Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Confidence, Content, Context, Creativity, Culture, Distinction, Diversity, Family, Happiness, Imagination, Innocence, Innovation, Jill, Mum, Mum & Dad, My Fatherhood, Otis, Paul, Relevance, Resonance
Can you imagine what it must have been like growing up in the 1920’s and living in the 1960’s?
The things you have seen, endured, been challenged by?
The advances in technology, social mobility, medicine?
Wars, depression, liberation, love.
It must have been amazing …
Well, the reason I say this is because it’s exactly the same if you were a kid in the 80’s but are around today.
OK, it’s not identical … but the cultural shifts have been, in many ways, just as dramatic.
Wars. Economic highs and lows. Medical and transportation revolution. The internet.
Huge shifts in expressions of creativity – from music, art, film and TV to fashion, food, technology and sport.
An endless journey of exploration, discovery and adventure.
And while it can all feel daunting, the reality is the changes are rarely night and day.
More like a steady stream of progress, even if not always in a straight line or done with fairness or equality.
Throughout her life, my Mum was very much about embracing the present.
Not in the sense that she was trying to mimic Cher [though I also love Cher] … nor that she didn’t value the experience and lessons of the past … but because her view was that if you embrace the times, you live a more fulfilling life.
It’s why she was always interested in what others were interested in.
Music. Art. Film. Culture.
Because even if she didn’t always understand it or like it, she felt it was important to appreciate it. Though, you would be amazed how much she did like it. Love it even.
It amazes me how many people don’t seem to follow this view.
Who think that actually, you can turn back time.
Like Republican/Tory voters. Or Daily Mail readers.
Stubbornly trying to maintain or recreate a time where they felt more ‘in control’. More important or valuable.
And while I appreciate change can be scary, it can also be exhilarating and that’s why the idea of living in the equivilent of the 1920’s to 1960’s has never made me feel so old, it’s also never made me feel so lucky.
I hope with all my heart I get to experience the World when Otis has gone through the same period of time.
It’s unlikely, but I hope he embraces it.
Not just for his happiness, but for what it could inspire him to do.
To discover.
To learn.
Thank you Mum.
Filed under: Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, China, Comment, Context, Creativity, Culture, Distinction, Diversity, Emotion, England, Equality, Experience, Family, Food For Thought, Friendship, Fulfillment, Home, Hong Kong, Hope, Imagination, Immaturity, Innocence, Insight, Italy, Jill, London, Mum & Dad, My Fatherhood, Otis, Paul, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Point Of View, Relationships, Relevance, Resonance, Shanghai, Standards, Wieden+Kennedy
A few weeks ago, my friend – Philippa White, the founder of TIE – spoke to me about my life.
While many would say that is the single worst idea anyone could have, Philippa – for reasons that still escape me – thought differently.
TIE – or The International Exchange – is an amazing thing.
They link people from the commercial world [from big organisations to people from BBH and W+K] with social initiatives around the world, providing unique opportunities that will transform the lives of both parties.
It’s an absolutely amazing organisation and the people who have done it talk about how it has had a profound affect on their lives – for the experience they had, the realisation that their skills can benefit people in different ways that they ever imagined and the lessons they learnt about what they’re good at, what they want to be good at and the future they can now envision for themselves.
I have not done TIE, but Philippa and I bonded when we met over the power of overseas experiences and learning and for some reason she wanted to talk about my journey.
We cover a whole lot of topics, from family to friendship to failure and while it may only be interesting to those looking for a cure for insomnia, if you’re looking for development, growth and having more meaning and value from your life … I can assure you TIE is definitely going to be of interest to you.
Thank you Philippa. Thank you TIE.
You can be disappointed by it here.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Authenticity, China, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Creativity, Culture, Entertainment, Fake Attitude, Imagination, Immaturity, Innocence, Innovation, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Packaging, Planners, Relevance, Resonance, Standards, Wieden+Kennedy
Yes it’s real.
Yes, it has been out for at least 4 months.
And yes, there are so many things I could say about it … but I’m relying on you do it for me.
I will say this however …
When I worked on Old Spice at Wieden – which was only for Asia and had little to do with the great work from Portland – we were adamant that while the creativity should be allowed to explore all manner of mad worlds, the packaging/fragrances had to communicate stability because otherwise there was the danger the whole brand would look like one giant joke.
Or said another way …
The product had to allow madness around it rather than try to compete with it.
I’ll leave it there, over to you …
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Brand, Brand Suicide, Business, China, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Corporate Evil, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Design, Differentiation, Emotion, Empathy, England, Fake Attitude, Fulfillment, Hope, Imagination, Innocence, Innovation, Insight, Loyalty, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Only In Adland, Perspective, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Positioning, Premium, Professionalism, Relevance, Research, Resonance, Supermarkets
Above is a point of sale sign from a local supermarket.
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT!!!
What a pile of utter shite.
Noticeable for it’s stupidity rather than it’s inspiration.
The sort of stuff you would expect from a 5 year old writing jokes for a Christmas Cracker, than a company with well paid staff, responsible for the commercial growth of an organisation.
So who is to blame?
Well there are many who should feel a sense of shame – from ad agencies to research companies to clients – however when I think of who started this horribleness to begin, I can’t help but feel it was at the hands of the marketing department.
Of course even they are not totally to blame.
The C-Suite, with their demands and expectations have a lot to answer for … almost as much as the investors, who say they want the companies they invest in to be good companies but they better make increasing profits every quarter.
But what I found fascinating coming back to Western markets from Asian – specifically China – was how little ambition there really was.
Oh companies would talk about it – wax lyrical about it – but when you delved a little deeper, you saw there wasn’t much there.
Instead the focus was far more about defending rather than growing, corporate convenience rather than customer understanding, explaining rather than communicating and short-term conformity rather than long term change.
But of course, ad agencies need to take their blame for this situation as well.
Too many doing whatever clients want rather than what they need.
Profiting from process over creativity.
Celebrating speed over substance.
What makes it worse is some think this leads to good work.
Effective work. Using ‘proof’ that ignores the myriad of small, separate elements that combine to drive success so they can place themselves on a self-appointed pedestal.
But there are some who have a bit more self-awareness.
Who know what they’re doing is not as good as it could be.
Or should be.
But rather than face their responsibility in all of this, they blame others for how this came about … turning to questionable research that is based on a few tweets, a couple of chats around the agency or claims every single person on the planet can have their attitudes and behaviours characterised by a singular colour or some other bollocks.
And from this, they will claim the public don’t care about smart stuff.
That they ‘don’t understand’ good ideas and writing.
They they’re simply not interested in creativity and ideas.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
I’ve got to tell you, I’m absolutely over it.
I’m over the focus on the lowest common denominator.
Let’s face it, life would be pretty horrible and boring if that is how we really operated … and contrary to popular belief, we don’t.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t elements of predictability in what we do, but to ignore the nuance … to suggest everything we aspire to is exactly the same, delivered via an identical approach … is just plain bullshit.
But here’s the kicker, because more clients and agencies seems to be adopting this approach.
White labelling, phoned-in solutions with a cool sounding names that actively destroys any sense of differentiation and distinctiveness of their brand from countless competitors while also directly insulting the intelligence of the customers they rely on to survive.
I get it’s less hassle to just agree with clients.
I get that having income coming in right now is very important.
I get that a single point-of-sale sign is not going to change the world.
But when we are willing to allow our standards to be determined by how quick we can make money, then all we’re doing is ensuring the long-term value of our industry – and the talented people in it or wanting to be in it – dies even more quickly.
And that’s why I am also over people being quick to piss on anyone trying to do something different.
Claiming it’s self indulgent.
Labelling it a failure before it’s even run.
Saying it won’t appeal to the audience … despite not knowing the brand, the brief, the audience or how people actually think or act outside of some hypothetical customer journey / strategic framework of convenience.
And yet, when you look at the brands, the work and the agencies who consistently resonate deeply and authentically with culture and drive long-term loyalty, growth and profit – it’s the usual suspects and a few newbies, like Nils and the fabulous folks at Uncommon.
Yes our job is to help our clients achieve more than they hoped. Yes our job is to attract rather than repel. But our job is also to help build the future for our clients … influencing, shaping and – sometimes – forcing dramatic change even before the masses are quite ready for it, which means doing work that challenges and provokes for all the right reasons … sometimes asking questions of the audience rather than boring them into beige submission.
And while I acknowledge there are risks in all of that, I personally believe it is far riskier to dumb everything down to it’s lowest common denominator, because every single thing we love, respect and covet has come from someone or something doing something different.
Whether that’s an idea, a product, a story or a new way of looking at the World … it has come from people who understood who we are but take us further than we imagined, pushing the journey and the story with every new chapter of what they create.
They could have taken the easy route.
They could have focused on optimising the rewards.
They could have spent their time ‘removing friction from the transactional process’.
But they didn’t. Or at least, they didn’t just focus on that.
They embraced the risk to create something bigger and more unexpectedly resonant.
Or should I say unexpectedly resonant by those judging them, because they knew exactly where they were going.
And this is why the people who are so quick to dismiss anyone trying to do something new need to understand their actions say far more about who they are and what they value than anything else. And in an industry that is fighting for its life, I put my faith in those using creativity to change the game rather than those who just talk about violation of some old rules.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Apple, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Comment, Content, Context, Craft, Creative Brief, Creativity, Culture, Design, Emotion, Experience, Imagination, Innocence, Innovation, Insight, Marketing, Music, Planning, Presenting, Professionalism, Relevance, Resonance, Standards, The Beatles, The Kennedys, The Kennedys Shanghai, Unexpected Relevance, Wieden+Kennedy
One of the things I love about this industry is our way of re-writing rules.
I don’t mean that in terms of post-rationalisation.
I don’t mean that in terms of rebellion.
I mean it in terms of letting creativity take us to new places.
That said, I think a lot of people forget this.
Clients and colleagues.
Specifically the one’s who encourage work to go where others have gone before.
Or where the brand has previously been.
Or just killing ideas before they’ve had a chance to start to evolve.
Of course I appreciate what we do has a lot of implications on our clients business.
That to get it wrong has serious ramifications.
But – and it’s a big but – doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t move you forward.
The opposite in fact.
They know this.
We know this.
And yet I hear words like ‘optimisation’ far more than I do ‘creativity’ these days.
Now I get it, you want to get every bit of value from something that you can, but our obsession with models and processes just limits our ability to invent and move forward.
Please don’t think I’m discounting the value of experience.
There’s a lot to be said for it.
But basing the future purely on what has happened in the past – specifically your individual past – is not experience, it’s blinkered.
Case in point.
Mouldy Whopper.
Here was a campaign that was attempting to do something differently. But rather than be curious about how it would be received, industry people – the same folks who are supposed to be pushing for creativity – were violently writing it off from the beginning. And when I pointed out that no one really knew what the campaign was trying to achieve – I copped it too.
Hell, I didn’t even like it very much, but I appreciated they were doing something different and evidence showed it was getting people to talk about preservatives in food – which was a positive for BK – so at the very least there were something positive in that. But then a senior industry person challenged me – said it was only people in the bubble of adland doing that – so when I proved he was wrong, he just disappeared. Happy to throw out personal opinion but not happy to be shown it was just his personal opinion. And that was my issue, we didn’t know how it would go. We had thoughts, we had opinions but we didn’t give it the time to see how it played out and apparently, it did pretty well by a whole range of metrics.
Of course, the great irony is that when you do have a brand that believes creativity can move things forward in unexpected ways, then you get accused of your job being easy.
I can’t tell you the amount of times people said to me, “it can’t be hard working on NIKE, they love being creative”.
Of course, the people who say this have never worked on NIKE and tend to be the first to criticise anything they think is ‘too creative’.
My god, when Da Da Ding came out, the wave of, “I don’t get it”, “it’s indulgent” was amazing.
But not as amazing as the fact that a lot of the abuse came from white men not based in India.
But I digress.
I love creativity.
I use that word specifically as I see it as being much bigger than advertising.
At least in terms of where the inspiration can come from and how it can be applied.
I am in awe when I see ideas taking shape. Things I never imagined coming together in the aim of changing something rather than just communicating it.
One of my greatest joys was running The Kennedys, because I saw that in possible its purest form.
From making takeaway coffee cups into dog frisbees to re=programming Street Fighter to represent the lessons they’d learnt over the previous year … was epic.
Sure, sometimes it was scary, frustrating and painful.
Sure, there were arguments, walk-outs and moods.
But as I wrote before, great work leaves scars and while that doesn’t mean it can’t be an exciting journey to be going on, it will have many twists and turns.
Or it will if you are pushing things enough.
And that’s what this post is about, because recently I read a story about John Kosh.
John was the creative director of Apple.
Not the tech company, but The Beatles.
John Lennon loved him and at 23, he found himself art directing the cover of their iconic album, Abbey Road.
What many people fail to realise is the band name was no where on the cover.
And while John had logic behind that decision, many in the industry thought differently.
Especially at their record company, EMI.
In fact, the only reason it ended up happening is that timing was so tight that it was allowed to slip through before anyone else could stop it.
Another example of chaos creating what order can’t.
What a story eh?
And before anyone starts saying I’m wrong …
I’m not saying the decision to remove the bands name from the cover made the album successful. This was The Beatles after all – the biggest, most successful band of all time – so it was always going to sell by the bucketload. However I am saying the decision to remove the bands name from the album cover helped make it iconic … which arguably, helped make it even more successful.
Not to mention make the zebra crossing on Abbey Road one of the busiest in the World.