Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 12 - July 4, 2018
Until it was made possible, in modest production value, by Y&R Skopje and awarded with Titanium Lion in 2013. 3. Always dare. Dare yourself first, then dare others.
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
hungry for attention, for recognition, for being seen and heard. That’s why we work harder (just like Avis). Maybe because we appeared so late on the global scene, we still have this great desire to prove ourselves to the world, and the entrepreneurial spirit to match.
Sir Isaac Newton
“If I have seen further than most it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Faris Yakob who have challenged this: Faris’ blog puts the famous Picasso dictum that ‘talent copies, genius steals’ to work to champion and explain “remix culture” and sampling.
“Amen Brother” (sic) which is probably the most sampled piece of music ever. It was originally shared by hip-hop pioneer DJ Breakbeat Lenny on the first of his Breakbeat sample compilation albums in 1986. Slowed down, it became the basic rhythm track for early hip-hop; speeded up, it’s the template for dubstep and drum and bass, and in between it became a mainstay of 90s dance music, even getting sampled by the Gallagher brothers.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better,
What’s needed is looser copying – copying making errors – rather than Single White Female copying.
Rather than copy from your immediate peers, copy from as far away as possible. If everyone’s copying Korean filmmakers, look at Argentinian or African sources – anything to get away.
what kind of problem is this and then use the 25 or so strategies appropriate for that kind of problem to act as start-points.
a game he calls “popular thing – broken thing”, which encourages problem solving by using a whole range of different successful answers – sometimes at least, we need to shake off our habitual solutions and force ourselves to look at a wider range of source materials.
scrap-booking is so useful: noticing and recording things you find interesting and useful,
The more different things you can copy from and the further away they are from your problem, the better because you’re creating more error.
Thus, repeating again and again, like a Xerox, becoming faint, corrupted, damaged, gaps appearing for a variety of new ideas and opinions to seep in.
Which has enabled it to advance by providing a reliable way for scientists to use each other’s work. Rather than relying instead on the power of Stephen Hawking’s thinly veiled threats.
Meeting people, discussing ideas with them, and observing them in their own environment is what designers call design ethnography.
Research gives you answers to the questions you ask but a chat can give you something you don’t know you need to know.
Talking to recruited consumers at their own homes can make your head spin in just the right way.
“anything that helps people like a company is advertising”.
“We help people and companies to like each other.”
sooner or later you’re alone defending your own aesthetics.
In this case, love is not just a two-way thing. It’s a threesome between people buying the products, marketers and product makers.
A successful product needs to be a) technically feasible, b) financially viable and c) desirable!
Technical feasibility is traditionally the job of R&D guys and engineers. Desirability is often left to marketers alone.
What do people need? What do they think about us? Why is that student girl our fan?
“Implementing empathy” was kind of the “Intel inside” slogan for us. Without empathy there is no love.
Has a careers adviser ever advised anyone they should be a stuntman, artist, or rock ‘n’ roll star?
They will, over time, brainwash you so that your main motivation is security:
The troublemakers aren’t smarter than you, they are not luckier, and they are not bestowed with any unique powers. Things don’t come easy to them. What separates them from everyone else is they couldn’t give a f%^& about the consequences of their actions.
How many times have you been driven insane by a client who wants what everyone else is doing, despite starting the project with the now hollow ambition of wanting “the very best ideas you have”?
Dylan’s success didn’t come simply because he was a master of words, it came because he wasted no time attempting to gain things like acceptance, attention and praise.
Fear stifles our thinking and our actions. It creates indecisiveness that results in stagnation. You procrastinate indefinitely rather than risk failure.
Without confidence you make decisions based on fear. With confidence you make decisions in spite of fear.
You may think the moral of this story is, your damned if you do and your damned if you don’t, but there is a huge difference in the way we lost the two accounts. In the first example we died on our feet, and in the second we lived on knees and eventually died on our knees.
You will often be faced with the choice to do what is right and what is easy, always choose the former.
Remember that the conformists are not born, they are made. Likewise, the rebels are not born, they are made. It just takes more courage, more confidence, and more hard work to make them.
In our industry “creativity” refers to problem solving. It’s the art of finding a lateral solution to a linear problem.
There’s a client • who has a product • that needs to be pushed into a certain environment • so an ad agency is employed • to come up with an approach • that through specific channels • will yield results.
At the end of the day, the first rule of brand building is “consistency”. The consumer thinks, “I’m intrigued by the new one but I trust the old one.”
Where the modern consumer’s question is not “is it new?” or “is it beautiful?” but “does it work?” and more to the point “how does it work for me?”.
Good creative work is not about the clever headline anymore but about how the overarching idea is applied. Innovation. It stems from technological advances and is generally introduced into any advertising agency through the media department.
It’s about that ability to walk into a boardroom filled with very serious people wearing very serious suits and say, “have you ever thought of this…?”
It will be a business solution, an intelligent creative solution, a solution that nobody who can comprehend a pie chart would have come up with. And for just one second all your tattoos will be ignored.
We physically produce things of beauty, but when we’re around the boardroom table, or being reviewed on some global Excel spread sheet, it always comes down to ticking boxes. And getting that right is intelligent artistry.
These increasingly detailed fragments of familiarity (let’s call it ‘user capture’) will ultimately produce data that’s never been collected at scale before.
Creativity, by the nature of the word, involves a level of originality and surprise. It not only plays on what has come before (ideas, texts, genres, interpretations) but seeks new ground. It is not only the track beaten down behind but the rocks, crags and waterfalls ahead too. Creativity, the good stuff, takes us further than we’ve known.
In advertising, the answer is yes – and with digital data, as with box office, these failures are self-evident. In a cluttered and savvy media world, lacklustre messages fail to convert, to attract, to engage, and this activity (or lack of) can be easily tracked.
We know that putting the user first ensures the experience works better.
In the case of editorial native advertising – you might think BuzzFeed, but know that The New York Times et al have offerings too – the publisher plays creative partner with the brand and they work together to create content that is mutually beneficial for both the reader and the brand.
