So I flew back from Bangkok and whilst walking through their fancy [but seemingly, still unfinished] airport …
… I noticed a rather interesting – yet astoundingly practical – evolution to the common rubbish bin.
Yep, it’s see-through. So bloody obvious eh?!
I remember a friend of mine who was a soldier in Ireland – and he said the thing he was most scared of were rubbish bins because you never knew what was hiding in them. I wonder how many lives would have been saved it they had simply moved from bins of solid colour to bins of transparency? Can’t of been that hard to do could it?
Anyway, this is another example of what I call ‘practical innovation’.
At the heart of all these is the need to answer a particular issue/problem.
There are a couple of examples I particularly love …
1. The photocopier was invented by a guy at a US patent office who was fed up of having to fill in the same form over and over again.
2. My mate Ian created the see-through shoe box because he saw his wife constantly hunting through her shoe boxes to find the right pair for the outfit she was wearing.
3. The ‘Trim Trolley’ that Tesco’s created [again, thanks to Ian] to help time-poor women get fit by making the trolley have variable resistance levels.
Great eh!
So isn’t it sad so many people in advertising talk about channel-neutral solutions and then end up solving their clients problems always via an ‘ad’?
And isn’t it disappointing that so many clients talk about wanting agencies to solve their business problems then only allow them to do a TVC?
This industry needs a great big fucking wake-up call … and I include those clients with 1950’s philosophies as to how to market to consumers.
I truly believe advertising is still an important force in business … hardly any other area [bar product development – which has been the driving force for brand growth over the last 5-8 years] can match it for helping create an ‘image memory’ into the minds of existing/potential consumers. However unless more people and agencies start backing this up with practical solutions to clients/consumer needs – then we’re going to end up being more frustrated, restricted and humiliated than we ever thought possible.
I mean, do you really like the fact one-dimensional thinkers [copyright Fred] like ‘McKinsey’s’ are treated with greater respect than us folk in adland? Especially because at end of the day, all they try and do is ‘cost-cut’ their way to profitability when we know that if you really want to make your business better, you do it from people power … something adland [and planners] are the true experts in.
I love advertising … some of the people and attitudes are abit questionable … but I really love what I do.
What’s pissing me off is what it’s becoming – especially because alot of it is in the hands of the people within the industry … the people who have an inherent [and almost un-natural] desire to be regarded as a high-end business intellectual as opposed to an expert in ‘motivating the masses’.
Power FROM The People … Power TO The People … it’s what made us [and should continue to make us] unbelievably valuable to business!