Good. Fast. Cheap.

“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.” No doubt you’ve heard someone invoke that advertising bromide at one time or another. I’ve been known to invoke it myself on ocassion. But no more. Because it’s wrong. And now we’re going to see if I can fill a whole column explaining why I think so.

There’s no question that there’s an inherent tension between these three dimensions of advertising -- time, money and quality. And I’ll concede right upfront that the thrust of the bromide is almost always true. Namely, that you can’t get good advertising when, as many clients are wont to do, you provide no time or money. But picking two of them doesn’t necessarily relieve that tension. If I remember my math correctly, there are three meaningful combinations of these dimensions that you can theoretically pick (after eliminating fast/fast, good/good and cheap/cheap.) Let’s consider each of them, shall we?

Fast and cheap. These two, you can definitely choose. They are brethren. Sympatico. And, unfortunately, they are parents to most of the advertising to which we subject the world. Fast can be cheap all by itself, simply because fast means fewer billable hours and day-rated days are eaten up. Of course, fast can be expensive all by itself, if you factor in rush charges and mistakes caused by rushing.

Cheap, on the other hand, seldom engenders speed. Cheap often means going with a grade B agency/writer/art director/commercial director/editor/music house/photographer/illustrator/whatever. Part of what makes grade B grade B is the fact that, often, it/he/she/they aren’t quite as fast/efficient/together (how annoying are all those slashes) as Grade A.

Point? Well, you can go the fast and cheap route, but it may not be as fast as fast-and-expensive, nor as cheap as cheap-and-slow.

Okay, how about good and cheap. Does that work? Well, it can ( as countless Creative Directors have pointed out to countless minions at countless agencies. “A big idea doesn’t depend on a big budget”, I believe is how it goes.) BUT, depending on the category, the medium, the target audience, if cheap comes out cheap-looking, regardless of how big the idea is, that can undermine the impression you’re trying to leave your target with. Many big ideas do depend on a big budget. Apple’s “1984” spot just wouldn’t have worked on the cheap. Since I’ve begun writing this particular column, I’ve kept an eye out for a current example of a good idea, diminished by too small a budget. Unfortunately, there are, as always, precious few good ideas out there, and most of them are nicely-executed, well-financed spots from one dotcom or another, Fox Sports, Sony Playstation and the like. Most everything else you see on TV are well-financed non-ideas.

That leaves us with good and fast. This is where the bromide blows up. It blows up good. Because good is inextricably intertwined with time.

It takes a certain amount of time to load up on information about the product, the problem, the competition and the target. Then it takes a certain amount of time (days, not hours or minutes) for all that brain fertilizer to sink in and start nourishing the idea farm. You need to sleep on it, more than once, if possible. Then it takes a certain amount of time to harvest all those ideas (this farm metaphor is getting old.) Then it takes time to weed out the mediocre ideas, and push and polish the promising ones.

When you get the assignment on Tuesday and the client presentation is Friday, the best you’re going to get is competent, relatively expected solutions. Sure, there is the rare exception -- a really good, maybe even great idea that hits within the early hours of the process. But the chances of this are sufficiently slim that basing your timetables on it would be the dumbest kind of stupid. Foolish with a capital DUH.

The same is true during production. When you rush the process, you lose out on think time, eliminate options that more time would’ve given you, increase the risk of error. Sure, you can produce a TV spot in four weeks. But if you have eight weeks, you have a better chance of getting the director and editor you want. You have more time to let the idea evolve in the minds of the latter. You have time to consider your options, to cast properly, to go over the production more carefully, to be sure you aren’t missing an opportunity, short-changing the idea, or neglecting some aspect of the production. If someone screws up, you have time to fix it rather than living with the results of the screw-up. You can give the music guy more than the customary 12 hours to come up with a scratch track. He might even have time to consider a two or three possible directions.

Time isn’t money. Time is far more valuable. In fact, as Chairman Jimmy so sagely puts it, “Time is the currency of quality.” You get what you pay for. And when you don’t spend the time, you wind up paying in many other ways.

“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two.” It’s just a bad way to frame your thinking. How about approaching it this way instead: How good can I get in this amount of time for this amount of money? And if that’s not good enough, find more time or more money. Easy for me to say. On the other hand, you got a better idea?