The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Speaking of celebrity obsession, your prey is currently in Chicago. Why aren’t you?

And the title of this post is great as well.

publicise me as a creative engineering director and every fucker gets their brief solved in 2 seconds flat. why the fuck do we need planners? waste of fucking skin 🙂 the issue with engineering is similar to adlands except we dont have a problem attracting the masses, we just cant/dont/wont train them to think beyond the standard definition of an ad. twats

PS: Einstein is pointing to the word “ass”… hng hng hng…

so gredge, do you reckon direct marketing is the engineering of advertising do you? you reckon anyone in any other discipline makes things up? dont go there because youll only come across as one of those myopic fuckers who doesnt realise data just tells you what happened in the past, not why.

Great topic. Enjoying the conversation too.

ive just spoken to rob who is stuck in an airport and wishes he could get to a computer to rant about how this topic is evolving. it kills me to say this but hes a fucking smart planning wanker and even he feels the industry is too often up its own arse spouting science in an attempt to try and feel important and valuable to a community that couldnt give a fuck about us. science can be used in developing insight but it means fuck all unless it can then be turned it into something motivating, exciting and imaginative which too many people are forgetting in favor of a fucking approach akin to writing an instruction guide for a 1989 video recorder. its not science we need in advertising, its fucking common sense. pity the client im just about to go and see. im not in the mood for any shit. thanks gredge, youve woken me up.

This is not just about science in advertising, surely? I thought it was about how to explain to kids that thinking like an engineer is useful.

But if we are going to talk about science and advertising or, to make it broader, evidence based business decision making, lets be clear: an empirically based solution might be limited; but one that doesn’t look at any data is just irresponsible.

The common link bewteen science and communication is a desire to discover something we don’t know and in the pursuit of that “something” come up with something magical. It’s like looking past a very distant star in order to see that it’s there.

In both science and advertising you can go the wrong way and try and support something you don’t know with stuff that is considered to be correct. The leads to boring shit that either doesn’t work, or only works a little.

That may sound a bit soppy, but it’s something I really believe in.

For advertising – it’s not an art, it’s not a science, and there are healthy amounts of going on blind faith/making stuff up.

Then knocking it down, and trying again; whether you use conventionally ‘artistic’ or ‘scientific’ techniques.

And Rob, as for recruitment in engineering, I’m not surprised, and agree with you. God knows I think it’s bad enough in advertising – so I’m co-writing a blog on the subject (http://adgrads.blogspot.com/). I think the notion of crushing creativity has to tie in to persistence in some way – knowing that getting a job you really want is often bloody hard, and takes real effort.

Manage to enforce those two on young wannabe engineers, and I reckon things will take off.

Woohoo! Here we go… Andy Mad Person, I’m glad you’re awake, but far out the thread has gone a bit bung.

We’ve shifted from “why kids don’t fancy engineering” (answer: they think it’s boring, dirty and low-paid spanner-wielding, and apart from Mythbusters, nobody is making it appear otherwise*), to “we don’t need science, we need common sense!”

Common sense works a treat when putting up a tent. But if you want to build Bilbao, or the Opera House, you want a BIG FUCKING IDEA — and then you want to know the strain capacity of the material you’re using to build your dream, which you can extract from *interpreting* data you already have, and maybe testing a hypothesis IN THE LAB.

And then you want a client who looks at the Big Fucking Idea, looks at the nicely drawn blueprints, looks at your team of TRAINED EXPERTS, and says, yep, you can build that. I’ll let you. It’s not going to fall over and kill me on opening day because some weak-arsed human fax machine of a client service minion diluted the glue because I made a passing comment about it looking very sticky and they didn’t know how to respond.

Data is meaningless. Interpretation of data is everything. Advertising as a Science is a dumb idea; but so is Psychology as a Hobby. I’m fed up with people who know just enough to be dangerous making up processes and dumping wrung-out nonsense on my telly with the excuse that it’s probably not going to hurt anyone.

PS: I spent THREE YEARS of my LIFE as Direct Marketing Creative Director for ****bank, repeatedly asking for – just once – a 50/50 split on some creative so we could prove that a simple idea beats the crap out of some shit offer. No dice. You’d think they owned a forest, the way they wasted paper.

*Rob if you use this on this brief I’ll break your titty-radio…

Oh and James.

Like all life, its about balance. And possibly more importantly for advertising, its about understanding that balance.

Haha. Such a big business thing to do.

I love how Sainsburys promote their eco friendly reusable bags one week, then give away their magazine free to everyone the week after; and have shelves filled with hundreds of their promotional leaflets.

Jesus … is it a full moon? What’s been going on today?

OK … I do believe that too many people in advertising treat it like a science when the output is far more about insight and imagination – however I also am a massive believer that science CAN [and does] help generate insights which can form the underpinning of a core idea which the creatives can take and make fantastic.

The work I did on Tango, Virgin, Apple and Mini all are testimony to this approach but their power was that they helped form/validate the core insight rather than become the expression of the campaign idea.

And absolutely I value data … without it you cannot move forward or sell/justify/prove an ideas effectiveness [the only way we got to do the work we did at HHCL was by being able to prove it would work, no one spends millions based on personal opinion] … however I am very critical when people use data to just say what has occurred rather than why people reacted that way.

Put it this way – I am more about Freakonomics than Tipping Point if you know what I mean! Ha!

With a waist like that you’re way beyond the Tipping Point1

Kudos, but you’re not meant to eat all of them at once!

Just goes to show how important the data is!

The old insight/implementation dilemma rears its head again.

For what it is worth, I really like that idea Lauren. It’s not going to start wholesale changes, but it will maybe start stopping people seeing them as 2 completely disperate disciplines.

Katie … thanks for the comment and I’ll try and explain where I am coming from with the caveat that this is a subject which is so open to interpretation that it is unlikely there will ever be a way of coming to a clear conclusion.

The other thing I need to express before I continue is that I was talking purely about technological innovation [The post was about how to encourage more people to become engineers] … I do appreciate social, cultural and economical innovation is continuing to develop at a rapid rate and I appreciate I should have maybe made that abit more obvious, ha!

OK, so what is innovation?

Well that is about as ambigious a question as you can get. What one person thinks is fresh and new, another thinks is an old idea in new clothing.

Was iPOD an innovation or a modern take on the Walkman?

Was Harry Potter an innovation or a modern take on the classic archetype story?

Now you might think I am being pedantic [and I probably am 🙂 ] but these are questions that are part of the cause of the ambiguity you are calling me on.

Sure China is supplying its energy usage through the use of Wind Farms but is that really an innovation?

OK, it is societal / cultural /economic innovation – but given the technology has been there for centuries, is that something we can really claim as new?

And yes, the internet is allowing people to connect, combine and act like never before – but that’s a technology that has been around in one guise or another for a couple of decades, so is that more about cultural innovation or technological? [And then I could argue that for all the talk of us being able to now instigate massive change on a global level, there’s not been too many examples of it]

The issue I have is that much of what we PERCEIVE as innovative is more about evolution – both interms of the technology and/or the impact it has on society and/or the economy.

Sure I am basing this comment on innovation that achieves a certain level of ‘mass acceptance/acknowledgement/acclaim’ [which is where there is a massive flaw in my argument, ha] however putting medicine, the internet and the arts aside [medicine: because I acknowledge their pioneering success / internet: because I do think its impact has been nothing short of revolutionary / art: because it is too amigious to disect properly] can you really say our lives [not just our lifestyles] have been dramatically and undeniably impacted like say … the period of the last century?

I do appreciate where you are coming from and I do acknowledge I was being rather ‘dramatic’ in my statement but much of the examples you use I can counter as being evolutionary change – and while you could then counter by saying the ‘effect’ they had was societal / cultural / economic innovation, we’ll just be going round and round in circles, ha!

For what its worth, I’ve been talking about this issue with three clients of mine who all have a vested interest in this area – DISCOVERY Channel, Apple and NASA – and it always causes a massive debate mainly because invention, innovation and creativity are all open to interpretation and counter comment.

As I said, my view was based purely on technological innovation – and yes, there are more patents being registered than ever before [though we can’t forget that doesn’t mean they ever make it to production] – however interms of products that fundamentally shape the way we live [barring the elements I’ve already highlighted] people like economist Jorge Niosi, US Government Physisist Jonathan Huebner and business analyst/physicist, Theodore Modis [plus a bunch of people at New Scientist] to name but a few, agree that we are not experieincing as dramatic change than that of previous centuries – even though to be fair, we’re only 7 years into this one so maybe we should all come back later and have a look then, ha!

Saying all this, I do agree with you wholeheartedly on one thing … alot of the ‘innovation’ spouted by adwankers [thanks for that] is about as innovative as an Andrew Llyod Weber musical – and surely you won’t disagree with that ‘claim’, ha!

predictable fucker is our rob.

Good point Pete.
Maybe that confusion is part of the problem…

I think I should point out that Rob probably has a lot to do with this potential downturn in technological innovation because every time he meets the Apple guys, he reminds them that when they were purely focused on innovation, they almost went bankrupt and when they started mastering existing technologies, they became rich. There you have it, conclusive proof Rob Campbell is a virus. 🙂

george calls it as he sees it