Centers & Institutes
The Intensive Care Checklist: What This Simple Tool Can Do for Your Marketing
By Doug Wilhide
The word “checklist” sends shudders down my spine. So do the words “template,” “marketing committee,” and “copy review meeting.” They signal something gone horribly wrong with a marketing program—something that could possibly be fixed but probably not in this lifetime.
I’ve been an advertising “creative” most of my career—copywriter, creative director, art director, idea-generator. A creative’s natural instinct when confronted with a marketing challenge is to say, “Turn it over to us and get out of the way.” Sometimes we look at any variation on that approach as a prelude to disaster. Many times we’ve been right.
But sometimes we’re wrong to just skip the review process. Recently the idea of using control measures has gained quite a bit of buzz thanks to the research of Peter Provonost, a critical care doctor at Johns Hopkins. He has demonstrated through a number of well-controlled experiments that the simple act of using a checklist for procedures in intensive care units can produce amazing results—thousands of lives saved, hundreds of millions of dollars saved, complete turnarounds in infection rates.
Provonost’s work—minimally funded, often belittled, and usually resisted—has “saved more lives than any laboratory scientist in the last decade.” The story, written up in an article in the New Yorker (December 10, 2007), draws a number of interesting comparisons between medicine and other fields. In aviation, the “expert audacity” of early test pilots was instrumental in moving the field into the jet age. But it was high-risk, erratic work, and eventually it gave way to flight simulators, checklists, and standard operating procedures—not as dashing but not as risky either, and very effective.
One of the enduring conflicts in the marketing world is that agencies want to sell “expert audacity” while clients feel more comfortable with checklists and committees. It’s an issue even within agencies as any account executive who has had “differences” with a creative team will tell you. Both sides tend to go further down their respective paths than they should and the result is one of the reasons so many marketing programs fail. The procedure works, but the patient dies.
Templates, for instance, are a lousy way to create exciting brochures—marketing pieces that may actually attract interest in a world where attention spans are limited and the fight to court them is highly competitive. But using some kind of template is a very good way to build a company-wide collateral program that helps keep the graphic design and copy approach consistent. This can end up as a battle between inwardly-focused company policy and outwardly-focused customer service, but it doesn’t have to.
Marketing committees are usually oxymorons. You can’t do effective marketing by committee. Too much depends on instinct, daring, quick decisions, and timing. None of these is a typical result of committee processes. There are a lot of people who can hedge and critique, and a lot of people who can say “no.” The one thing most committees lack, which is absolutely essential to good marketing, is someone who can say “yes”—an expert with both audacity and authority.
The New Yorker article cited another factor that makes a difference in both medical operations and marketing: the involvement of senior executives. These are people who can make things happen because they can get decisions implemented and because they have a stake in the results. A copy review meeting that doesn’t include both an engaged copywriter and a manager who can give final approval is a waste of time. But if you bring both of them together—two audacious experts who care about the results—you can be quite successful. The writer knows that what he or she says counts, and a smart executive will keep in mind David Ogilvy’s line about dealing with creatives: “Why buy a dog and bark yourself?”
Provonost’s work on combining checklists and expert audacity sounds obvious and simple, basic common sense—like most good marketing. He claims it would cost very little - a fraction of one percent of the National Institutes of Health budget - to quickly get his processes into every ICU in the U.S., saving huge piles of health care dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
The best marketing campaigns I’ve worked on had several things in common:
budgets that were not large, but sufficient for the job at hand; control
processes (e.g. checklists) that were accepted because they produced better
results; and experts who knew what they were doing and acted both
audaciously and effectively.
About the Author
Doug Wilhide is president of Wilhide & Company, a consulting firm for advertising and marketing communications. He has been a copywriter and creative director for three Minneapolis ad agencies and has worked with over 150 clients in a variety of industries. His professional work has been recognized locally and nationally with over 50 industry awards and he received the Business Excellence Award for Creativity and Innovation in Teaching from the University of St. Thomas. He has taught graduate students in the Master of Business Communication program at UST since 1986 and also teaches in the Mini Master of Business Communication.
