Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 12 - July 4, 2018
Getting bored is painful but necessary. I then do something else.
Start your work fired up and you will get into the flow much quicker.”
We should work on praising ourselves better too.
Confidence plays a huge part in group dynamics. Holding something back can stifle the creative process, and this has a direct effect on the team.
trust through practicing feedback.
taking a few minutes out of your day to reflect on what’s happened, then writing on a post-it what you think each of your team members did well, and what they could’ve done better.
It requires both intense focus and a looseness of thought that helps connect one thing to another in a new way. It likes inspiration from elsewhere and thrives on ritual.
‘Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.’
Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organisations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.”
businesses need help, especially in navigating the communications landscape. The challenge faced by the specialists – the communications agencies – is that clients aren’t necessarily willing to pay for this help.
assuming we define innovation as finding new and better ways to solve client’s problems (and it is worth noting that innovation and technology are not synonymous – old media and old products can be used to solve problems in new and better ways), the next step begs the question of which problems? And how? And do we need to limit what we do to clients’ problems?
“Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and, now, their modern counterparts were capable of creating one breakthrough after another because they built innovation strategies around recombining existing technologies rather than inventing new ones.”
The fact is the return from innovation is still unproven, mainly because it cannot sometimes be directly charged to the client.
they need to have someone at board level with responsibility for it so that it fits clearly into the overall business plan
cultural change is likely to be needed and this change is likely to be perpetual.
Part of the role of the innovation team has to be to ensure that everyone in the agency has the opportunity to be innovative and that innovation is baked into the overall process.
Ideation and execution are interdependent.
the best ideas come from matching a human insight with technology to solve a client problem.
they still need a good team of planners to ensure that they are finding true human insights, which is very different from a proposition.
the best way to innovate is to provide time to think outside tight deadlines.
They sponsor students and get them to tackle briefs and challenges we set them. LivesOn, a product that allows you to tweet from your afterlife, came from this collaboration.
Tom Uglow, creative director of Google Labs, describes innovation as a combination of exploration and experimentation, which equates to play, which equals fun. So if you are not having fun, you will never be able to innovate.
creating a culture of agility, one in which we are constantly challenging the way we work, sometimes using different processes to solve different problems.
however you define innovation, offering it to brave clients is going to represent the best opportunity for our industry going-forward.
Y por eso amamos a mi cliente de consultoría.
Innovation is a word that’s being thrown around a lot in advertising right now. The same way “big idea”, “halo effect” or “game changer” was just a while back.
we’re still in the business of making and make believe.
what was once the art of making campaign products driven by lifestyle photography in the 1980’s – is now called making interactive tools and applications driven by social storytelling in the 2010’s.
embracing this notion of initially not fully understanding how to solve something and keeping at it instead of finding ways of killing it (out of fear).
It’s that moment when you look at a new phone, application, social channel, piece of software or even a plain bus stop down the street and go “Hey you guys, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could actually _____ simply by _____ this thing here? I bet people would love that. I know I would.”
the importance of having nice people around you when you start embracing your area of incompetence cannot be understated.
we had this rule saying we were never allowed to say “No”. Just to figure it out or find the alternatives and move forward. It was called “to keep the momentum” and to be “delusionally optimistic” about things.
There’s literally a hundred ways an idea can get killed before it sees the light of day.
passion was still trying to make things people had never seen before.
when navigating a company there is no timeless. Only now.
The interdisciplinary creative.
Innovation without a brief is called having a business idea and as much as I love inventing random cool shit – why would I turn it into a crummy commercial?
You are not Luke Skywalker my friend, you’re Boba Fett. A gun for hire. Suck it up or become a startup.
The relevance was there, the innovation was there, simply not in the sense of the established broad platforms we’ve got today.
There is no such thing as “digital” any longer and there’s not been for quite a while. There’s only life.
any story can be translated into something interactive. Something a little less expected. Something little bit more innovative.
Beyond the old “digital” label lies the immense global marketing power of existing and now widely populated platforms. YouTube, Twitter, Google Maps, Yelp, Craigslist, Facebook, Google Hangouts, Shazam and Pandora/Spotify are not what they initially were. They’re all grown up. And interactive advertising has been forced to grow up alongside them.
new exciting technology like instant messaging or social media can definitely change human behaviour – but the behaviour within that platform will then find its target, its “norm” and stay that way.
you can’t just give feedback – you need to properly structure and lead the creative process. Map things out. Inspire. The same goes for innovation in the creative process.
These are basically a handful of relevant territories where we can start exploring new ideas
The product, brief and the problem at hand naturally set the number and type of buckets.
In this process a lot usually get structured by the traditional creative flow/team.
strategic
get everyone onboard early, and more importantly, at the same time.
fearful, over-protecting of ideas that slowly kills all the good energy and fun in the room.
