When half a croissant solved the problem

Alan Moseley, president and chief creative officer, 180 Amsterdam, starts with an unusual story.

His agency used to serve croissants to visiting clients. After every meeting they noticed that the croissants would be untouched.

The agency, thinking that the clients did not like croissants, replaced them with Danish pastries. Still no one touched them. It then enhanced the look and feel by serving the croissants with expensive cutlery and so on. Still clients did not want to eat what was on offer.

One day someone in the agency decided to cut the croissants in half. “It changed everything. The same client who did not eat better, sweeter and more delicate croissants was now eating what was on the plate.”

This is a metaphor Moseley uses to describe the advertising of today.

“If you tackle problems in a normal way, you will never solve it,” he says. He adds that ad agencies look at the more obvious solutions that come from the textbook. “If we try and move away from that, we may find a better solution. The moment we look at things from a different perspective, you can create a different ambition and come up with a more interesting solution,” he says.

180 claims to have got its inspiration from a magazine quote attributed to legendary film maker Francis Ford Coppola.

The quote said: “Whenever you get into trouble, keep going. Do a 180-degree turn. Turn the situation halfway round. Don’t look for the secure solution. Don’t pull back from the passion. Turn it on full force.” Moseley says, “We have a strategic planning construct in our name. We are the agency for strategic planning even though we are run by creative people.” According to him, the natural thing most agencies do, when clients come up with issues like why people are not accepting their products, is delve into the reasons, and come up with solutions in the most obvious way possible. “If you ask people they will always say that the croissant was not appetising enough,” he says, coming back to his croissant theory.

So does the ‘cut your croissant into half’ also indicate that agencies should unbundle their offerings?

Moseley does not totally agree. He repeats that they must come up with the unexpected solution that has been never explored before.

180 — which adds the name of the city where it’s located to its name, so its Los Angeles office on the beach in Santa Monica is called 180 Los Angeles, while 180 Amsterdam is located close to the canal in Amsterdam — believes in ensuring a healthy mix of cultures while staffing its agency. For instance, Moseley points out that there are employees from 20 different nationalities in the Amsterdam office alone. And the agency culture ensures that no single person is solely responsible for any client’s problem.

“Whatever the problem, whether you are in strategic planning, account management or in creative, you are equally responsible for finding the solution to a client’s problem,” he says.

While doing so, 180 is also reviewing the agency model, rethinking about agency structure constantly.

Should we do away with reporting structures altogether, is one question that it frequently asks.

While its radical approach would have resulted in interesting solutions for clients like Asics sportswear and gaming console major PS4, there are also some cases of failure. While working on any brand, 180 does research by speaking to people from all walks of life. To keep up with its open-mindedness while mining for a solution, the agency has sometimes also hit a dead end. To launch a soft drink sometime ago, the agency went to wine tasters.

The agency got them to try the soft drink to see if there was any more depth to its flavours than people involved with the brand could fathom out. “We did not find a solution to that other than a response from them that they would rather drink Burgundy,” laughs Moseley.

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