Food for thought: The spy who sold out
Forgiving a pretty face
Facebook to agencies: how will people share your story?
Is “The Pitch” an accurate reflection of our industry?
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Put your writing through its paces
What do writers and athletes have in common?
They smell the same? They have the same set of social skills? Close, but no dice.
The real answer is that both writers and athletes get better with practice. The contentious difference: the body of an athlete can fail up to a certain point, but the mind of a writer only gets sharper over time.
Call me Captain Obvious, but the truth is most people neglect the importance of practice in honing their craft – and by that I don’t just mean drafting headlines. Yes, learning the quick draw on pithy, insightful headlines is necessary. And yes, you have to draft half a million calls to action. But if your gig is writing, you should write. Full stop. Write compellingly, humorously, moodily, uselessly or dramatically. Just…write. A copywriter’s ability to write to any emotion is what sells their work and, ultimately (and hopefully), the product. Writing without restraint or worry helps broaden the possibilities of story telling.
So if you feel like you need to give your copy a boost, sit down every day and write headlines for a campaign you wish you could work on. Write a blog. Write fiction. Be fearless for a little while. Write things that won’t get put in front of a client, or forget that someone is out there judging your work. Write like you wish you could.
Your job is to be the person in the room who can find le mot juste. The only way you can get to that point is (to borrow from our athlete metaphor) to hit the track before race day. So write for yourself wherever you can, and for whatever reason you can invent. In time, that person judging you, that client you need to impress and that job you want to keep will all fall into place. You will be a better writer, because you actually write.
Grip interviews: Jamie King
Jamie King is an Art Director at Grip Limited in Toronto.
1) True or false: Clients too often get hung up on the size of their logo?
True.
I’ve never had anyone ask me if I remember an ad because the logo in it was huge. Have you?
2) Without revealing its name, what is your favourite thing about the best campaign you’ve ever worked on?
Just seeing the idea make it through the whole process still intact. It’s rare.
3) What qualities do you look for in the copywriters you like to work with?
They need to be good, down to earth people. Curious = great, passion = also great. Egos need not apply.
4) Thinking about the entire arc of campaign creation, what are your favourite and least favourite parts of the process?
The brief is always my favorite part, but that new-brief-feeling is usually crushed shortly after by the project’s timeline.
5) What’s the difference between a good idea and a bad idea?
Insight.
6) How important is it for an Art Director to be on top of the latest technology trends?
Very. Now more than ever we’re selling ideas to clients with executions that lean heavily on those technology trends. We can’t expect a client to buy into it if we don’t know what it is we’re selling.
7) How do you balance the desire to share Grip’s latest digital campaigns in your social networks, while maintaining meaningful connections with your friends?
I don’t share the campaigns, they share themselves when I interact with them. It just so happens I do that a lot.
8) What’s a common, avoidable mistake you see being made by ad agencies in general?
Not putting ideas in front of a client because they are out of budget. If the idea is that great the agency should get behind it any way they can. Even if that means over-investing to get the right solution in market.
9) What’s one thing you learned at the University of New Brunswick that still helps you every day at work?
If you are looking for answers, don’t be afraid to ask questions.
10) What are you reading these days and why?
My twitter feed. It’s current.
11) True or false: Andy Warhol was a genius?
True.
He’s still very influential today.
What are you doing for the next two minutes?
Would you pay for two minutes of pure silence? What if that silence was created by Bruce Dickinson, Thom Yorke, Bryan Ferry, producer Mark Ronson and other celebrities? Okay, it reads a bit like an Onion article, but it’s actually a very real and very modern stunt for a very old and undeniably great cause.
For this year’s Poppy Appeal, The Royal British Legion has released a single into the UK charts. The track “2 Minute Silence” is exactly what the name says, 120 seconds of no sound recorded by celebrities. Their aim is to raise money and consciousness by sending the video to the top of the charts so BBC’s Radio 1 will play the silent tribute, live on air.
Along with the “song” a video has been released in which musicians join British Prime Minister David Cameron and several other familiar figures to stand quietly towards a very worthy cause: All of the proceeds from the single will go towards furthering the Legion’s very important work, supporting serving and ex-Service personnel and their families.
Crazy? I don’t think so. It’s a powerful video and a big idea that makes remembering very much a thing of the present via our i-obsessed culture. You can even show your support via Facebook and Twitter, furthering this forward looking take on a cultural event that’s been around since 1919 and has, admittedly, seen its share of ebb and flow in the public’s eye.
You can purchase your copy now at www.silentsingle.com or from iTunes, or preview the video and behind the scenes footage.
It’s two minutes. What are you waiting for?
Taking Facebook Places
Remember the first time someone said “WHAT? You’re not on Foursquare?! LAME!” and you jumped on your mobile device and did a search for this wondrous thing only to ask yourself “is this it?”
After checking into a few places and gaining mayorship of your (cleverly named) home, the novelty of social-based check-in services probably wore off. Facebook was a late comer in the “check-in” game, but with over 100 million mobile Facebook users in North America alone, its Places platform already has a decent head start on a user base. When it opens up to the rest of the world, Facebook forecasts that Places will have 500 million active users. The only question that remains is how easily Facebook can get users to offer up even more personal information.
Right out of the gate I’ll tell you: I’m a Facebook Places advocate. They’re leveraging services other location-based aren’t: tagging friends who are with you, attaching photos and limiting your check-in to your actual location. This last point is a real game-maker for me, given that the first day I jumped on Foursquare I checked into Rodeo Drive just to see if I could (I could).
If basic functionality and common sense weren’t enough to position Places as a game changer, consider that they’re launching with 22 big-league starters in the U.S. Companies like The Gap, H&M, Starbucks and McDonalds have all agreed to throw down promotional gambits against Places’ success and reach.
With check-in promotions ranging from $1 donations to Ronald McDonald House to free pairs of jeans at The Gap to the first 10,000 check-ins at The Gap, Places is already a little sexier than Foursquare’s composite offer of a “Gym Rat” badge.
Though Places is only 2 months old, Facebook has yet to find a real method of tapping into revenue generation possibilities. That being said, the gears are already turning. With the ability to track peoples’ live spending habits, see where their friends are shopping and redeeming coupons, Facebook will not only able to establish predictions against our social lives, but our financial lives too.
Truth in Advertising
Let’s kick this week off with one from the archives. This short was penned by Dave Chiavegato, one of the Creative Partners here at Grip Limited.
Advice for intern hopefuls
Students often ask me what creative directors look for when they’re considering interns. Recently, Anthony K from Seneca sent over a couple of fresh minds for such an information session. Vinay and Jeremy – you fellas asked some great questions. So great, in fact, that I thought they’d be worth sharing with the Slide’s audience.
What do you look for in an intern’s portfolio?
I look for ideas. Lots of them. Blow out a campaign into as many different media as you can. Show how it lives. Take risks. And please, only put your best work forward. If you wouldn’t show it to your boyfriend, girlfriend or parents it doesn’t make the cut.
Is it better to do spec ads for big brands or small, unknown ones?
I’ve never been asked this before. Interesting.
My advice: create concepts for brands you love, rather than worrying about the size of it. Having said that, if you are going to tackle a big brand and you stray from the brand voice, explain why.
What qualities make good intern candidates?
Assume your work is good. Now tell me what makes you stand out from the others. What do you do in your spare time? Perhaps you collect rubber chickens, run a horror film festival, show your still photography in a local gallery, play in a punk band. I look for interesting people. Because interesting people make interesting work. And they’re more fun to be around.
Do you have a method for coming up with ideas?
Yes. And no.
Can you elaborate?
Um, ok. Well, I really focus on the brief. I continually ask myself: “what is the one thing I want people to remember?” “What does it mean to them?” “How do I get people to remember that thing?” Also, I stare at the ceiling a lot.
Do you ever feel like you can’t go on, that you want to change careers?
All the time, man. Working in advertising is hard. You eat a ton of shit. But there’s always tomorrow. You start fresh everyday. When I feel like crap, I go home if I can. If I can’t, I listen to music. Or watch a YouTube video. Facebook is a great distraction too. Sometimes I take a walk over to the Gap, because as much as I like the store, I wouldn’t want to work there. No offence. I love my job. The positives outweigh the negatives. So much so, I can’t imagine doing anything else. My advice? Keep it all in perspective. It helps.
What’s the best advice you can offer an intern once s/he gets a job?
Make yourself invaluable. When an agency can’t do without you, chances are they will find a way to keep you. So work hard and listen to advice. Learn. Try. Show up. Talk. Share. Brainstorm. Above all, don’t be shy. Being shy is death.
If you’re an intern and want to chat, drop me a line: jonfinkelstein@griplimited.com
The trouble with crowdsourcing
As I was motoring down the information super highway (yes, I’m bringing it back), I stumbled across a discussion board that posited a curious question, namely: “what are you doing to stop crowdsourcing?”
More bizarre still, was the number and type of responses.
To begin, a little definition. According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.” Or, put in slightly less scientific terms: getting other people to do the work for you. The term itself was coined by Jeff Howe in the June 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.
Crowdsourcing is now, and ever will be, a gamble. To my mind, clients and agencies that crowdsource are coming at it from one of three angles.
One, they are collecting brand ambassadors by proposing that they, as fans, have the insight and energy to deliver something good. Proximity ran a series of successful crowdsourcing gambits for Doritos to get consumers to name new flavours and “go viral” with their homemade ads.
Two, they are looking to produce a critical mass of work on a dime. Consider that the average prizing for a crowdsourcing contest is $30,000.00. Not a bad deal for a TV script, radio script and some banners.
Or three, they are trying to coolly deflect blame. This, by the way, is never a good idea, as evidenced by Gap’s wildly unsuccessful bid to crowd-source a revision to its logo.
In any case, crowdsourcing is an undeniably high-risk proposition. There are some who claim that crowdsourcing equals mass wisdom. I disagree. It just takes one quick trip to one of the popular crowdsourcing communities such as Zooppa to see why crowdsourcing is neither the future, nor a major threat to the industry. The work is bad. Ok, some of the work is adequate. But that’s about as good as it gets.
Crowdsourcing isn’t going anywhere. There will always be people who are willing to provide services to gain recognition, or for a shot at a big prize. We have all seen the signs “Website for $25/mnth.” Due to the quality of work crowdsourcing produces, it isn’t likely to become a threat to our industry. But the impact of crowd-sourcing will be determined by us. If, as professional Marketers, Advertisers, Designers, and Developers, we cannot consistently provide appropriate value for our services, crowdsourcing will continue to trend upward.
Grip Ltd. presents: 101 Thoughts on Advertising: Part 2
Two weeks ago the Big Orange Slide introduced a new series of collected thoughts on advertising, culled from the pulsating brains at Grip Limited.
And now, the series continues.
Advertising is:
12) a product of liquor and guessing.
13) going to drive innovation, not the other way around.
14) soul destroying and intensely gratifying – often in the same day.
15) strangely dependent on focus groups despite thousands of Facebook fans who offer their opinions for free.
16) to retail what a grease-paint moustache is to Groucho Marx.
17) more difficult than it looks from the outside in.
18) a craft, not an art.
19) an industry made up of mostly great people – but a few too many assholes.
20) way more fun than actually working for a living.
21) its own big idea.
