playbook for advertising planners – not just industrial designers.

Great design solutions, Loewy figured, played to two competing human impulses – our interest in the new and our deep-seated comfort with the familiar. The designer’s goal, therefore, was to find the “most advanced yet acceptable” answer to his or her brief. Excite and assure in equal measure.

Far from being a charter for mediocrity, Maya explains not only many of Loewy’s groundbreaking designs but also why some new brands and businesses disrupt successfully while others fail – the new rides in undetected on the coat-tails of the old. (Steve Jobs’ artful introduction of the iPhone once we had become familiar with the iPod is a case in point.)

Loewy’s theory receives a timely reboot in Derek Thompson’s new book Hit Makers: the Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. (Required reading for all, except perhaps Ed Sheeran.) And although I suspect few marketers and ad people are taught the principles of MAYA, let alone go about our business with it uppermost in our minds, I believe much of the best brand thinking and many of the best advertising solutions conform to this blueprint.

They honour current beliefs while remaining determined to stretch or at least update them. The best communication starts with listening, after all. And it is agency planners, the reluctant stars of the APG’s show, who may be best-placed to “keep the flame” in their myriad roles of brand guardian, “chief engineer” and occasional change agent.

At risk of caricature, creative folk will tend to strike out for the most advanced solution, then bewail the failure of others to either “get it” or buy it. It’s in their nature and it’s what our rewards system drives them towards – the dopamine rush of a bauble. (Creative awards skew towards the new.)

A few – it’s true – instinctively wear a MAYA hat, whether that is to guide them to the right ideas or simply to stuff that gets made. And unfashionable as creative teams now may be, they would often have a built-in “auto-correct” – one partner reaching for the stars, the other with feet planted firmly on the ground. One live wire, one earth.

For the mortal creative, however, the planner – and strategy more generally – can be their friend in two regards – helping them get straight to “most advanced” answers that are intrinsically acceptable (to the consumer, remember, not necessarily the brand owner) and/or policing the unacceptable. My personal preference is for the former.

A good brief and a good briefing is still a great place to start in the quest for surprising advertising that is accepted rather than rejected, even if the APG Awards raised its gaze beyond this many moons ago. The best briefs steer everyone to what Loewy called “optimal newness” – answers that are at once fresh but somehow familiar, original and appropriate. (“Draw me the court I’m playing on and I’ll try to hit the line,” my creative partner, Augusto Sola, says.)

However, once creatives are up and running, the planner’s task is to act as a kind of clutch control: a role that demands a light touch and a gift for nurture (of ideas, that is – not necessarily people), because creative people need to feel they got there themselves and, of course, often do. And because no-one likes a smart-arse.

Just as it does in the spheres of music and film, our industry’s most popular output works because we recognise something familiar even as we embrace the new. Look more closely and our most transformational thinking may actually be grounded in acceptability, not just the more obvious “advance”.

So as the APG judges gather to celebrate the new, they are reminded of an old truth. Here’s to the less crazy ones.

 

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Next time you see an image of Air Force One taking off, think Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes. The look of today’s presidential plane, emblazoned with “United States of America” on the blue-and-white fuselage, originated with a quiet collaboration between President John F. Kennedy and Raymond Loewy, who was perhaps the most accomplished commercial image and design expert of the post-World War II era.

When the first jet, a Boeing 707, was added to the presidential fleet in 1959, Dwight D. Eisenhower was content to let the plane’s nose and tail be painted with the Air Force’s easily visible “international orange” and the sides with the block-lettered label of an obscure bureaucracy: Military Air Transport Service.

But his successor, John F. Kennedy, and Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, were far more attuned to how symbols could enhance a leader’s image — what we might now call his “brand.” When Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946, his financier father, Joseph (who had once owned the American franchise for well-known liquor brands such as Haig & Haig Scotch), said, “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes.” During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy supporters wore PT-109 tie clips to remind voters of their candidate’s heroism in saving his crew after his Patrol Torpedo boat sank in the Pacific during World War II.

As a college student, Jackie Kennedy had once drolly written that her life’s ambition was to be “a sort of overall art director of the 20th century.” Operating out of this aesthetic instinct, her interest in history and her desire to help her husband (who had been elected by a tiny popular-vote margin) at a time of almost unrelenting Cold War crisis, she famously restored the White House with the ambition of improving how the American presidency was presented to the world. To both Kennedys, Eisenhower’s drab, military-looking plane was a missed opportunity. They started by having its fuselage repainted with the words “United States of America.”

In March 1962, Mr. Loewy, who had a house in Palm Springs, Calif., saw the presidential plane landing at the airport there. That evening, he told his friend Gen. Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s Air Force aide, that the aircraft, with its “rather gaudy” orange graphics, looked “terrible.” General McHugh explained that an enlisted man of little experience was responsible for the design. He added that a new Air Force One was being constructed. Mr. Loewy offered to make some suggestions, without taking a fee, on how the new plane’s appearance could be made more distinguished.

Born in France in 1893, Mr. Loewy had migrated to New York after serving in World War I. While building his design business, he made his mark on the Lucky Strikes package (changing its color from green to white), the 1940s Lincoln Continental, the Coca-Cola bottle, dispensers and vending machines, the Greyhound Scenicruiser and the Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. (Later he created logos for Exxon, Shell and the United States Postal Service.)

By Mr. Loewy’s account, he visited the White House a few months after his conversation with General McHugh. After the designer laid out some sketches on armchairs against a wall, President Kennedy chose one that featured a red-and-gold design, but asked for it to be rendered in blue, which he said was his favorite color.

Mr. Loewy recalled that Kennedy also chose the Caslon typeface — which resembles the one used in the heading of the Declaration of Independence — that was used for the legend “United States of America.” During their meetings, Kennedy also asked Mr. Loewy to consider how the federal government’s visual imagery could be improved, and Mr. Loewy’s firm was retained for a feasibility study, which led to the orange stripe used by the United States Coast Guard.

The new Air Force One entered service in the fall of 1962. Its color scheme and graphics proved to be timeless, and they survive today on Barack Obama’s Boeing 747s, combining sky blue with what Mr. Loewy called “a luminous ultramarine blue,” with an American flag on the tail and a presidential seal on each side, near the nose. The Kennedys were anxious about charges of commercialism, so Mr. Loewy — normally no shrinking violet — remained publicly quiet about his role in the plane’s transformation, for a while. Breaking his silence in 1967, he told United Press International about his involvement, adding that the president had “loved that aircraft. It was his baby.”

Just as Mr. Loewy’s logos and designs helped to differentiate commercial products in the marketplace, his work on Air Force One helped to make the plane a world-famous symbol of presidential majesty and power. For instance, on election eve 1976, hoping to benefit from its aura, Gerald Ford’s campaign advisers had the president address American voters from Air Force One on live television, over engine noise, with opening and closing images of the plane soaring above clouds.

The impact of the reimagined aircraft was evident on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, when the Kennedys were landing at Love Field in Dallas, and a local television announcer told viewers, “Here comes the big jet — Air Force One, ladies and gentlemen, with the seal on the side,” adding, “Beautiful sight!”

Jacqueline Kennedy had always drawn the line at letting the plane’s luxurious new interior (also designed with Mr. Loewy’s help) be photographed for publication, out of worry that the staterooms looked too much like those of a rich tycoon’s private plane. The first time most Americans got a look at Air Force One’s interior was that afternoon, after her husband’s assassination, when Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of the most famous images of the century, was photographed taking the presidential oath there at her side.

 

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