• by Paul Gough , January 29, 2003

For Tom O’Keefe, it isn’t all about the creative.

The Foote, Cone and Belding veteran was recently named executive creative director at the agency’s Chicago office. And while he’s got a lot of experience working in creative with such clients as Amazon.com and Taco Bell, O’Keefe says that what happens afterward is becoming almost as important these days.

“Media might be moving faster than the creative process in some respects,” says O’Keefe.

According to him, today’s many media choices are having an impact on how campaigns are being created, not just where they’re being placed. Media is part of the mix when it comes to deciding what a campaign says and how it says it.

“You have to come up with an idea that is big enough to work in many different media,” says O’Keefe. Television is changing, he says, but that’s also the case with the other media too. This new thinking permeates every aspect of the creative process. “You work from the ideas standpoint first and then, what’s the best way to translate it to TV, radio, print, outdoor…you really have to be that clear these days,” he says.

O’Keefe says everyone’s trying to figure out the next best thing. Product placement, for example, he believes, will use bigger and longer formats as it gains in popularity with marketers, but finding clever ways to position a product with consumers is equally important. “There’s as much creativity in media as in coming up with a brand these days,” he says.

As for the relationship between each part of a campaign, O’Keefe says that it’s gotten better in recent years but isn’t as good as it should be. He says media has risen in terms of importance and the amount of creativity that has been applied to it. But he sees the need for creative, media planners, and account managers to consider the campaign holistically. They need to determine the objective together, know it in a big-picture way, and figure out how to carry it out together. “They need to be talking all the time,” O’Keefe says.

It’s also given many a creative director a reason to do more than just glance at the brief. Ten years ago they wouldn’t think twice about a brief that said the campaign would run in TV, one radio spot, and a print ad. “Now you think, is that enough? As a creative, you think, where else can this go?” he says.

O’Keefe says the medium can even become part of the story. A prime example: BMW Films. “How they did it was bigger than what it was,” O’Keefe says. He suggests that the BMW films opened up a whole other world to advertisers, an example of how media is fragmented these days and how explosive it can be with a new way of doing business.

On the other hand, O’Keefe thinks that nothing’s going to unseat television anytime soon. “Nothing moves people like moving pictures and being able to tell a story with film. It’s hard to believe that something can replace that telling in a linear way,” he says. Which is not to say that it won’t change. “It may not be a 30-second TV spot. It might be a five-minute thing or something you download,” he says.