Present Generation

Heads Down In London

 

After three and a half weeks in London, it is clear it is a great time to be in advertising.

Not for all the reasons well paid agency executives like to plod out as a facade of optomism.  You know, the 'never been so much creativity and innovation about, we can do anything...' line.

No, what is great is that walking around SOHO, talking to people at agencies here and abroad, heads are down working.

Not conferencing, parading as gurus, whinging or penning another article claiming the death of something.

Nope, the smart people are just getting on with it.  Taking the brilliant principles of creativity mastered by Mr. Bernbach & Co. and matching it with the robust body of knowledge of digital (couple decades worth of info now) and social (a very productive 10 years) along with all the other theories and stuff to make smart stuff that is interesting and works.

Yes, a lovely time to be in our business. Right, time to get on with it.

Links of articles my mom mailed me / an idea I might get around to making

 

My mom sends me links.  Okay, not not by email or some internet tool like Delicious, but articles cut out of her analog newspaper and mailed to me in France.

It is not a new behavior, growing up she would hand me the paper and tell me to read it.  When I wnt off to university the good folks at US Postal Service passed the articles on to me.  Then, back it he same city but my own residence she would build them up and every time we met a small package of clippings was always passed on.

Tools of delivery changed but behavior has never wavered.

Now, despite my never ended steam of news and articles there are few I love and devour more eagerly than my inter-family diplomatic pouch that arrives every fortnight thanks to France Poste.

I don't want her to stop. I love the effort and things that my mom sends only because she think I might like it.  So pure.  Not because she wants to be a influencer or show people how cool she is by what she likes.  Just a sincere sharing of what she thought I might appreciate.  So motherly.  So sincere.

Articles these days tend to be about:

- Recommendation of places in Paris or London (place I spend a lot of time)

- Articles on the advertising world of Canada

-Things about friends of mine or people I grew up with

- An interesting bit about the business of sport (side interest of mine)

- Tips on raising plants (we are a family of people who seemingly growing things)

So, I thought it would be nice for me to share these pure, un-tampered links with the world.  It is a neat idea.  I might get around to making it.  Till then the articles are safely kep in a small envelope.

Band of Brothers

Came across a band of brothers today.

Off to play some music in sychronicity. Bass for one and violin the other.

Watching an episode of Jersey Shore (in French subtitles) sharing
equally earphones and some quality popular MTV culture.

While sporting matching Nike AF1s sharing the bond of social status.

Being French they were united by a deep, heated and well informed
political and metaphysical debate over the meaning of Snookie and the
presumed promiscuity of all American women.  In particular the cadre
known as sorority girls.

Just a couple of brothers, who may not be related by blood, doing what
brothers do.

Faces of Versailles

Went to Versailles last Friday, took the wife for the first time for the wife, third for me. 

Amidst the throngs of people getting off a bus to quicky fulfil their lifetime dream of taking pictures around France, I always enjoy places like Versailles.  Not for all the history and facts, I forget them quickly.  For the notions born by people that form constructs we take for granted today. 

Things like John Locke's treaties on property that gave us the very idea of property - something we never think of as an idea, just part of our social order. Or in the summer outside St. Andrews drove through the home of Adam Smith - he had a fair bit to do with the whole capitalism thing.  Versailles is a great testament to many of the constructs that form civil government today.  Plus the great displays of what a great ego can construct. 

This time, I was really intrigued by the faces.  Probably because there is a Murakami exhibit at the moment, which subtled encouraged me to look at things I don't normally, at Versailles or anywhere else.

This about sums it up.  Spawns some thoughts about context, and one of the many unanswerable debates in advertising of the importance of aligned context.  No alignment here, but it abo ut sums up how well we have progressed and matured over the past handful of hundreds of years.

Then I saw this guy, his official purpose is a little nob that hold a piece of strign keeping the elaborate curtains for blocking light.  My favorite face and quality candidate as the originator of Movember.

There were many other faces.  Talk about statue clutter.  This was my final select because nobody was paying attention to it.  Following the hall of mirrors and the King's "workbench" just off it was a little ante-room.  This chap stood with dignity, wearing ony a marble cape and a nice beard.

Right then.  So that was last Friday.  Back to advertising...

Contrarian linking

Something about human nature makes it easy for us to always focus on what's wrong.  Which is just wrong.  Contrarian thinking in my economic studies always really connected with me and brought out my inner disestablishmentarianist.  Or maybe just the stubborn Scottish side.  Regardless, lets end this week with some contrarian linking:

Everything is amazing,body's happy

Media is Thriving

PS. Think Small will give the reader who can identify the place and context of the contrarian activity (ie. why is it going against the flow) in the photo a gorgeous chocolate brown suede notebook including postage if outside Vancouver.

Beergoggles

Apparently, to everyone else in their euphoric state, this is an actual representation of how I looked at our Christmas party:

In your sober vision you may be able to discern me, not wearing beer goggles, collecting photographic "evidence."

Remembering

Friend you!!!

Has over "friending" aka MySpacing devalued friendship?  Or has it made people rude in real life because they feel they have enough friends already and are afraid of making new friend for fear their social network friend numbers are getting out of hand?

Probably not, but if there is anything we can learn from reality shows, apart from tv ratings driven experiments on human behavior, apparently it's that people aren't out to make friends these days.

Oh what a sad world.& Maybe these people just need a good
friend to have a chat with...

It's not me, I'm him.

An interesting window into linguistics and persuasiveness is impressionists. Frank Caliendo is one of the best modern impressionists.  This clip from him on Letterman features some great bits on John Madden, Al Paccino, George Bush and Bill Clinton.

It would be fun to do a focus group with impressionists and they can only convey opinions in the character they think best demonstrates their point.  That would be interesting, very very interesting.

Nutfarm

My brother is crazy.  His idea of fun in a mid winter Ontario snow storm.

Happy fresh one

Happy New Year.

Lets start the year on with our data hats.  WARC reports a leaked (or at least allegedly leaked) new media survey from Deloitte.

What is clearly emerging is had proof that while web advertising continues to grow, is does not consumed in a vacuum.  The old adage that a layered media plan is exponentially more effective continues to entrench itself.  A few days ago one of Canada's national papers published a report that 80% of Canadians, across all demographics still rely on traditional TV and print new sources over internet.  It comes down to trust.

If there is a take away looking at the research it's that folks are spending more time entertaining themselves online and with mobile devices but have yet to really trust content on the medium or find advertising all that valuable.  If there is one point from the Deloitte research that demonstrates the opportunity still ahead in digital it's this:

67% of consumers said they would willingly be exposed to more online ads if they could receive free content they found valuable; but 65% opined that any type of internet ad was more intrusive than ads in newspapers and magazines. 37% said they would rather pay for online content than be exposed to advertisements.

Reading between the lines and making some fair assumptions, online advertising is unfortunately learning many lessons from bad off line advertising.  It's intrusive, gets in the what of what you really want and offers little value.  Are online banner ads becoming the equivalent of bus backs and urinal posters?   However, what is golden is the data shows people will be happy to be exposed to more ads if the content is valuable.  What if that valuable content was the advertising.

What if Honeyshed fit the bill as valuable content?

Happy Birthday!!!

This little corner of the blogoshpere is now officially over one year old.  While I had played around with blogs long before Think Small was my first considered and consistent effort.  Now over a year and exactly 300 posts later it's still alive.  And it all started with this in August of 2006.

It has been an interesting experience thinking out loud in the world wide web.  I find I repurpose the blog every few months but the core remains the same.  A place to store interesting things I find and share thoughts related to my profession that pop into my head.  My favorite ones tend to be the more tangental.

I've gained a huge amount of value out of blogging, despite the time consumed and manufactured tension to always feel like I have to put something up. 

1. Participating and learning during the hey days of the plannershere. 
2. Formulating thoughts that are probably 10 years beyond my actual experience level.
3. Formulating thoughts that are probably 10 years past people with over tens years experience.
4. A collection of neat and interesting things, places and experiences both real and digital.

Though the plannershere and blogoshere don't seem to have the vibrancy it once did, hopefully due to summer vacations, Think Small will continue on.  Though I've noticed lately that what is being posted seems to be feeling a bit overly polished and almost magazine article quality.  What garbage.  The brand of Think Small will be random, spontaneous and hopefully sometimes a bit confusing.  Be at the very least always something kind of interesting.

The lost art of detail

As an industry we are focused on bigness and greatness.  But often it is the smallness that lets us down.  To some it is laziness.  When someone relies on "fix it in post" reeks of never really knowing what you wanted in the first place. 

I love detail, and I love it when someone pays attention to them all.  For example I love reading about how integral detail is to the Mad Men series.

the big rub is that detail, be it authenticity in the set of a commercial or anal attention to detail in visual effects, is lost on the greater audience.  But those who care, care a lot, are are probably the ones who actually care about your product.  It's kind of like 10 year old syndrome.  Remember when you were 10, and whatever you were into, you were really really into.  How many times did you read that comic book or magazine you were into.  As adults, we lose a lot of that, but still retain one or two things in our lives still in that regard.  For some it's golf, others NASCAR and others still fashion or home furnishings.

Though, while detail is most pertinent to your core audience, while they may not consciously recognize it, great detail, be it elegant design, typography or just beauty can still affect or still the broader population.  While a bit of a tangent, this changing typography of highway signs is really interesting, given it's something we never think about, but use daily.

Russel Davies - U of Oregon

Stumbled across this today when looking at some Oregon video (was to be a summer vacation local, that was canceled twice and is no more... your welcome boss.)  It's student footage a visit Russell Davies made to the U of O Journalism school.  From back in the days when he rules the Plannershere.  It simply is interesting.

(Russell, I am still interested in importing an Interesting 2007 type event to Canada, let me know if you've worked out whether it would work.)

It's nice living 5 minutes from this

Happy Canada Day!

Oh baby

The Vancouver Board of Trade had their annual general meeting yesterday and the keynote speaker was Dr. Stephen Covey.  He was very very good.  I haven't read his books, nor know much about him but was impressed with the depth of knowledge and research behind what he said but mostly with the simplicity he delivered his information.  In addition to concise spoken segment, some power point slide (if I did have one constructive criticism he does need better art direction) and lots of video.

Not to take away from the big thinking important things he said, the thing I liked the most was him using this commercial to prove a point of bad micromanaging management in today's world, or the knowledge economy as he termed it.  Good to see a doctor has a sense of humour.

As a side one of the most interesting observations from my colleagues was the observation of our ingrained cynicism to these speaker gurus.  At one point he talked about the importance of listening (good) and then went on to describe how he uses native talking sticks (cheesy) to promote good listening.  The cheesiness pretty much evaporated when he gave an anecdote from a recent three day summit of global superpowers coming to the first positive dialog in memory on middle east peace thanks to the talking stick.  Maybe it was the name dropping quotes from Madeline Albright but cynical hats have been put away for a while...

Ask more questions

Really liked this article, so much thought I'd post it in it's entirety.  Lately, I've been doing a number of things with students looking to or exploring getting into advertising.  It's great to see how many talented, intelligent and well schooled individuals want to get into ad agencies.  It ensures my socks are pulled up fully every day.  But it's often disappointing to see how many quit simply don't do their homework or ask good questions.  "I've always thoughts advertising would be cool" isn't a good answer to the question why you're interested in advertising.  With so many resources and so much information out there, no excuse is reasonable for not knowing the basics of the industry and at minimum a couple pieces of work a particular agency does when you visit. 

This is a great story for what it takes to get into advertising but is also a good reminder for anyone.  After a number of years you stop asking questions.  Or only ask questions that you think will make you look good.  At the end of the day the best answers generally come from the dumb or obvious questions.

It pays to think like a student at any age

Published February 26, 2007

Not long ago, Thomas Kemeny was a college student trying to break into a very competitive business.

An aspiring advertising copywriter, he set his sights high. He didn't want to work just anywhere; he wanted to work with the best.

He wrangled an internship at one of the top creative agencies, then got his foot in the door at another leading firm in San Francisco, where he landed a job last year as a copywriter.

He'd been out of school less than a year.

Mentors say the 23-year-old is talented and hard working, but there are many talented, hard-working professionals who haven't experienced such early success.

One thing about Kemeny, he puts himself out there. He's willing to ask anybody anything.

It's more than natural curiosity. It's part of a drive to figure out his place in the world while learning what it takes to practice his craft at the highest levels.

He alluded to it in his valedictory address to the Columbia College's Class of 2005, a speech for which he created and inserted a 30-second commercial paying tribute to the class salutatorian.

Graduation is no time to celebrate, he warned his classmates with mock sobriety. "We're about to lose a great right," he recalls saying.

"When you're a student, you can ask anybody anything, and as long as you follow it up by saying you're a student, it's totally acceptable."

He called it "student immunity," and he invoked this right often.

Riding the elevated train, he spotted a guy with a briefcase emblazoned with the logo of ad agency DDB. He introduced himself and asked for a meeting.

"[DDB's] creative director told me every ad in my portfolio was crap except one," Kemeny recalls. "I took that ad and put it on my wall, labeled, `My first ad that doesn't suck.' Then I worked to make it the worst piece in my portfolio."

Students get better by showing their portfolios over and over again. Kemeny put his work in front of anybody who would take the time to look.

"Everyone does it," says Columbia College professor Laurence Minsky. "He was able to improve faster because he did it so intensely."

The spring before graduation, he applied for an unpaid internship at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami. It was a calculated risk. Many would-be copywriters go to portfolio school before trying to break into the business.

He wrote letter after letter to land the three-month gig. Among the reasons he offered as why the agency's recruiter should give him a chance: "I don't smell bad."

Then, employing a loopy logic, he wrote that he wasn't implying the other candidates did smell bad, though the agency was taking a risk they might if they hadn't mentioned it.

His internship was nearly over when Hurricane Katrina hit, wiping out power in his steamy, rented room. He slept for 10 nights on the floor behind a desk at the office, showering at the agency's gym and using his cell phone as his alarm clock.

"It took me up to another level," he says of the internship. "I'd worked hard before, but this was different.

"You made sure every detail was correct, the spacing between every letter was perfect and balanced, things I'd never dreamed of paying attention to."

When the internship ended, he headed back to Chicago with a simple game plan: "Get in front of people who I thought were good."

At an industry event, he spotted Kevin Lynch, co-founder of the innovative boutique Hadrian's Wall, now Zig.

Was it hard to approach Lynch? "Incredibly," he says. "It's never easy, the fear and the butterflies, but you push past it."

Lynch gave him freelance work and offered references at firms, including San Francisco's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

"He had the drive and persistence you typically find in people who are going to start their careers at such a great agency," Lynch recalls.

Fast forward to the present: Kemeny is off to a splashy start.

He was part of a Goodby team that created a high-profile campaign pairing the scent of chocolate-chip cookies with a simple black-and-white sign, "Got Milk?" The ads were placed in bus shelters in downtown San Francisco in December, but they didn't stay there long.

The campaign made national headlines when San Francisco officials ordered the cookie scent removed after complaints from groups representing diabetics and others.

When Kemeny is not working at Goodby, he's collaborating with friends on a cartoon show.

"Just recently I started taking singing lessons," he adds. "It's fantastic, I highly recommend it."

Where does he want to be, say, in five years?

"I really like advertising for now, [but] maybe I'll hop over to writing TV shows some day. I like writing and exploring and checking out new things, so I'm not sure where I'll end up."

It pays to be a student, whatever your age. Try invoking immunity today.

Credit:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-0702260014feb26,0,5668283.column?coll=chi-business-hed

design quote of the day

Design is art people use.

How many people does it take to make a strategy?

An interesting question was posed today in a discussion I had "how many people does it take to make a great strategy/brief?"  We're working on a relatively small project that crosses the traditional agency boundaries (advertising, online, youth, promotions) and we naturally want the best thinking and great input into the brief, but question where is the point you get too many people in the room to be productive.  How many strategist types from each specialty plus the creatives can you effectively have in the same room to brief?  Is it the power of three?  Is it more the merrier?  Does it depend on who the individual people are?

I'd say all of the above.  It is an interesting tension between getting good thinking from a group, but how to avoid being so big individuals get caught trying to sound smart to the group or forcing their agenda on all or even worse everyone feeling they need to leave the room with consensus or even worse than that everything simply ends up overly complicated with all that thought.

The dynamic and knowledge of a group is a great thing to hardness.  But lately I've been finding you also need the clarity of an individual or a small tighter group to flush everything out.  It's the distillation process if you will.  You kind of need to go back and forth.  Get the bigger group, flush out the ideas and thinking.  Take it back to your desk, review with one, maybe two others to tighten.  Float it back to the bigger group for further thoughts or ideas.  Distill again.  Repeat as necessary.

Et voila.  I'm off to do a cattle call meeting invite...

history of advertising

Old ads have always fascinated me.  I think it was ever since way back when I was first getting into advertising and read about how the first ads were placed in bibles or something religious like that by JWT sometime back in the stone age.  Part of me was just impressed that a professional firm could last that long with the same names on the letterhead. 

Since then I've firmly believed that some of the most effective ads are still from decades ago.  Naturally, VW's Think Small as the namesake for this blog is one of them.  So is Earnest Shackleton's recruitment ad.  Part of it is nostalgia and part is the glorious purity of such communications were permitted in those eras.

With this ad history buff side of me exposed, I'm happy to share the discovery in Wikipedia of this  somewhat thorough history of the early days of advertising.  Covers a lot of the different sides of the business.  But I couldn't help but to feel that they really missed covering one of the most important aspects.  The actual content of ads.

There is a quick mention of the early VW work and how it established positioning and USP's but apart from that it's most about media and issues with advertising.  And egads... regulation.  For an industry so consumed by it's own "thinking" and "ideas" wikipedia feels a bit incomplete.

How about one of the planning gurus like a Russell Davies or John Grant take a day off their blogs and set the record straight.

Trends - looking back and ahead

The folks at Contagious have put together this - Download mostcontagious2006.pdf  - list of the most Contagious of 2006.  A thorough review from design to retail and marketing - not that there's much difference anymore.

While you're brushing up on 2006, the forcasts for 2007 have begun.  The folks at PSFK are using YouTube here to collect community submitted weigh ins via video of trends for the coming year.  Just tag as directed

Curious curiosity

I wonder if humans are more curious these days.  We've always been a species with a high level of curiosity.  We like figuring things out.  However, there has always been a huge imbalance of power based on access of information.  Not scientific curiosity, but curiosity of how society and the world of business worked.  Long ago you followed your king because it's all you knew.  We started figuring there was something amiss with taxes - were did all that money go? - but could never prove anything.  Or, movies.  We always knew if wasn't really (right?) but never really knew how they pulled it off. 

But today, you can't find a movie without a behind the scenes to explain how all the magic was pulled off.  You can hold politicians accountable because you can see where there money goes, or how they are two faced.  We're being trained to be curious of the story behind the story.  But now a days, the people crafting or selling the story, can fake the story.  Because if you try to fake the story.  Spin the story.  Or change the story.  You'll get called on it.  And people will try to call you on it, and have the tools to find the information to call you on it.  It's quite cool and that's why I wonder if people, know they can find answers, are now more curious to seek those answers.

In this vein of curiosity, I hope Honda expands on this film that has been titled Making of More forwards please and shows us more the the "making of."

Group Think

Reading the circular self referencing world of ad blogs this evening, as I often do while watching TV (or just not bothering) it struck me that while it's fantastic to have all this sharing going on, are we going to achieve some sort of advertising group-think.

This really struck me when reading Trend Watching's monthly Trend Brief and they posted a list of other "in the know" companies that have bought the 2007 Trend Report. A mixture of ad agencies (Saatchi,) trendy companies (Diesel) and some not so trendy companies (Shell.)  If everybody's reading the same stuff, won't that pull everyone together.  Wont we all end up doing the same things?  Is this maybe why we've seen such a rapid explosion of me too's in Second Life?  The word of mouth effect amongst agencies.  All the hipster planners and creatives went out and got Second Life accounts.

Admittedly, this is an overly cynical thought.  But, to avoid getting caught in the same web of blogs and therefore thinking as what's on my RRS list, I'm making an early New Year's resolution to read on non-advertising related blog a day.  With this brilliant list I've got January covered (excluding the first which is a holiday.)

Benefits of Growing Old

Phew, after reading this thank goodness I just turned 30.  No wonder I’m happier now…

I love me

I like a lot of things, but it's still kind of cool to see my own name somewhere.  Seriously, who doesn't love to see their name in lights, even if it's only you seeing them.  Kudos to my hotel in Montreal for making my hotel CRM rad five minutes after check in!

In Canada, we spend a great deal of effort convincing clients to do great creative work. In the UK, clients demand it.

Thought?

How did this get past the focus group?

Tesco sells pole dancing for kids.  Seriously, read it here.

It is amazing that at some point someone thought this was a good idea.  Especially a company renown for it's data.  Wonder how the product development pitch conversation went...

"Well, our research shows that kids are having sex at earlier ages and pole dancing is a long standing tradition in our culture.  Therefore this athletic and historical device is a sure hit..."

Food and mental blocks

The Vancouver International Film Festival is taking place this month here in Vancouver BC.  Yesterday saw a great film called We Feed the World.    It basically highlighted a number of practices of where our food comes from.  It was more of an expose than an editorial slant type of film.  An agricultural and fishing based Fast Food Nation if you will.  But there was one very interesting statement from a UN Adviseur that really stuck with me.  To paraphrase he said that although today's systems for growing food and getting them to our tables are ever more automated, inhuman and GMF oriented people in general still have inthe idyllic vision of "the heroic Farmer" in their mind when the choosing their tomatoes at the market.  They know it's not true, yet don't change their view.  It really struck me that many people kind of know that the way the raw materials of their food is grown or caught is getting quite messed up and that the quality and taste isn't as good as it once was. But we just choose not to look deeper into it as the pocket change worth of money we save at Costco and Tesco justify it.