Lateral: Tate Tracks

Last year I attended a course designed for aspiring account planners. In simple terms, account planners are advertising agency people who work to understand the consumer's view in order to create communication that resonates with them(the consumer). The discipline of planning has different approaches and it boils down to the agency culture and the type of planner working on any particular campaign.

So back to my story. Each week, I hopped from one agency to the other (we had our seminars in  different agencies) gathering knowledge from a diverse range of planning directors. In each seminar, we were presented with at least one campaign from the hosting agency. What has any of this got to do with lateral thinking? (If by now you cannot tell that I like to provide background information, now you know :)

One campaign that stood out to me was a campaign for Tate Modern by Fallon. The video below sums up the idea behind campaign idea, Tate Tracks:

Just to give you some background information, Tate Modern had some success drawing in that audience but they struggled to keep them. The reason why this campaign gets a mention today(a highly honorable feat if I say so myself) is that the thinking behind it provided a long term benefit. We all know that music plays an integral role in the life of the audience they were looking at (Tate Modern used music in their previous attempt) but Tate Tracks went the extra mile by getting into the heads of the musicians. The question asked wasn't (only) "How do we get the consumers attention?" but "What do they consider as art?" "How do they contribute to art?"

"Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces" (SOURCE). The campaign changed traditional art by tapping into the inspiration it provided to musicians.