Useful Lunacy

Learning to have ideas

(Photo © all rights reserved by Robert Pollack via Flickr)

Last Thursday marked the second session in my Copywriting class at MCAD. We're in the "learning to have ideas" phase of the course, which is equally illuminating for teacher (me) and student (them). As background, it helps to understand that being an advertising copywriter is, "80% conceptual thinking and 20% finish carpentry," according to my old compatriot Khari Streeter. So this phase of the course is as much about developing a work ethic and practice of ideas as it is coming to grips with the fragile reality of creativity. (We'll get to the niceties of writing copy soon enough.)

Jack Foster and Robert Grudin and Rollo May have all written wonderful books on the subject of ideas. 

How do we "have ideas?"

My old mentor Bill Miller (co-creator of the "Perception. Reality." campaign for Rolling Stone at Fallon) said, "The business of creativity is learning to survive rejection." So, stamina and willpower are definitely required. There's an insightful interview with noted screenwriting guru Robert McKee that quotes him: "The most important component of talent is perseverance - the will to write and rewrite in pursuit of perfection." Yes.

I told my students about the old jealousy Hollywood has of writers—since writers are the first to see any story come to life. Having ideas means willfully confronting the unknown. Who knows, maybe the role is even heroic on some level; which suggests a healthy ego and curiosity wouldn't hurt. Do what others will not. Robert Grudin said, "Creativity is dangerous." That sort of thing. 

At any rate, it's also work. From Stephen King to Michael Chabon, the lesson is clear: to have ideas, you must actually have them regularly—and commit them. I think it was novelist Chabon who suggested a challenge like, "1,700 words a day or don't bother." Or as legendary London creative director Dave Trott's so clearly stated: If you're creative, create. The issue isn't so much form as it is function—whatever venue works, works—so long as you continue to produce ideas of merit. 

Such is the state of "having ideas" in one small class of students in a 100 year old fine arts college in the upper midwest of America in the fall of the year 2009. 

Posted via email from Tim's posterous

Birmingham, and the future of advertising

Let me start this post with a shout-out to the United gate agent at the Birmingham airport who managed to get me on an oversold plane going home. Thank you!

Birmingham is a great city. I had a lot of fun speaking there. Big thanks to Mason, Dale, Jeff, Rhonda, David and David and all the other hospitable folks for bringing me down and putting together the event. Clearly, there's a lot of smart people trying to do innovative work in that city. It was refreshing to hang out and get a sense of how that community is dealing with the various forces evolving advertising and marketing. 

Here's yesterday's presentation. Enjoy.

What's The Future of Advertising?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: advertising marketing)

I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Many years ago I put together a class called "So You Think You Want My Job" for the Boston Ad Club. It was designed for people who thought maybe they should get into advertising, but had no idea about who did what, or how things got done.

I assembled a curriculum, and sent it off to Pat Burnham, legendary second Creative Director at Fallon (behind Tom McElligott), for criticism and insight. And after a long while, this package shows up.

Turns out Pat had carried my curriculum around for months, trying to find time to read and react. Finally, he got on a plane, it got on the runway, and it stalled. So he had a few hours with nothing to do but critique my outline. I'm glad he did.

Pat returned my manuscript filled with underlining linked to lengthy quotes in the margins. Brilliant observations, all of them. Including this one:

“An instructor at the U of M told our class that we couldn’t get a good grade by writing a lot of facts and stuff about the subject. He said he knew just about everything there was to know about the subject because he’d been teaching the class for a long time. He said the only way to get a good grade was if he said to himself after reading our paper, ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way before.’ That, to me, is what ads are (or should) be all about.” 
– Pat Burnham

I think you could build a communications agency of almost any stripe on that quote.

MOTTO:  "When we create ads/paid search/blogger outreach/gadgets/you-name-it, people react: 'I hadn't thought of it that way before.'"

How many of us hold our work to that standard?

It's deceptively, cruelly simple. First, you're aspiring to create words/images/architecture/motion/functionality/all-of-the-above that must be interesting, that must be so compelling they must be noticed. (Reminds me of Bernbach's Paradigm.) Which, in today's media landscape, is quite a challenge. Moment-graphics, anyone?

Second, your work (again, in whatever format or medium you're in) must not only be interesting, it actually has to be interesting enough to engage the audience. Their reaction, "Oh, that's neat," doesn't cut it. In other words, you have to make them care, even on a microscopic/nanosecond level. Your work must have a quality that gets people to stop whatever else it is they were doing and want to pay attention to you. As Robert Grudin puts the challenge, "Most people do not make discoveries because they do not expect to."

Third, and perhaps hardest—your work, once it's got their attention, got people to engage—has to get the audience to think differently. How often does that happen? Another way to put it is "surprise." You work should aspire to surprise.

For the sake of argument, swap "Google Gadgets" or "paid search campaigns" or "SMS-enabled billboards" or "brand characters on Twitter" for the word "ads" in this great quote from Howard Gossage:

“The best ads are something no one has seen before. They heighten our own perceptions."

Are you holding your work to that standard?

The Tufte Impact

It's going to take a few years to unravel, but I suspect today marked a significant change in how I want to think and how I'd prefer to present what I think.

A few years ago my friend Dmitri Cavander, a fantastic web designer and painter, got me interested in the work of Edward Tufte. I've rifled through a few of Tufte's books, but never found the opportunity to dig in. Until today.

The gal at the registration desk (one of Tufte's four assistants) said there were "just under 500 people" present at today's "Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course Taught By Edward Tufte." This was his first of two days in Minneapolis—it speaks well of the Twin Cities that we have that many people interested in efficient display of information and clarity of design.

(Interestingly, Tufte's assistants aren't his grad students; he hasn't been teaching at Yale for a while. Rather, they met Tufte by helping him with sculpture projects and yard work. He hires well. The course was flawless in terms of audio/visual, course materials and all that.)

The price of the course includes hardbound copies of Tufte's four major books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence). You're encouraged to arrive early and read a few selections before class. (I didn't manage that feat.)

Tufte speaks gently, with wit, precision and grace. His style of rhetoric reminds me of the writings of the author Robert Grudin. Both are exceedingly well-versed in broad ranges of insights, experiences and knowledge; and keen to share.

The course moves through selections from each of the four books. Lots to think about in the coming years. We covered the beauty (and really, the better practice) of using just nouns, numbers and simple arrows in presenting complex information vs. succumbing to the failings of Powerpoint. We learned about utilizing sparklines to simply convey vast amounts of numerical data.

Tufte also emphasized trusting your audience's ability to understand (the human brain can read and comprehend much faster than it can hear), and advocated for empowering your audience by giving them a summary of your presentation before you present—and in some cases, instead of presenting.

It's clear: Tufte doesn't much like Powerpoint. And for very good reasons. I'd always struggled with PP's inept design tools. Obviously spending so much time focusing on designing my presentations is proof enough I was using the wrong tool. I use Keynote now, but probably still spend too much time concerned with how words look versus what they actually say. Tufte's lesson: Focus on content. Focus on what you have to say, using the most efficient means of saying it. As he put it today, "Use PP (or Keynote) as a slide projector only."

But I wonder. What about drama?

I've given quite a few presentations around the subject, "What is the future of advertising?" My presentation format includes some paragraphs revealed over time (i.e. bulleting) and a bit of window dressing between major sections to help shift the mood. I use what's on screen as both a dramatic tool—to reveal a new point—as well as a foil for my running commentary. I think of it as a performance, with some value in the performing. And I seek to reduce what's on screen to a bare minimum. Is that effective by Tufte's definition? I think it has to do with content and context.

Then consider those strictly business presentations: New business proposals, project summaries, campaign presentations. Here, I completely agree with Tufte, and look forward to stripping away many of the "extras" I've found myself using with clients. Time to broom the sequenced reveals, the transitional effects between slides. Time to consider brooming Keynote all together.

Tufte gave an example today, which I'll paraphrase:

"Imagine you've got seven minutes with your boss to present something really important. First, take an 11x17" piece of paper, fold it once, which gives you four pages. Put everything down on that one (four page) document. At the start of the presentation, give your boss the document and ask them to read it, assuring them it should take about four minutes, and then there will be plenty of time to ask questions afterwards. Knowing people can read faster than they can hear, your boss finishes on time, and maybe asks a question or two—which you've been rehearsing for. Hopefully, you finish your 'presentation' ahead of the seven minutes. (What a gift for your boss!) And, of course, you leave a copy of your document with your boss, which they will probably return to."

It's about empowering your audience. It's about knowing they're smart enough to comprehend what you have to communicate—so you let them read, you let them control the presentation. It's about recognizing your content is more important than your presentation. Of course, this method requires you have to have your shit together, doesn't it? It means you've got to really know your content, have it researched and edited. No wonder so many presentations focus on the pretty nuisances.

Again, it's probably not the right approach for every presentation—otherwise, Al Gore wouldn't have won that Oscar. But if I learned or reaffirmed anything today, it's to prioritize a presentation's content above the presentation style or methodology and (whenever it's appropriate) to empower my audiences with as much information before we start presenting. The ultimate goal—to create conversation as soon as possible.

Jack Foster on Line 1

A few weeks ago I was doing my best to procrastinate at work when my cell phone rang. It was the author of How To Get Ideas, Jack Foster, calling.

Calling me.

I've never met Jack. Never written him. Or called. Or emailed. And here he is on the other end of the telephone. A guy who's book merits five stars from 51 of 54 reviews on Amazon. A book that's cited by 31 other books. Over 90,000 copies of the first edition sold. This was wonderfully astounding.

I first read How To Get Ideas in 1998 or 99, a few years after it was first published. It didn't save my life, but it certainly helped me figure out how to work smarter and faster in advertising. I've probably given away a few dozen copies, and always included it in required reading lists for classes I've taught.

"Getting an idea depends on your belief in its existence. And your belief in yourself."

So it seems a friend of Jack's found this blog and noted my recommended books, including an out-of-date edition of How To Get Ideas. Jack asked if he could send me the latest edition, since it's got two new chapters? What's my address? Could I update my link?

This wasn't a blog comment or email asking, this was a real live author using the phone to connect with his audience. Talk about social media.

"The child swings for the fences. The adult thinks too much and has too much scar tissue and is manacled by too much knowledge and by too many boundaries and rules and assumptions and preconceptions. In short, the adult is a poop. A handcuffed poop." (Be more like a child.)

The new edition includes two new chapters: Rejoice In Failure and Team Up with Energy. Both are welcome additions to an already solid philosophy. Clearly, Jack's work in advertising—being required to come up with all kinds of different ideas (not just ads)—and his teaching provided experience and context for developing useful technique. I've turned to this book more times than I can count to get over a block, or procrastination or myself.

"If you're like most people, many times your thinking is inhibited because you unconsciously assume that a problem has restrictions and boundaries and limitations and constraints, when in fact it doesn't."

And I think How To Get Ideas is the book that initially turned me on to another all-time favorite, Robert Grudin's The Grace of Great Things, with its powerful entreaty: "Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection."

My old copy has all kinds of underlines and notes in the margins, some indicating the book's value in parsing the difficulties ad agencies were (and currently still are) facing as marketing evolves into the digital space.

"Something is going on right now in some other field that could help you solve your problem, that could give you fresh insight, that could turn your thinking in a new direction, that could combine with something you already know, that you could use to unlock your mystery. Keep your eye and ear out for it."

If it isn't clear, you really ought to get yourself a copy of this book, preferably the new edition. Heck, buy a couple copies and give 'em to friends and co-workers. 

"The truth is: There is no difference between (a) having an idea and not doing anything with it and (b) not having an idea at all."

Thanks for calling, Jack.

Editing

Seth Godin posted an intriguing stat today: "...for the last seventeen years, every single movie that managed to win the Oscar for best picture was also nominated for best editing." (Run the analysis if you're curious.)

I agree with the value of editing. In fact, one of my favorite quotes (not sure who coined it, Stephen King? David Mamet?) is "Half of writing is editing."

If you've read McKee's Story, or almost any book on writing, you quickly uncover how true this is. The business of putting words down in a specific order is not 100% about just putting those words down. It's also about picking some up later and throwing them out, revising them, rethinking and, well, editing.

In fact, deciding what not to write is often more valuable than simply writing.

Godin asks, "Who's your editor?"

Hopefully, it's you.

Books for The Future of Advertising?

Class doesn't start until January. But I've got to figure out which books to reference and possibly mandate for my Future of Advertising class at MCAD. This stack is my starting point.

I haven't read them all, yet. But I've read a few of them more than twice. Some are likely familiar, others possibly a bit unusual for a course on advertising, much less the future. But there's method in my madness.

The Courage To Create
by Rollo May
I first read this about 15 years ago. My memory's vague at the moment, but I seem to recall value in May's observations about the common structures of creativity, across almost any and all disciplines. Seems like a good foundation.

On Writing: A Memoir To The Craft
by Stephen King
This was the first book that taught me how to write. I think writing coherently, but with flavor, will continue to have merit. Even in the future.

How To Lie With Statistics
by Darrell Huff
"The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science," writes Huff. Ah ha! My buddy Chris Wexler recommended this slim tome, first published in 1954. Given the continual rise of the importance of data -- be it Google Analytics or an ROI statement -- I'm feeling like Huff's work is worth examining.

Made To Stick
by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
I haven't read this yet. By all appearances, it seems to provide lots of worthwhile perspective.

How To Get Ideas
by Jack Foster
First read this about 10 years ago while preparing to teach a course on advertising at Emerson College. I continue to turn to this book for reference and help when the wheels need grease.

Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances
by Judith Weston
Typically, I underline, circle and bracket particularly compelling sections of the books I read. I fold page corners, too. My copy of this book, much like "Gossage" or "Grace of Great Things," is littered with inky markings. "Sometimes a mistake is our subconscious speaking, and we ought to listen to it," Weston writes. This book is written for people in TV and Film, but it's equally applicable to running an advertising agency or working in this new world.

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
by 37Signals
We saw Jason Fried speak at the recent MIMA Summit. I just got this in the mail from Lulu Publishing. Can't wait to read it, pen in hand. I'm curious about the ethos or practice of working, and how our newer culture of conversation, "always in beta" and "always on" are affecting methodology.

Actionable Web Analytics
by Jason Burby & Shane Atchison
Same story. We saw Jason Burby speak at the MIMA Summit, and I thought, "If this guy has a book, I'm buying it." And he does. What drew me in here was the simplicity and strength of Burby's approach to divining business goals and the metrics to measure them. Funny how little of this rigor actually occurs in business today.

The Grace of Great Things
by Robert Grudin
Perhaps my favorite book. Enough said.

Feakonomics
by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
This book has been sitting on my desk for at least a year. I think the underlying idea of 'seeking connections in new ways' ought to have a place in the Future of Advertising.

Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide To Creating Great Ads
by Luke Sullivan
I wonder if Luke's considering a revised edition that acknowedges the Internet? Hands down, one of the best, if not the best, book on making ads inside an advertising agency. I suspect this book is used in other classes at MCAD, so I might not include it for that reason.

Life After The 30-Second Spot
by Joseph Jaffe
(Is it safe to admit I haven't read the entire book yet?) I'll get there. Looking forward to being able to call Across The Sound with a clear conscious.

The Book of Gossage
by Howard Gossage, et al
My copy is quite well underlined, bracketed and generally marked up. Despite his age and era, Gossage really did have an eye and ear towards the future. "The audience is to be considered first and foremost. You are there at their leisure."

The Age of Conversation
Edited by Gavin Heaton & Drew McLellan
Seems like a no-brainer to include this one. My copy arrived a few weeks ago. I'm looking forward to reading it (after I finish Jaffe's book, of course).

Granted, a vast majority of classroom reference and research for The Future of Advertising will consist of blog reading, posting and participation. But academia requires some scholarly fealty to the printed word.

What are your thoughts? Are these books worth the effort? Are there other books my students and I should be reading? Should I include Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, for example?

What's on your bookshelf? What do you read again and again? What books do you share?

Advertising: Expense or Investment?

You gotta love AdAge's CMO Strategies column. One week it's Mark Simon spewing about why Twitter is "asinine." And this week it's quite different--a very well-considered piece by Avi Dan (former global executive director-new business development at Euro RSCG) titled "Agencies Must Wake Up to a Different Business Model."

First, I like the fact this is Chief Marketing Officer Strategy--as in, Chief Marketing Officers should demand their agencies wake up to a different business model. I like that focus. Because it seems like we've been beating the (half dead) horse of advertising without much success. Maybe it takes the people with the money (the marketers), to truly implement change.

Dan posits several fairly common recommendations for evolving one's agency into an "Agency 2.0." But I don't think that's the point. Plenty of agencies (Anamoly, Saatchi LA, CP+B, et al) have already succeeded in these areas. I think the reason we're seeing his recommendations in a CMO Strategy column is to give CMOs a blueprint for demanding change from their agencies--specifically the agency holding companies.

More to the point, I suspect the real motivation for Dan's POV is in arming CMOs for the inevitable clash with their CFO and CEO in determining the true value of advertising.

It's a Clash of The Titans.

"Unfortunately and unfairly, agencies are facing a head wind as the context of compensation has changed in the past two decades. Up until the 1980s the marketing folks or salespeople, the agencies' natural partners, controlled agency compensation. But as the longest-running bull market in the history of Wall Street began in 1982, the balance of power within corporate America shifted. Quarterly reports, financial guidance and stock options as a form of compensation began to take center stage in many companies, and with it the ascent of the CFO from bureaucratic, bean-counting functionary to corporate policy maker and stalwart. Over time, especially when it became harder to build the company's top line in an ever-more competitive environment, many CFOs applied financial engineering to the bottom line -- including the idea that advertising, and an agency fee, is an expense rather than an investment. And a symptom of this new thinking -- the greater emphasis on policing the financial aspect of the client-agency relationship -- is the emergence of procurement as the third leg of the CMO-agency relationship stool." (Emphasis mine.)

Is what we do, what we create--is advertising itself--an expense or an investment?

You can see how the notion that "advertising is an expense" came into being. TV commercials air for limited periods of time. Print ads become outdated within months. And people keep saying consumers hate advertising. Voila! It's an expenditure--worse, a commodity. (Which is what I suspect Dan really meant.) And if advertising, and thus the agency fee and the entire relationship, is just a commodity, then let's head over to Costco because they've got a special on retail ad campaigns in aisle five next to the bulk cereal.

Given this condition, it's no wonder the ad industry's prone to frequent "clients hate advertising" sentiments. If advertising is merely a commodity to be written off, then I'd hate spending time on it and paying for it, too. (Fenske's post is worth your time, btw.)

At its core, an expense is essentially negative. Expenses require justification. They inspire quibbling and bullying. They lead to a singular determining factor: Cost.

An Expense is not an Idea.

I think it was David Ogilvy who said, "Clients get the advertising they deserve." Treat the ad industry as an expense, and well, look at what's on air and online right now. Is anyone happy with that?

On the other hand, if you're a smart CMO, why wouldn't you prefer to position your advertising budget as an investment--as a positive, forward-thinking outcome?

Investments are valued. Just like Ideas.

If marketers were to demand their agencies pursue a different business model, one which valued ideas over hours, and put the onus on the power of creativity and the skill of craft over the blunt time keeping--I suspect agency/client relationships would improve overnight. And likely, the overall financial balance would remain largely the same.

As Dan points out, "J.K. Rowling, Steven Spielberg, Damien Hirst or Georgio Armani, don't fill time sheets and don't get compensated based on how many hours they toil, but on the basis of the value that their artistry creates."

The issue is value.

Do marketers value advertising? If they truly did, then many more should be demanding their agencies pursue a different business model.

How to Tell Stories, 2.0

Lots of synchronicity out there on the subject of Story: 

Valeria Maltoni's recent post on "Elevating the Conversation on Stories" is well worth your time. I've been wrestling with the notion of Story as a definition or motivation for all this lifecasting/blogging/social networking--why it matters and why marketers and audiences should care. Philippe Deltenre's weighed in as well with a conversation on the metrics of conversation marketing.

Feels to me like the definition of Story--what is a Story--has rapidly changed. We "-cast" or blog to continue telling an ongoing, ever evolving story. We're vastly more enabled now to tell those stories, as well as consume them.  The Public Timeline on Twitter is a kind of story. At 1:27am last night, that story was being told mostly in Japanese.

Story is also much more collaborative now, and ongoing. Story is now conversation. Less the writer in their turret, more the group commenting from around the globe. From an advertising perspective, it's much less about the writer & art director working alone against the world to tell their story--and if you like it, great, the end. It's more about the writer & art director creating an idea or structure that enables others to contribute to the story--which might just continue being told long after that team left the account or the agency.

Story is also much less linear. It's much less sequential. It's much less obvious. Look at the narrative structure of Lost or 24. And both those examples provide ample evidence of collaboration, of consumer-involvement. You can join a story today and work it backwards as well as forwards, and still get entertainment and meaning.

In essence, the role of the Writer (or the creator) is in flux, too. And I'm primarily referring to that role within an advertising agency. In the past, a creative team might view a film (take Blade Runner) and use it as inspiration for an advertising concept (take Apple's "1984"). It's not really a conversation. The creatives controlled what was to be appropriated, what was to be referenced, what was to be said. Now, the role of the creator is as much about being the guide, the talent scout, and the editor--influencing and motivating others in an ongoing conversation/story that (one hopes!) will ultimately benefit a client's brand. (Let's get that conversation measurement thing figured out quick, Philippe.)

And yes, today's definition of Story is a work in progress, perhaps even a Mystery (as Grudin might put it). Because we, "Sense either that there is something curiously 'wrong'...or that there is something strangely wonderful" going on here. And this is awesome. Because "We must, in solving the problem (of Story) solve ourselves."

Mr. Grudin, meet Mr. Fenske. Mr. Fenske, Mr. Grudin.

Leafing through the May/June 07 Communication Arts this evening. Ernie Schenck's ad column sticks out because of one word: Fenske. 

"It takes magic, ludicrous, fancy, blind-flying and something hidden from probably 99.7% of the people on earth to bring an audience what they don't know. It takes Mr. Wacko."

— Mark Fenske

There's that frightening stuff again.

Thank god.

I had the privilege of spending an hour with Fenske at the Oak Room in Boston a few years back. Got to buy the man a few drinks after he'd thoroughly up-ended Arnold's creative department—people walking away from Mark's presentation, scratching their heads, wonderfully mystified. Yet, smarter. Better equipped.

I suspect the author Robert Grudin might concur:

"Restless, curious, playful, contriving, the innovative mind feeds on challenge and makes its home in the provence of mystery."

I wish I could bottle it, Fenske's ability to continually up-end stagnant creative processes. In the meantime, words will have to do.