We’re currently looking for fledgling art directors and
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There's a good article in this week's AdAge on the phenomenon that the Dove "Evolution" spot has become. In just two weeks, and with zero media dollars spent, the spot has had two million views, and has been played on CNN, "Ellen", "The View" and "Entertainment Tonight." It has also, according to Technorati, been one of the most blogged about topics of the past few weeks. And as a personal anecdote, my wife has had it emailed to her by 4 different people. She's never had anyone email her an ad before. But most of all, it's led to 3 times the traffic to the CampaignForRealBeauty.com website that Dove's Superbowl ad did last year.
Just to reiterate: they've had better results from an ad on YouTube than from a Superbowl ad which cost roughly $2 million dollars in media.
Russell had a piece in Campaign magazine last week speculating that soon we'd get to the point that a forward-thinking brand would have zero dollars spent in media. Apparently we didn't have to wait very long.
Incidentally, it was a Toronto production. Kudos to Nancy & Janet and everyone at Ogilvy Toronto for this - nice work.
I spent Friday in a big meeting for one of our clients who is trying to come up with a global brand idea for a new product launch. There were agencies and clients there from 5 countries across North America and Europe.
Everyone had received the same brief, and each country came back with several ideas, so over the day we saw about 20 ideas presented in quick succession. It was a good chance to see lots of different creative ideas and lots of different presentation styles, and made me think about what worked and what didn't. Some observations:
Romance your idea. Some people got up and just started showing
scripts & illustrations, with no set-up. Others told a story.
They started with the brief, explained the tensions they'd found in it,
had a point of view on the people who buy the product, and walked
through their overall thought process that led them to the work. This
made them seem smarter, and made the work more powerful by putting it
in context. I think sometimes we expect great ideas to sell themselves
- that people will just know good work when they see it. It's not
true. People all come with their own contexts and backgrounds and are probably distracted by thinking about a hundred other things. Frame the idea for people. Tell them how to evaluate it. Tell
them why it works.
Slow down & repeat yourself. When people are seeing 20 ideas in a row, it's tempting to think you need to speed through your work because there's so much. That's totally wrong. Slow down. Repeat what your core idea is several times so it's clear. Even better, use multiple ways of presenting it - don't just rely on a few powerpoint slides. Create some boards, print a hand-out sheet, make an idea video, act it out. It's not overkill: people are seeing 20 ideas, so help them internalize yours. Those are the ones that stand out.
Don't undermine your own work. Some people got up and said they had a
few good ideas, and a few that weren't as good. So why bother? Believe
in everything you're showing. Saying that you don't like some of it
makes me doubt all of your ideas, and worse, your judgement. If you
didn't think something's good, then why did you bring it? It's your
job to filter. And if you do decide to show it anyway, don't say it's
bad, because you never know what someone else will like, especially in a
global meeting with people from other countries/cultures. I sort of
liked one of their "bad" ideas but after they'd dismissed it, that became the frame by which everyone judged it. It was
never going to be taken seriously.
Being interesting trumps being perfectly on strategy. Some ideas clearly addressed everything on the brief, but didn't feel inspiring. Other ideas felt huge and inspiring, but didn't address everything on the brief quite as well. I found the big and inspiring stuff stuck with me the most, and that's what I argued for. Inspiring is hard to come by, and being interesting is a bigger challenge today than
communicating some stuff about your product. If you're not
interesting, having a message that addresses everything on the brief
won't matter - it will get ignored. So it's easier to take an inspiring idea and fill in a few details than to take a technically sound but pedantic idea and try to force it to be inspiring. If something feels big, it's important to notice that and figure out why you feel inspired. Because if it takes your breath away and excites you, it will probably have the same effect in market.
Anybody else been in a situation like this? Have any other observations to share?
This is a classic (well, as much as something from 1998 can be a classic):
Great use of editing and music to make their point. A perfect demonstration of the power of making you feel something rather than just telling you something.
I think I'm becoming a curmudgeon. I've seen some really horrible business writing in presentations and memos recently, and I just want to give people a rap on the knuckles. Really, there's no excuse for it. We work in communications.
Henry over at Trends reminded me of this gem from George Orwell's famous 1945 essay "Politics and the English Language." Today these remain great rules for any memo or Powerpoint presentation. We should all memorize them.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Orwell also offers these questions to ask while you're writing.
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Genius stuff (and now that I think about it, also not a bad formula for making an ad). If we could all follow that even ten percent of the time the world would be a better place.
In his columns on ESPN.com lately, Bill Simmons – prompted by
the Houston Texans drafting Mario Williams ahead of Reggie Bush - has been advocating
for the creation of a position called Vice President of Common Sense.
He writes:
Every professional
sports team needs to hire a Vice President of Common Sense, someone who cracks
the inner circle of the decision-making process along with the GM, assistant
GM, head scout, head coach, owner and whomever else. One catch: the VP of CS
doesn't attend meetings, scout prospects, watch any film or listen to any
inside information or opinions; he lives the life of a common fan”.
By doing so, he thinks organizations could eliminate (or
reduce) the number of bad decisions that groups with access to too much
information or who are too close to a problem often make. The VP of Common Sense would always be a step
back from everything and have more perspective.
Which is a long-winded way of saying Tesco might think about
adding a VP of CS, because there’s no way this product would’ve slipped by if
they’d had one.
Well this is nice... Typepad have profiled us on their homepage today as part of their Featured Blogs series. They say some nice things. Thanks, Typepad.
After today the writeup will live here, on Typepad's featured blogs page, which is really worth checking out as a fantastic way to explore and find some new blogs.
I read about something called a Project 365 on Lifehacker a
while back. Basically, you take a
photograph every day for a year. (I’m
sure people have been doing this for years without attaching a snappy name to
it.)
A photographer I am not. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the exhibit of my work currently
on display at Gallery Leo. But what
better reason to give it a go? Hopefully
at the end of a year I’ll be a better photographer for it, I’ll have developed
creatively and I’ll have some cool photos to show for it. And hopefully the whole year won’t be shots
of stuff on my desk, what I’m watching on TV, strobe photos of the cat and my
ongoing project to see how long it takes the TTC to install a door, which is
what I’ve got so far.
But even if it is just daily boring stuff, that’s fine with
me. I was at the McCord Museum of
Canadian History in Montreal over the weekend
and I was knocked out by their collection of photographs from the Notman Archive, many of which are excellent shots of everyday, boring things.
Maclean's is a national news magazine in Canada. They're not the most cutting edge or insightful publication, but they have a fairly broad mainstream readership. And this week, they've become the latest instance of old media hugely, colossally, missing the point. Here's their cover article:
Now I realize they're probably trying to be contrarian and raise some hackles to sell some magazines, but come on. The internet sucks? Really?
You know, I was originally just going to post the shot of the cover and let it speak for itself, but now I think it deserves a response. Yes, the internet is filled with porn, and spam, and scammers, and misinformation, and bad people doing bad things, and mean people, and selfish people, and boring people, and crazy people, and the whole enterprise is messy and convoluted and confusing. But you know what? That's also what LIFE is like. And that's why Maclean's is missing the point.
The internet is one of the most powerful forces ever created not because it elevates dialogue to a better place or represents us at our best, but because it allows us to see each other exactly as we are. It reflects humanity in all its forms, from every
corner of the world. By connecting everyone to everything it allows us to see
unfiltered windows onto other people's lives in ways we never have been able
to before. And that teaches us important things about the human condition.
Ever since the printing press, media has been centralized and controlled and edited, so the world you're seeing is someone's version of the world. With the internet you really can get an unfiltered view of the world (of course, you can still choose to rely on others to control and edit for you), and have to navigate your way through it, find communities, share ideas, and build your own view of the world. That ability changes the power structures. It changes how information is disseminated. It changes how we see things. And yes, that's messy and nasty sometimes, but that is what life is. Saying the internet sucks is saying life sucks.
Watch this 9-minute video of a random selection of YouTube postings edited together.
Yes some of the people are boring, or silly, or use bad language. But I find it really beautiful and inspiring. And what gives you a better sense of humanity and what regular people are up to... this, or the op/ed page in a news magazine?
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