I will invent a better wheel

Mediocrity is tempting. It is effortless and widely appreciated. It is actually easier to achieve than the state of being absolutely crap at something. So why not embrace it?

I recently had a pleasant conversation with a great ad man about the importance of being different in advertising. Of course, being the Lady Gaga of advertising is probably not the way to go (sounded much better in my head), but having a point of difference is paramount. And not just in advertising.

At the moment, it seems to me that most people in advertising are trying too hard to be different or creative, hence some ad campaigns that overlook the main purpose of advertising - that of selling happiness - and whose main aim is to be awarded some Lions in lovely France. If perfection weren't so boring, I'd say I'd want Leo Burnett's creativity and David Ogilvy's salesmanship. In lovely France.

Great advertising requires good people - I retract that. Great advertising requires great people, people who see things differently without having to wear some magic glasses. Advertising is changing rapidly, and what might have worked five years ago might be inefficient today. I'm no retired ad man, but I'm going to say this to myself: Take roads that haven't been travelled before. Invent a better wheel. Fail like hell. Then get it right. Be amazing.

One Crappuccino, McPlease

Ordering coffee these days feels like a personality test and takes almost as long as walking your dog. You cannot go to McDonald's and order a cheeseburger, but asking for a McCheeseburger might get you out of trouble. So just how happy is humanity about having so many products to choose from?

First of all, I don't think the problem here is the great number of options available to consumers. Within the basic context of democracy and that of a free market, having choices is good. Having more choices is even better. The problem, then, is that advertising creates what seems to be new products. That's why you need an Italian dictionary to order a coffee in England.

However, this situation is more than the result of advertising creating products that only seem new. Brands such as Starbucks use Italian names for their coffee for the simple reason that Italian coffee is widely appreciated as high quality coffee. Therefore, Starbucks plus Italian quality equals brand quality. Surely, there are more reasons as to why products today seem so complicated, but the bottom line is that behind any frappuccino there is the old-fashioned coffee.

What Next?

Success. To a certain extent, we all know what success is. It could be working in an office that has walls and more than one window, or being recognised on the street, or being more annoying than Simon Cowell, or not having a clue as to what treasure lies behind the digits of your account number(s). But what happens once you've reached that ridiculously perfect social and professional status?

I have no idea. I am but a 21-year old middle-class dreamer whose greatest success was not even paid in real money - even though, come to think of it, I did get paid in gold (sort of). Anyway, I guess there is always something greater than what you are and what you do. So if you are successful and need ten accountants to sort out your fortune, that doesn't mean you cannot have twenty accountants for the same purpose if you suddenly find yourself overwhelmingly and dangerously successful. In other words, having everything is technically speaking impossible. 

However - and I'm saying this without owning an island - I don't believe success necessarily involves having a lot of money. Maybe success is not even a corner office. Maybe success is having a job that you love, true friends, one wife, some kids and a dog. So what if this is a cliché? Societies are based on clichés by definition. That said, success is certainly perceived in different ways by different people, and no definition in this polluted world will be able to objectively portray such a subjective concept. Better yet, no post on this blog will risk boring readers to death by technically analysing the notion of success. Be successful.

And Then the Robot Starts Dancing

I recently had a "Hey, do you know that TV ad?" conversation with a friend who has no particular interest in advertising and I noticed something, well, normal. He kept telling me about several commercials he had seen and liked - most of them for cars - but he got wrong almost all the brands those commercials were for. As far as he could recall, "the one with the dancing robot" was for Volkswagen and not for Citroen.

This means then that he remembered the creative ideas in those adverts rather than the actual brands they were advertising. Does any brand want that? Exactly. So could this mean that consumers don't pay much attention during commercial breaks? Or could this be the advertising agencies' fault?

There is a positive answer to the first question. Yes, it is a fact that only a small number of TV viewers actually pay attention during commercial breaks, which means that the majority of them ignore TV advertising (and engage in other activities) or are only affected by it on a subconscious level, as in the case of my friend.

As regards the answer to the second question, the situation is certainly more complicated than it may seem. Advertising agencies build brands by creating brand image and brand personality and all that, right? In order for them to grab the attention of the consumers, they must come up with memorable adverts that say "Hey, you, don't go pee, you want to see this!", hence the dancing robot. Still, TV advertising today seems to be more like a competition of creative ideas rather than good selling techniques, so the risk of people having no idea what "that cool ad" is for seems only natural. Having said that, the lack of attention on behalf of the audience might be a matter of association - as a component within the facets model of advertising effects - between advertising and the product being advertised. But that's a different story. Actually, it is not, only I will expand on it in a future post.

Relevant Thoughts

Well, I've been thinking and I don't believe that the big idea has even been invented yet. The wheel? Seriously? That's the smallest idea that the homo sapiens' brain has ever come up with. Which is why it is probably the greatest idea, since it brought about progress. Put simply, I think that if an idea is able to make a tree grow twice as fast as it normally does, that idea is a great idea because it leads to something great: a faster regeneration of the Earth.

Trevor Beattie was right, I guess: There are no real big ideas. I mean, have you seen the universe? I think that any idea is limited to this almost round planet's troposphere and, every now and then, its exosphere.

 

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Still, I do believe that an idea can change the world. Jupiter might not give a damn, but I do believe that good ideas are worth fighting for. Perhaps it all boils down to belief, to how sure one is that their idea is able to change things. Perhaps it is the usefulness of an idea that establishes the latter's dimensions, or maybe it's its crazyness. Perhaps there are no big ideas, but there are big small ideas.

It's the big small ideas that matter.

Trevor Beattie at Coventry University

Friday, 1pm. I'm thinking: 'The world can end after this.' That's because Trevor Beattie is about to talk about advertising and big ideas and big ideas that are not big ideas and, of course, political advertising.

As the legend behind FCUK and Wonderbra and a life-long Labour supporter, Trevor Beattie begins his talk by focusing on ideas. In his view, the truly big ideas are as rare as the invention of the wheel and that of the Internet. The ideas we refer to as big are, according to Trevor, small ideas. The ad man himself admits he has never had a big idea in his life. However, Trevor agrees that "without ideas, there isn't anything else", because it is the sum of all the small ideas that push the world forward.

"Worry about the little things, because the big things will happen". Indeed, one should probably concentrate more on getting the details right rather than trying to influence the things that will happen anyway, sooner or later. It is the actual details that make the big things bad or good or great. I say worry about everything.

One of the reasons why I admire Trevor's work is because it is intriguing. Exciting. And within the highly sensitive media today, his work is even more fun to see. Also exciting is the fact that he is flying into space next year as the first fare-paying space traveller. I am not going to repeat myself.

Anyway, it is good that the world didn't end after his talk, because I got the chance to talk to him in person. I told him about me and my mates' plans of setting up an advertising agency and guess what he said. He said "That's fantastic, go for it." We also got some good advice from him regarding this matter. I am going to repeat myself: We got advice from Trevor Beattie.

Friday was a good day.

Rewind

How many buttons do we need to press in order for us to live these days? How many screens do we need to stare at in order to feel entertained? Some believe the future is  more buttons to press and even more screens to stare at. Only slimmer, of course. I believe the future is the beginning. Not ‘like’ the beginning. The beginning.

Of course we like the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone and other i’s, but I think at some point in the future – given that 2012 is yet another boring end of the world when nothing’s going to happen - we'll get tired of being useless creatures with idle brains, so we'll gradually give up all the high-tech and go back to basics. That is not to say that self-destruction isn’t fun. I mean seriously, having a robot that can do the chores for you doesn’t sound bad at all, does it?

But what if the future is our own history? What if all we do is head towards our past – no round flying things, no inhabited Moon, no Internet. Just the beginning.

Don’t get all ‘wtf’ on me now. Just remember that a few centuries ago the great minds posited that the world was flat. Not heart-shaped, but flat, for God’s sake!!! And they thought they’d fall off it once they’ve reached the edge. So it is not impossible that our future be our beginning.

Nothing is impossible. Impossible is nothing.

What If + Why Not

It started as a 'what if' question. The idea, I mean. Me and two other mates from uni have been successfully working together on several advertising campaigns and projects as part of our Advertising degree, and at some point we realised that starting our own freelance ad agency is too tempting for us not to give it a try. Or think about it seriously, at least. Besides, we feel that we're upsetting the universe if we don't start using our ideas and ridiculous passion for great advertising to the benefit of so many local and regional businesses showing potential to grow. So we have the idea. The next step - coming up with a strategy.

I know that optimism can be disappointing at times, but somewhere along the way I learned that I'm just not cut out to be a pessimist, so now I'm openly hoping that this project will soon become tangible. I mean, why not?

John Hegarty at Coventry University

I was not a student at Coventry University when John Hegarty – the H in the global advertising agency BBH – gave a speech here in 2007 as part of the great Coventry Conversations speaker programme. In fact, I heard the speech on iTunes U and I remember that day as the day when I realised that “Keep Walking” was bloody brilliant.

John’s speech is not about advertising. It is about outstanding advertising. It is about big ideas and the brands they create. BBH’s philosophy relies on creativity rather than on statistics, which, to some extent, reminds me of MacManus and Leo Burnett. John points out that good work can be created entirely for yourself, because “you are the only person whose judgement you can trust”. He gives the example of J. K. Rowling who, when asked who she had created Harry Potter for, answered that she had created the story for herself.

“Don’t be in advertising. Be in something bigger.” John admits that even though he works in advertising, he doesn’t want to be in advertising. He tries to go beyond the boring advertising and create some meaningful work based on creative and interesting ideas. This can be seen in different advertising campaigns for Levi’s, Johnnie Walker or British Airways.

John also talks about the importance of reducing an idea down to its essential meaning. By doing so, an idea attains power; it is enhanced and therefore has a greater impact on the audience.  An idea, in John’s view, is “the most democratic thing in the world – anybody can have it”. Therefore, those in the creative industries should strive to create work that people want to see.

Advertising can be great. It’s just that, if we are to consider John’s words, it is not called advertising. Besides, the name really doesn’t matter as long as we – those passionate about good creative ideas – try to get there. Sure, we don’t have to. But then I’d have to lose the “those passionate about good creative ideas” part.

No Way Out

Since I don’t believe anyone out there could care less about what I did today or on any other day – and if they do care and they didn’t give me birth, God give them something acceptable to do with their lives! – I am not going to talk about it. Instead, I’d like to share my middle-class views on the cyber-nonsense loving creatures that we have become.

We claim to be “socialising” via the Internet and before we know it, we’ve got kids that can barely articulate a word properly because they are retarded and have absolutely no sense of what is going on in the real world – if such thing may still exist. So we laugh online and we chinwag our hearts out online and we live online and we die online, but before taking our sore fingers off the keyboard of life for the last time, we lie to ourselves once more by claiming we have no regrets because we have [cretin] kids, a legitimate wife/husband, a house, a tree in front of it and the latest iMac on our bedside table, all Wi-Fi enabled. So we die in peace.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. Shock and horror. Everyone knows its benefits as well as they know its human-decaying side and we have all agreed (?) it is the way forward (??). Google is a verb, (un)facebookable may be underlined in red in Word, yet it is still used (by the by, Microsoft is outdated, buy yourself a freakin’ Mac!), people twitter™ more than birds twitter and we seem to be turning into robots as we twitter. Science and progress.

So why do I blog you may ask. Why do I use Facebook and Twitter and instant messaging programmes?

What do you care? Mind your own Wi-Fi-ed life!

Lunch with Dave Pegg, Cadbury

Today was a good day. Dave Pegg, a member of the design studio at Cadbury plc, came to Coventry University to give a talk on the legendary brand and on how the design department operate within the company. David covered Cadbury’s advertising from the first adverts in the 20th century to the renowned gorilla commercial and yes, the weird eyebrows commercial.

Fastforward to lunchtime.

Lunchtime. I had the opportunity to talk to Dave over lunch, thus being able to find out more about Cadbury’s vision as a global brand and about the ways in which Cadbury, as an umbrella brand, is rather different from Kraft, the worldwide giant. There were questions and there were answers, but what I was truly impressed with was Dave’s devotion to and passion for his career. We shared the same views regarding the fact that a creative job – be that in advertising or design - cannot be considered a job per se: There’s no starting at 8am and going home at 4pm. Working as a creative means constantly playing around with ideas, trying to create something that is beyond the constraints of some office walls and working hours. It is what you do, no matter where you are.

It is how and why you exist as a creative professional.

Saatchi & Saatchi at the Barber's

When you look at yourself into the mirror for 35 minutes because there’s literally nothing else to look at while your fur is technically and gradually being cut into a decent haircut, you might think this is the worst way of wasting 35 minutes of your life and 8.5 pounds of your dough. But if the old guy cutting your hair talks to you about Saatchi & Saatchi, you tend to think life is actually happening to you.

Jack’s is the classic barber’s. It’s got ‘Est. 1978’ added to its name on the front window and the customers seem to be making plans for that year’s Christmas while waiting for one of the last haircuts they’ll ever have. Strangely enough, I felt my Mondays were better than theirs. Well, at least more numerous from a biological perspective.

So anyway, while I was in the ancient throne and before I even had the chance to get bored, the barber asked me what I was studying - the natural question that springs to one’s mind when having to put up with a species of students. The answer was going to change every minute of those I spent back in 1978, for the barber sounded like a retired Saatchi & Saatchi adman while sharing his views on the agency’s work. Go figure.

Jack’s is the classic barber’s.