STRAT_SCRAPS v59
Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.
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Off the bat, I want to recommend a book:
“Offline Matters: The Less-Digital Guide to Creative Work” by Jess Henderson. Directly opposite of this newsletter, Offline Matters is a book that came out of writing a newsletter. A newsletter about the ad industry, digital culture, and all the ailments within.
And it somehow only costs $3.
I’m about halfway through, but here is a quote from the first few pages that will become a guiding principle of mine in any future career choices:
“I want something better than a life tethered to consumer culture.”
Damn– same.
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The job of a planner, in explicit and simple terms is “fuck around and find out.” — The mistake often made is thinking that the “finding out” is more important than the “fucking around”
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I’ve written before about brand relics. Evidence of a brand’s existence that lives outside media dollars or signage.
But “don’t leave things how you found them” is also a big personal belief.
Leave your fingerprints on everything.
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A quote from Bjork:
A lot of pop musicians do this: simplify things and find an emotional coordinate and then write a whole song about that coordinate. Maybe the first verse of a song is about a lover, and the second verse is about a friend, and then the third verse is something you saw in a movie, but it’s all about that particular emotional location. Pop music is so often an attempt to make sense of something that’s really complicated in everyday life. Often, the method that works is to zoom out and try to look at it from afar.
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Impress/Irritate your creative team! This is a fun type generator that I see getting some use in my next presentation.
http://spacetypegenerator.com/
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An awesome website that shows how fear of new technology is nothing new.
Here are 85 news stories about how the invention of the radio is going to doom us all (although the radio did give us rush limbaugh, so maybe they weren’t wrong).
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Gonna end with an anecdote.
In a brainstorm with a client and a potential direction comes up. The below dialogue is word for word the exchange that followed:
Client: “I love this! Just make me one promise–”
ECD, cutting the client off: “Nope.”
It was all in good humor, and the client ended up having a very reasonable request, but that “nope” stuck with me.
Never make promises so early on.
And maybe even more importantly, make it clear you aren’t going to make any promises.
WEEKLY MONSTER
I haven’t been drawing much recently, so here is a monster drawing that I have hung above my desk. If I had to sum up my approach to advertising in an image, this would be it.
