The Producers - do your worst

Struggling to come up with that ground-breaking, award-winning, career-defining idea? Then maybe you’re trying too hard.

Everything I know about advertising I learnt from the movies #14

From your first day at school, throughout your whole life you’ve probably been told to do one particular thing, above all others: your best. But do you ever get the feeling, despite doing that, it doesn’t seem to work?

Sometimes, especially with creativity, it’s just not enough. Either the ideas won’t come, or if they do, they get quickly shot down. So, maybe rather than trying to do your best all the time, you should try doing something else instead: your worst.

In The Producers, Mel Brooks’ famous comedy from 1967, a Broadway impresario, Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, has a nice line in defrauding wealthy elderly women to finance plays that never get made.

When his accountant Leo Bloom, played by Gene Wilder, discovers the fraud, Max needs to hide it from the IRS, and Leo tells him that the IRS don’t investigate plays that lose money. So, Max comes up with a brilliant idea that will kill two birds with one stone: keep the IRS off his back and earn him lots of money too. Together Max and Leo come up with a plan to produce a surefire flop, which they will oversell interests in, then flee to Brazil with the proceeds.

First, they need to find the right script, and soon do: “Springtime for Hitler” – written by a deranged ex-Nazi. They then find the perfect director, a flamboyantly gay transvestite, with a track record of abysmal failures. And to complete the plan, they cast a hippie actor to play Hitler as a beatnik, and bribe the New York Times Theatre critic to write a savage review. To make things spicier still, Max and Leo are of course both Jewish. What could possibly go wrong? Or rather right.

As it turns out, everything. Audiences see it as a brilliant satire and it is a massive hit, which lands them in a whole world of trouble, but I don’t want to spoil the story for you – or set the wrong example. I mean, who in their right mind would go celebrating Nazis?

In his book, “Alchemy: The Surprising Power of ideas That Don’t Make Sense,” Rory Sutherland talks about how the opposite of a good idea, can also be a good idea. This is exactly what Springtime for Hitler turns out to be, even though it wasn't exactly what Max and Leo had in mind.

Sometimes we try too hard to do everything right, when perhaps sometimes we should rather think about what could happen if we do everything wrong. When everybody else is trying to do their best – and yours might not seem good enough – then try doing your worst. Something so bad, that’s it’s actually very good. It might sound crazy, but it just might work (and it’s often a lot less sweat too).

Even if it doesn’t work and you wouldn’t share it with your client, your ECD or even your mum, it might get you to a brilliant idea that you could.