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The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
PIRATE(D) READINGS
A few books I’ve shared before, but finally got around to converting to PDF rather than apple’s epub format…
EAT YOUR GREENS.
One of the most important “number books” in the industry was pretty recently released. A must read.
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James Victore, Feck Perfunction
Not specifically for advertising, but important nonetheless. I hadn’t heard of Victore until embarrassingly recently– shows the importance of reading outside your industry.
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101 Things I learned in Advertising School
I don’t agree with every item in there, but you gotta know the rules before you disagree with them. Also, I’ve used this explanation more times than I can count.
LINKS/EXCERPTS
Long, but important:
“As Hesz puts it:
“We’re ignoring the mainstream professionally because we so often flinch from it personally.” And yet “The middle” as Hesz reminds us, “remains where scale happens. The middle is where fame happens. Proper, your-mum-knows-about-it, fame. The kind of fame where when you walk outside the office and ask people about it and they know what you’re talking about. So much of what the advertising industry does now, if we’re being honest, fails that most basic test. Simply put, the numbers just don’t back up the extent of our obsession with the outer edges. For every limited batch craft beer, there’s a lot of lager still drunk. For every gluten free loaf, we still get through a whole load of oven chips. This isn’t about traditional purchases versus new ones, either. For every new digital platform we coo over, Facebook remains, in effect, the whole internet for approaching half of all UK internet users, while Twitter is a tiny minority pursuit.”
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From Weigel and his recent post about “insights” “To understand the lives of others, we must get out of our own.” In fact I think the prior quote is from that as well
“If insight refers to a moment of illumination, it is a transitory experience. A new way of thinking about a problem is only new for a short term. Today's Aha! moment, if it is any use, is tomorrow's received wisdom. This should tell us that insight is not an important goal in itself, but a means to an end. All insight is provisional, anyway. One moment of it leads to another, and they should lead to visions, decisions and actions.”
This one is interesting tho not because it knocks the insight off the pedestal, but because it exposes the tension between insights and knowledge. Why aren’t old already discovered insights collected? Once it has been uncovered, the value doesn’t vanish… Julian Cole recently had a tweet about how insights have expiration dates. I don’t think I agree. He quoted “millennials value experiences” – but maybe that was just a shitty insight from the get go?
Anyway, I’m for the idea of not saying the word “insight” anymore.
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“For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private.”
From Scientific American’s article “Unlimited Information is transforming Society”
They bury the lead but this “boundary blurring” is possibly the most important yet undiscussed cultural shift. Not all boundaries are good, but when it comes to “amateurs and professionals” or “public and private” – the loss of those barriers will / have already fundamentally altered society, and not for the better.
SCREENSHOTS + OPINIONS
Hey look it’s us!
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This is the type of work you miss out on when you are briefed on a format, and not a problem:
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Every day we stray farther from the light…
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Necessary Trouble is a great name for an agency.
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Yea, I throw up a little every time I hear this… My theory is it is a projection from an industry that feels guilty about its role in mass consumption.
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My biggest area of improvement as a planner is around not showing my work.
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An ad that fell out of the newspaper. There’s something I love about how simple yet noticeable it is. If this had come from a big brand and their agency, this a) never would have been approved and b) if it had, would have included 10 rounds of revisions and approvals. And the hiring of a “handwriting specialist”
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I think Strategists have made their lives hard and their value lower by complicating what we do.
We want to justify the hours. We want to uncover insights. We want to think creatively, not rationally. But “Say that volvo trucks have superior stability” is a great creative prompt. Why complicate it?
Weekly Monster
I don’t think this brand has ever had an ad that wasn’t somehow terrifying.
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