Finding the Highest Common Denominator
By Toby Barlow
Back when I was just a rube in this business, a lovely British woman named Joanna Thompson took me down to some fancy club in San Francisco for a lunchtime speech by a fellow named Jeff Goodby.
He was awesome. Relaxed, funny, with great work to share. This was before “Got Milk” or much of their other famous work, but most all of their work was phenomenal. In this speech that day, one thing caught my ear. According to him, Goodby, Berlin and Silverstein’s work succeeded because it was aimed to connect with audiences’ “highest common denominator.”
The moment he said it, a small volt of electricity hit. Bzap. And it stuck. I’ve spent the 20+ years since then trying to (a) do work that speaks to a Highest Common Denominator (b) trying to understand what Jeff was even talking about. What I figured out pretty quickly was that “highest common denominator” work isn’t work where you have to read The New Yorker to get the ad. It might be a joke about Rice Krispies. It might be a good kung-fu move. It might be the way the light hits the flowers. But I do believe there is a highest common denominator lying there as a potential solution to nearly every assignment. It is the secret to great work, and it’s our job to find it.
I don’t know if highest common denominator thinking makes us better people. One could argue that it reminds us of our best selves and makes our collective community better. But that might also be utter hogwash. It shouldn’t be exclusionary and it shouldn’t be so low you feel like taking a shower after. It’s democratic — an AOC voter and a Trump fan would both appreciate it. And that’s why it works.
It certainly has something to do with acknowledging that advertisers are — as Bill Bernbach put it — the uninvited guest. We owe it to our audiences to be more respectful of their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste. We should consider them, no matter who they are, to be worthy of our best thinking. And we should strive to deliver it.
Making that work isn’t always easy, but judging it is. The way I measure our creative is incredibly simple:
Does the audience feel better having experienced our work?
Does the audience feel spoken to versus shouted at?
Is there some beauty, truth and/or wit in the work?
That criteria might seem unbearably obvious, but, um, just take a look at the majority of marketing that surrounds us. Yeah…
Bottom line, I think, is this: highest common denominator thinking reminds us of the best parts of being human beings. Sure, it’s great to be an animal too, to do all those things we share with every rutting beast in the wild. Lots of advertising that hits those basic notes. But the work we like best is marketing where some part of our cerebral cortex high fives another part and says “Fuck yeah, that’s why we’re here.”
Mozart got there. Aretha did too. At our little shop we aim for it every single day. Maybe not as often as Goodby, but then, he has a 25-year head start.