Ask any art director the single thing that has made their job easier in the last few years and they will probably say the computer first, and stock photography second.
In my opinion, both have made the job harder.
Computers have drastically shortened the perceived amount of time needed to create an ad, and stock photography has drastically altered the perception that ads need original images. Those are two pretty big misconceptions.
With time in short supply, and stock so plentiful, most projects look like this: start the job the day it’s due, read the headline that has already been written, search some…
It’s not Ogilvy on Advertising.
It’s a novel!
Sure, David Ogilvy wrote a great book about advertising. So did Bob Levinson and Peter Mayle. But the absolute best book ever written about advertising is the novel e. by Matt Beaumont.
A novel you say? How can that be better than a classic written by one of the masters of advertising?
Easy. Because e. shows what it’s like to really work in the rollicking and often surreal world of advertising.
The novel, told completely in email form, is about a pitch for the Coke account by London agency Miller Shanks. Through a blizzard of emails, Beaumont captures…
Mad Men, in case you haven’t seen it, is an original series that started last year on AMC, about a New York City advertising agency, set in 1960.
The first season was fantastic: great writing, acting and art direction. And for those of us in the business, it’s also a journey back in time to an era where going to work at an ad agency, for men, meant wearing a suit (even creatives!), smoking a pipe and drinking the proverbial three martini lunch.
For women, it mostly meant being chased around the office by suit wearing, pipe smoking, drunken letches, but that’s…
His name is Keith Johnson and he has made a Muffin Car: a cupcake-shaped runabout, which conceals a tiny electric all-terrain vehicle complete with handlebars from a Hello Kitty bicycle. You could think of Keith as a lone eccentric, toiling away in his garage, fueled by butter cream, but you’d be wrong. He’s actually one of a dozen or so people who make and race muffin cars.
And they are not alone. In fact, there are thousands of people who are now making things again. Curious, new things, with a real sense of wonder to them. These modern day inventors —…
I spend a ridiculous amount of time reading, which I justify to myself (and my family) by saying that the more I read, the better writer I’ll be.
Recently, I came across two writers who create their writing by rearranging or subtracting words from what they’ve read. I know this sounds kind of post-deconstructionist, but the resulting new works are absolutely unique.
First, there’s Newspaper Blackout Poems from the wonderfully named Austin Kleon. He is a writer, cartoonist and designer who does pretty much what the name implies — he writes his poems by removing words from newspaper articles. The results are sparse,…
Attend any ad agency meeting and one thing you can be sure of is that the buzzwords will be flying: Out of the Box, Let’s Take This Offline, New Paradigm, Low Hanging Fruit, A (fill in your own big number) Foot View, and Dog & Pony Show, just to name a few. It seems that these words are hardwired into the meeting lexicon.
This practice is so widespread that Buzzword Bingo games have sprung up like mushrooms on the web, and IBM even has a commercial based on the idea, which, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess, was…
A little while ago I found a really amazing speech called The Brief for the Sistine Chapel on the English brand planning site www.accountplanning.net.
Written by Damian O’Malley, who is now the Executive Planning Director for McCann Europe, the speech illustrated just how important a brief is to the creative process.
In it, Damian imagines the various briefs that Pope Julius II, or the Pope’s account man, Cardinal Alidosi may have given Michelangelo. Each is analyzed for its effectiveness and potential outcome, and the article ends with the kind of brief that has the power to inspire a Michelangelo — or a…
