George Stubbs Hamletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800

Make the knife go with the pencil

I spent a most lovely morning in best company at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, currently exhibiting British Painter George Stubbs.

The web is what you make of it

Your site is the most important space on the web.
Be sure it’s made sociable.

Alas, more than 99% of websites are useless.

© 2011 Aigle boots. All rights reserved. Permission pending…

 

 

Hannah Jones
on the fear of failure

 

Milton Glaser
on the fear of failure

 

 

 

 

Kneedeep in mud can be sexy too

As daring daughter Dido recently pointed out: “It’s not over ’til the fat lady sings but it is good to know the fat lady has taken center stage.”

If my advertising trade is accepting of the fact or not – that in order to survive the transformation and succeed in being transformative, we must bring back the magic – the entire ad industry will just have to follow suit in the wake of transformation and take on their social responsibility not only as an agency but for their trade as a whole or resign. The ever more sophisticated consumer now has the ability to sift grain from chaff and makes good use of it as the global shift in consumer behavior clearly demonstrates. All you need to do is watch the news.
It much looks like Germany will be closing down their nuclear plants in rapid succession after being terrified and sorrowing by the events of Fukushima.

A pragmatic and practical approach for bringing back the magic has long been offered by Gareth Kay from Goodby, surprisingly with ‘What we can learn from the mating habits of birds‘

We now live in the age of ideas that do.

It’s not what we do, it’s what people do with what we do. Just as important as providing the means of getting things of relevance done and enabling people to get involved, a psychologic switchboard for bringing back the magic, has been captivated by Cindy Gallop in her 3min manifesto. It’s the nessecity of each of us to focus on ourselves and maintaining our very own survival strategy of self actualization and not just focusing on the needs of our clientele. I’ve had to let go of excellent craftsmen and women for not bringing themselves along to work back in my time at zentropy partners.

What makes a brand sexy?

“The willingness to take chances.”—A sucker punch answer by the adored Cindy Gallop, I stumbled upon elsewhere. Stay put for a series of statements on the fear of failure brought to you by Berghs’ Exhibition ’11 and some of the worlds most renown advertising practitioners. The willingness to take chances demands a certain willingness to embrace failure. Kids love to play in mud puddles. Why? They are magically drawn to mud puddles and getting themselves dirty. Why is that? It is our human survival strategy that makes them want to become experienced. If they don’t learn, they won’t survive another day, so to speak. A good question is why do grown ups shy away from mud puddles and getting dirty? They don’t, they are just no longer drawn to mud puddles since the learning curve has expired, we now are drawn to whatever is new to us (reality tv, porn sites, newscasts). A most reliable trait for marketing that is (that of inherent continued need for learning).

Watch the videos and find out why the attitude of fearlessness of failure should help us silly grown-ups succeed in being transformative.

Ad Industry brief

Every little helps—No piece of work may be submitted with no reliable aim at bringing back the magic.
Are you experienced?—Ideas now must be ideas that do. Getting experienced at what ideas that do are all about.
Responsibility—Not only focus on the client needs but focus on your needs as a creative human being and as a member of the advertising trade.

• When fear stifles inititative—Robert W. Goldfarb

Source:
commoncraft—our product is explanation
Voice-over by Lee LeFever

Twitter in Plain English

Blogs in Plain English

update on May 2nd

Desktop Revolution 2010 update

Most everything successful these days, is successful because it has beautifully adapted to the desktop revolution. Computing with all research and information processing and sharing, has slid from the back office over the desktop into our pockets, and seems to be all over the place.. Along with the desktop revolution, we have been lifted out of the more mechanically driven industrial age and accelerated into the more abstract and extremely technology driven information age. It has been a good quarter of a century! And we are still at it.

Much to our misfortune, the desktop revolution stopped short of invading two of our more powerful industries, the automotive industry and the advertising industry. That is ~ the underlaying thinking and re-education that eventually invaded our lives as commoners with the desktop revolution was adapted step by step and has not led to a much more radical approach of rethinking the futures of either one of the two left behind industries.

1. Both industries have underestimated mainstream trends
2. Both industries appear to be stuck in an ivory tower of non-adaptive, disconnected thinking

Both, the insightful Amelia Torode, and paperback writer Hugh McLeod, have long signalled what is proving to be true, technology changes, people don’t. Sadly true, with us advertising people.

Courtesy Hugh MacLeod, VW ad Bill Bernbach ddb

• Carmakers are in the transportation business not in the automative business
• Growing awareness of environmental issues
• Pressing need for life enhancing mobility and flexibility in everyday life
• Greater cause for cost efficiency

• Local Motors. Early insight of an alternative approach for the automotive industry to become more consumer oriented

Underestimated trends in the advertising industry

• Greater awareness and impact of environmental issues
• Democratisation of brands
• Empowered customers

With massive evidence, that both industries need to act, and knowing that exceptional circumstances require exceptional action, I have yet to receive strong signals that these industries have accepted evidence and have invoked impulses to secure their future. Cars have not changed much since I was born other then becoming bigger rather than smaller, consuming more fuel rather than less and offer no intelligence for helping with everyday life other than electronic windows. We are all waiting for an insanely great idea from the automotive industry to help with the environmental issues.

International advertising, and I am referring to German ad agencies, have grown to the size and complexity of Madison Avenue agencies… Alas, with a market not even close to the size of the US market.

Why not wrap the entire ad service offering up in a neat desktop advertising package and slide it across the desktop into the pockets of clients and consumers? Move from day-in, day-out services to software, hard at work 24/7? Do away with customized campaigning websites and come to the aid with empowering platforms and great listening apps?

That said tv ads are at their best and come from insanely great boutique shops in Hamburg and Berlin who seem to be laughing all the way to the bank despite the recession.

The purpose of this blog is not necessarily to salt wounds but to amplify solutions and provide orientation and focus on best practices and to provide instructions on how to get there, rather than wasting each others time with explanations.

• Deborah Schulze’s blog entry, which sparked the above cartoon

Large networked classic ad agencies

Brands expect integrated communications. An efficient, effective solution to solve the brand’s issue, brought to market with the most cost efficient and effective channels available. This holds true from within the smallest niche offering of smaller set ups as well.

1. An insanely great Idea along with a good story that is campaign-able across the chosen channels
2. Decentralized campaigning capable of reflecting the brand truths is imminent in mastering the splinternet [groundswell]
3. Any unit involved with the execution better be regarded as part of the creative team
4. Idea and channels must be seriously synchronized amongst strategy / creative /account / technology / media / the client side of the story and lovingly honed to become effective
5. Account leadership expected to be savvy and experienced in all required fields of chosen channels
6. Creative leadership in the hands of a digital native is more likely to succeed given all the technological aspects that classic creative is not accustomed to
7. Inherent operations only viewpoint and internal affairs orientation must finally give way to solidarity with the client’s customers and consumer orientation

• Five questions every CMO should ask a prospective ad agency
• Thomas Mahon from Englsih Cut with brilliant insight on old versus new advertising
• What the ad industry is learning from nature

Digital marketing agencies

As digital with ever evolving technologies have become perfectly capable of handling most advertising disciplines, and are welcomed by the customers to do so, their clients expect proper brand management, participation marketing and hands-on prowess in handling large accounts, especially for multi-national account handling. Expect clients to increasingly demand integrated marketing from even the smallest niche offering here as well.

1. Governing and relationship management of digital agency and lead agency is vital for the brand’s success.
2. Decentralized campaigning capable of reflecting the brand truths is imminent in mastering the splinternet [groundswell]
3. Strategy, media, account and technology must brace themselves to fully service international roll outs of digital multichannel activities including all non-digital assets
4. Good money can be made with adding mobile support to existing brand sites (great temporary opportunity for small production set ups to add income)
5. Providing solid digital footprints for your clients may very well replace conventional brand management in a surprisingly radical fashion
6. Platform development and enabling apps, listening and monitoring apps, mobile migration will replace much of the micro site-, landing page- and banner activities
7. Creative and account leadership better be brand natives as much as digital natives need supply a proven track record in classic advertising and brand management
8. With the event of social media, digital agencies can no longer sell static micro sites or websites as dynamic sites, that lack the technology driving blogs without adding sociable functionalities. Better build blog and mobile ready sites with the needed intelligence for today’s participatory audience built right in.

 

• The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age
• Nicholas Rope from digital agendy Poike talks about “ads vs things”

 

What’s with the woodstock twitter badge?

Much like the summer of 1967 and woodstock have changed our society for good, the silent revolution, a movement known as hipster phenomena has been with us for more than a decade, eventually laying the foundation to ‘life always finding a way’ and having technological advances make the internet retaliate with the social media revolution to set our twisted commercial-only setting straight and have us return to a more human like, organic, evolutionary, adaptive world order. Stay tuned…

 

• Get your badge here
• Am I a hipster? Google returns 2,830,000 search results