Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Brand Suicide, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Customer Service, Design, Innovation, Internet, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Relevance, Resonance, Technology
So this is sort-of following on from yesterdays post.
Specifically the last line of yesterday’s post.
The bit about AI/VR.
You see a few weeks ago, I was invited to speak on a panel about the future by Frog Design.
No, I don’t know why they asked me either.
Anyway, it was a great panel and I learnt a lot of stuff but where things got a bit sticky was when the subject of AI came up.
OK, I was the reason it all got a bit sticky, but that’s because I feel companies are approaching AI with the sole goal of enabling the lazy.
Yes, it’s still early days but automating the most common/basic of tasks feels such a waste of potential.
I get they have to get people used to things before they can push them to new things, but to focus on such mundane tasks doesn’t naturally push the industry to explore the bigger possibilities of it.
My suggestion was that I’d like to see it being used to take people to new places.
New opinions … thoughts … possibilities … experiences.
More inspirational intelligence than artificial.
When you ask for news headlines, it reads you how different news sources see the same story.
When you ask for a countdown, it plays you music you haven’t heard before until the timer is up.
When you ask for the weather, it tells you some places you can go to, to take advantage of the climate.
In other words, make you benefit from the AI beyond the fact it’s performing a function that saves you approx 0.3 seconds doing. Kind-of like the premise behind user-unfriendly tech I wrote about a while back.
Of course to do this means that they have to do more than just follow the data.
It means they have to add something to it.
Context. Insight. Humanity. Creativity.
Things that companies are seemingly valuing less rather than more.
To be fair, Amazon are trying to do this with some of the more quirky aspects of Alexa … but I still would like to see more being done, because not only does this add real value to the tech, it means brands have a chance to build additional value with their audience rather than sit back and watch their engagement get less and less.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Confidence, Context, Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Insight, Management, Marketing
As I’ve written many times, my parents drilled into me that a life of fulfillment is much more valuable than a life of contentment.
As I’ve also written many times, I didn’t realise what this really meant until I hit my late 30’s.
And yet, despite that, I seemed to have embraced their philosophy in how I was living my life, including who I hired.
Put simply, I gave always valued someone who lived an interesting life more than someone who lived an interesting advertising life.
You’d think the two are connected, but that’s not always the case.
And that’s why I liked – and still like – people who have tried stuff.
It almost doesn’t matter if it worked out or not, the key is they’ve tried things and can recognise why it all turned out as it did.
Even if that’s about acknowledging the importance of luck.
So people who have travelled, worked in different industries, toured in a band, studied contemporary art, been arrested, written a fanzine, graffiti’d the hell out of things, created stuff – even if that’s kids beds – will always be initially more attractive to me than someone who studied advertising, worked in advertising and made advertising.
That doesn’t mean people who live an ‘ad-life’ aren’t good or valuable – of course they are – but I genuinely believe the more experiences you have, the more you will contribute to ideas that don’t just differentiate themselves from the usual ad noise, but offer a point of view that is undeniably infectious creatively and culturally.
Because as Peter Ustinov, the great actor, once said …
“People who reach the top of the tree are those who haven’t got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom”.
But here’s the thing …
While I am celebrating ‘generalists’, this is more than just someone who flitters from one thing to another.
I’m talking about those who commit to something. Throw themselves into what they do. Are seriously wounded when it goes wrong but have it open doors to something new they may never have considered without.
And while outsiders may see all this as random acts of experimentation, is actually a continuous stream of fulfillment because the people who do this stuff know the more they live, the more they have to offer.
Or to paraphrase Mr Ustinov, the more you explore, the more see what’s possible.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Confidence, Creativity, Culture, Emotion, Equality, Innovation, Insight, Marketing Fail, Perspective
Originally this was going to be a post about patience.
We live at a time where the urge to rush to judgement seems omnipresent, however we often forget that each of us is going through personal situations that can affect how we behave and so what we experience may not be who the other party really is.
There’s this quote that says something like, “if we knew the troubles that weighed on the minds of the people we talk to, we might react to what they say in a very different way”.
And that quote is right, however in our rush-rush, myopic state-of-mind, we rarely stop to even consider that – let alone explore it – so the results we get might never be as positive as they could be if we had just stopped for a beat and thought of the other person.
That’s what this post was going to be about but then something happened.
You see recently I discovered someone betrayed my trust.
The irony is what they told another party was incorrect.
But that doesn’t make it any better.
And then I remembered that quote that says, “the worst thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies” and they’re right.
I liked this person.
I still do.
But for some reason they thought it was right to do something that was wrong.
And right there, things got damaged because trust is everything in a relationship … whether that’s with a loved one, a colleague or a client.
Trust means you can disagree without any lasting damage.
Trust means you can let people explore things you don’t understand.
Trust means you can let teams go to the wire before they reveal their work.
Because trust is about believing the other person has your back … that their standards, goals and expectations match yours.
That doesn’t mean you’ll always like what they’ve done, but it does mean you can be honest about it and they’ll listen to you and you’ll listen to them. Not because you want to necessarily have a ‘compromise’ on the outcome, but because you want to make sure what you’re doing is the work the person best placed to make that call wants to make.
The work that excites them … or makes them laugh or simply shit-their-pants.
And while it would be nice to think trust happens simply by spending time together, it doesn’t.
The reality is trust comes slowly.
It tests you.
It see’s what you’re made of at the most vulnerable times.
But when you have it, it’s the most amazing feeling you can have.
It liberates you.
It lets you literally get to places bigger that you could ever get to on your own.
And that’s why I am always willing to let someone I trust make mistakes, but never when it’s to save their own neck.
Which is why trust is so hard to earn and so quick to lose.
Because as they say, united we stand divided we fall.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Confidence, Creativity, Culture, Differentiation, Education, Innocence, Innovation, Insight
So Elon Musk’s SpaceX company successfully launched his Falcon Heavy rocket.
I was interested for many reasons, most notably for the fact that when he launched his previous rocket – I saw it but didn’t know what it was, so my brain got bent out of shape as I tried to work out whether it was an alien invasion, a Korean rocket or just a Hollywood stunt.
As it did to many others too.
For the record, to make sure Otis wasn’t scared by his parents and odd-parents reaction, I told him it was Santa doing a ‘trial Christmas run’.
He didn’t believe it … which is impressive because at that stage, none of us knew what was actually going on.
But this launch was different.
Bigger. More innovative. More spectacle.
And as amazing as all that is, what I found the most fascinating was how they made the booster rockets return back to earth.
IN UNISON!!!
I’m not saying this just because it’s the sort of thing you only expect to see in a JJ Abrams movie, but because by doing that – he just reduced the cost of space exploration from NASA’s billion dollar a flight price tag, to about 90 million.
Incredible.
But there is something even more wonderful.
No, I’m not talking about the fact it’s made me write the most topical post in this blogs history, I’m talking about how it has reignited the imagination of people around the World.
Shifting the aspirations of tech from making a billion dollar app to literally changing the potential future of the World.
Of course you need a lot of money to do that, but everyone has to start somewhere and as long as Musk continues to show how to do this with responsibility and humour for the benefit of the planet [unlike how he conducts his personal life], then I think he has just introduced humanity to an incredibly exciting chapter in it’s development.
And boy do we need that.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Brand Suicide, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Marketing, Marketing Fail
A while back – when I was running The Kennedys – I told the guys about how hard it is to make great work.
Ironically, the issue was less about the expression of creativity – though there is always difficulties in that – but in actually getting your precious idea through all the gatekeepers/processes/people without it being impeded, diluted or impacted.
Now don’t get me wrong, being pushed to be better is always good, but it appears we now live in times where the goal of others seems to be the reverse.
Sanitization.
Blandness.
Ego/Career management.
Or as my dear friend George once said:
“Creativity today is a client going to the doctor, telling them their expertise is wrong and then prescribing their own medicine.”
Of course people are entitled to their opinion.
Of course ad industry creativity needs to be commercial creativity.
But right now, it appears many clients version of ‘commercial’ is to either communicate what they want people to care about [regardless if they care about it, or believe it] or to say things where absolutely no one can ever be offended because what they want to communicate makes beige look bold.
And because adland – or should I say some within adland – has sold the value of creativity down the river in favour of making fees from process and production, the entire industries ‘creativity’ is being called into question.
What has happened to wanting to make work that makes culture take notice?
What has happened to wanting to making work others wished they had made?
What has happened to wanting to make work that changes entire categories?
Yes, I know there are some that still fly the flag of great work – but not many and not always consistently – and what’s worse is that we, as an industry, have contributed to this situation but what really gets to me … what really pisses me off … is that I feel we are continuing to pander to the wishes and demands of the organisations we are supposed to help, the organisations who – for whatever reason – are undermining our industries value and long-term future.
I’m not saying we should be arrogant.
Or rude.
Or forget why clients hire us.
But come on, why be a doctor when we let the patient diagnose themselves, which is why I absolutely loved this piece by the phenomenal Dave Trott.
At the beginning of this post, I wrote about how I had taught The Kennedy’s that great creativity doesn’t come without bruises and scars … well, if we still want to stand a chance of making the work that shows how brilliant we can be, then we better be prepared to fight harder for it, because being the punching bag is hurting everyone … us, our clients, our audiences.