The importance of international awards to ADV agencies

Agencies go in to the trouble of presenting them selves to international awards because they know it make them win clients. Clients love to work with agencies that exist on books…

Proposition:

Dear agency, make your book.

It might include, not only the creative work, some nice case studies that will explain the thinking for clients to see the “level of professionalism” they are going to have if they go with them.

It can even be a form of extra income to agencies because it can be sold.

It can be presented in an agency workshop targeting those clients the agency is running after.

# Something like this:

Well this is my point of view…

A fresh idea to be used as city branding

LightScraper from Stangd on Vimeo.

creative teams, surround yourself with progress

When you complete a list of action steps, your instinct might be to throw the list away. After all, the work is completed! However, some creative professional teams take a different approach; they relish their progress. Some go so far as surrounding themselves with it.The inspiration to brainstorm comes easy, but the inspiration to take action is rare. Especially for creative professionals, the constant flow of ideas is often the greatest inhibitor to making ideas happen.

Especially amidst heavy, burdensome projects with hundreds of action steps and milestones, it is emotionally invigorating to surround yourself with progress. Why throw away the relics of your achievements when you can create an inspiring monument to getting stuff done? A "Done! Wall" reminds you that you have moved forward in your journey.

Why not decorate your work space with completed action steps? While we tend to surround ourselves with art and imagery that serves to inspire us in our work, is it more inspiration that we need? Most creative professionals report that they are not short of ideas, but rather the discipline and organization to make them happen. For this reason, consider surrounding yourself with testaments to taking action.

There is no better push-towards-taking-action than action itself.

Share To Make Ideas Happen

The philosophy to "share ideas liberally" defies the age-old instinct to keep ideas secret. However, the creative person's tendency to jump from idea-to-idea-to-idea causes most ideas to die in isolation. Creative professionals should take every opportunity to communicate new ideas broadly, seek feedback, and develop a sense of accountability.Share your ideas liberally. The benefits from accountability and feedback outweigh the risk that someone steals your idea! Many productive creative professionals and entrepreneurs claim that they become more committed to their ideas after telling people about them! The fact is that great ideas are plentiful, and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When you feel accountable to others, you are more likely to stay focused.

Broadcast your idea to generate valuable feedback. Great ideas don't develop in isolation. You can become drunk on your own kool-aid without any candid feedback from others. A critical component of pushing ideas forward is gathering feedback to refine the idea.

Engage a few "partners" in every project. The more people you work with, the more pressure you will feel to provide further updates (and have some progress to report)! Why do publishers insist on offering advances to authors even when the author prefers to put off the advance in favor of a more lenient time schedule? The importance of deadlines has been a common theme across Behance's profiles of creative professionals. It is no surprise that novels are less likely to end up in a drawer, half-written, when there is an advance cashed and a deadline looming. Use other people and externally-generated deadlines as a way to boost your accountability!

Rely on Initiative, Not Experience

Companies are obsessed with resumes, constituents rely on credibility, and one’s past experiences are regarded as the best indication of future success. After all, what beats a great track record?However, the creative world and especially the history of breakthrough ideas suggest that initiative, not experience, is the best indicator of future achievement. Ideas require bold initiative to gain traction. We should think differently about the criteria we look for as we hire new employees and select new leaders.

What is initiative? Thomas Edison’s famous quote, 'success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration' delineates the central role of energy, leadership, and endurance in making ideas happen. Initiative is a bias-to-action. Those who take initiative possess tenacity and a healthy degree of impatience with idleness. Every team needs people that are able to jump in and get started, sometimes prematurely.

Hire based on initiative, not experience.
In the corporate world, it is all too easy to scan a resume and make assumptions based on past jobs and scholarly degrees. When our founder, Scott Belsky, worked at Goldman Sachs, he saw "more resumes with 4.0 GPA’s than there were job openings." Instead, when hiring people, his team looked for examples of candidates taking initiative in their interests. As he explains, "We would look for people who got involved and became leaders in things that they loved. It didn’t matter whether it was the sailing team or a campus newspaper, the fact that someone took extraordinary initiative was the best indicator that they would do the same in their future job."

People who dig deeply into their interests and naturally become leaders are likely to do so time and time again. Interestingly enough, the subject matter of past interests may be irrelevant.

The same argument could also be made when selecting (or electing) a leader. While the human tendency is to avoid risk and seek the most “experienced” candidate, perhaps one’s history of taking initiative should be the primary criteria?

Tips for Judging One’s Ability to Take Initiative:

• Look past the resume. Experience can certainly be the result of past initiative taken, but it can also be the result of mere circumstance.
• Initiative is the best indication of future initiative. Look for examples of leadership positions and “taking action” in a person’s history.
• Probe a candidate for their true interests, regardless of what they are, and then measure the extent to which the candidate pursued those interests.

When you stumble across a true "do-er," someone that has passion, generates ideas, and actually takes action, you must recognize your good fortune. Nothing will assist your ideas more than a team of people that are able to take initiative to make ideas happen.

Why Risk Is Worth It

Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the "40-30-30 Rule." During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance. It’s a simple matter of acclimating to unchartered territory.

To improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone.

And when we come out the other side, we often can't help but wonder why we were so timid in the first place. Questioning this fear is not unfounded. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown that we deal with failure better than we'd expect. In studies, “when people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job… or fail a contest, they consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.” In other words, “we overestimate the intensity and duration of our distress in the face of future adversity.”

While we tend to focus solely on building our skill sets or expanding our knowledge, the greatest advancement and learning most often comes from action, experience, and taking risk. And our regrets in life reflect this. According to Gilbert, studies show that “in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.”

Although playing it safe makes sense in some professions such as financial services and healthcare, for our own creative development, we need to focus on the last 30%. Our inhibitions have evolved to protect us, but, in many cases, they limit us. The challenge is to rebalance our nature. Ultimately, it’s the ones who barrel through the discomfort, are resilient in the face of failure, and master the last 30% of taking risk who reach the highest levels of performance.

Be Solutionary, Not Revolutionary

When we sit down with a blank canvas or clean sheet of paper, we have the tendency to think big. We ask ourselves, “What can I think of that is new, surprising, transformational?”However, some of the greatest advancements across industries were not huge, singular achievements but rather incremental improvements. Even bold ideas such as online music stores, departures in architecture, and new genres of music were the result of new ideas refined over time. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Google was not the first search engine. And the list goes on…

While logic should encourage us to improve what is around us, we still tend to think of innovation as creating something entirely new. Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea. Marginal improvements are, frankly, less interesting for the cutting-edge creative. Nonetheless, incremental improvements often make up the difference between success and failure.

Creative minds have the tendency to lose interest after the first implementation of a new idea.

Especially productive creative teams are able to find excitement in solving problems both big and small, and in varying stages. It’s these accrued solutions that make up the distance between a new idea being created, and actually being adopted.

Leaders that focus on incremental progress – being “solutionary” rather than revolutionary – are the ones that truly push ideas to full fruition. Such behavior takes a tremendous amount of discipline. But with conviction and clearly defined goals, creative energy can be channeled to refine a good idea enough to make a great impact.

The next time you’re in “dreamer mode,” trying to conjure up something brilliant, challenge yourself to search for the little tweak that can make a big difference.

Build a Business, Not Just a Client List

If you work for yourself, getting more clients is a no-brainer, right? Clients give you work. Work pays the bills. Do good work and you get a testimonial. Do this enough times and you get a great client list... which makes it easier to get more clients in future. It’s a virtuous circle.

Or is it?One problem with approaching your work purely in terms of "getting more clients," is that it means you will always have to get more clients. If you don’t work, you don’t have billable hours, so you don’t get paid. Time off will always feel like money down the drain. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself on a treadmill, unable to get off. Spend too long on the treadmill and you’ll riskburning yourself out.

Another problem is that you will expend all your energy and creative talent on other people’s projects. And what will you have to show for it? At best, a great portfolio, client list, and testimonials. But if you want to keep eating, you’ll need to keep working.

This is the classic dilemma described by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth – sole traders start out with dreams of independence, but find themselves trapped by their own business. They spend all their time working in the business (doing client work), instead of on it (building the business).

Sole traders start out with dreams of independence, but find themselves trapped by their own business.

The solution is to stop thinking like a "freelancer" and start thinking and acting like a creative entrepreneur. This does not mean you need to get VC funding and take on an army of staff. The opportunities created by the internet mean you can carry on as a one-person outfit or micro-business. What it means is that instead of just working for hire, you start creating business assets whose value will increase over time.

If that sounds a bit daunting, consider these four types of asset, that are within the reach of any solo operator:

1. A Brand - create and project a professional and consistent image.
Designer and developer Nick Cernis could operate under his own name, but instead he blogs as Modern Nerd and sells his iPhone apps under the nameSpiffing Apps. His websites’ design and copywriting are consistent, memorable, and unmistakeable. And because Spiffing Apps is separate from Nick Cernis, he has the option of selling the business in future, allowing the next owner to inherit the goodwill and reputation associated with the name.

2. Online Properties - build digital real estate that grows in value over time.
David Airey is an independent graphic designer. Since 2006, he has been writing a graphic design blog at DavidAirey.com, and more recently atLogoDesignLove.com. He ploughs thousands of hours a year into his blogs. Hours he could have spent working for clients or hustling for new business. But now he doesn’t have to hustle for business any more. Clients come to his Edinburgh studio from as far afield as Japan and Canada. His blogs have also secured him a book deal with respected imprint Peachpit Press.

3. Permission Assets - build lists of contacts who want to know about your ideas, products, and services.
According to Seth Godin, permission marketing is "the privilege (not the right) of sending anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them." A permission asset could be an email list, a blog subscription list, a Facebook group, or a following on Twitter. Every day, Hugh MacLeod sends a cartoon to the folks who subscribe to his email newsletter. They are free to print it themselves or buy a high-quality, limited-edition print from the artist. Enough of them do the latter to make it a very rewarding enterprise for Hugh.

4. Products - turn your knowledge and skills into physical or digital items for sale.
If you can deliver a professional service for clients, you can certainly create your own product range. Doing this successfully means you develop streams of income that increase over time – and it frees you from the treadmill of hourly or daily rates. Photographer and writer Susannah Conway makes a living from her innovative Unravelling e-courses combining photography, community, and personal development. Matthew Inman has freed himself from web design hellby creating the phenomenally popular Oatmeal website as a showcase for his comic strips, which he sells as posters, prints, and in a forthcoming book.

It’s not easy to find time to create these assets – in the short term, it’s easier to justify work on client projects that will put food on the table next month. But for the sake of your long-term health, wealth, and creative fulfilment, you owe it to yourself to make the investment. And it doesn’t have to be a black-and-white choice – think of the Google engineers who spend 20% of their time on personal projects, or David Airey writing his blogs while maintaining a steady flow of client work.
--

How About You?
Supposing you spent one day a week building your own business assets… where would it take your business in a year? 5 years? 10 years?

What’s stopping you? What difference would it make if you found a way around those obstacles?

Bread design

New media can be anything I suppose.

Can we use food to reach consumers?

I will think about it in the future.

Passage Canal+ du Directeur Artistique de MS&L France from MS&L Channel on Vimeo.

The real difference between men and women.

I just got a brief where I have to establish (some how) the difference between men and woman to be able to start working on a campaign. I have to say I don't really know if there's a difference or not. Well, what I want to say is that I didn't know. Now I do know there’s one. By seeing this video from a seminar in Cannes (BBDO) I found out that the difference is not only anatomical. It's mental too.

Take a look and use it in your next campaign. Or at home if you want.

The real Differences Between men and women from luis pimenta on Vimeo.

Advertising Agencies: Kiss Your Creative Teams Goodbye

New demands on ad agencies mean old ways are dying and new job opportunities are being created.

Few things in advertising are as sacred as the creative team. Traditionally, this team consisted of a copywriter and an art director. When called upon, they would take the planner's insight and apply precisely the right combination of words and images to produce communication that was disruptive in its media environment, memorable in its delivery, and crystal clear in its meaning. This was done in hopes it would yield bountiful sales for the client (or a creative award for the agency).

I have spent most of my career on the copywriting half of that equation. I loved the work, but I also loved the privileged position my art director and I occupied in the agency. Once sequestered with our creative assignment, our methods were not questioned. Our work process was shrouded in the secrecy of a papal enclave with nervous account executives wringing their hands outside our chambers in anticipation of the time when we would emerge with concepts in hand (or not). Ah, nostalgia. I'm glad I was a copywriter in the '80s and '90s because the position as I knew it is going the way of the stat camera and Letraset.

The reason the creative team no longer works is because the right combination of words and images alone will no longer yield bountiful sales for the client. This is not to say good copy and art direction are unimportant. They have never been more important. Today it takes more than that, a lot more. Ad agencies now have different expectations placed on them. Our campaign solutions must do more than combine words and images to inform, inspire, and motivate. They must deliver business value in new ways that maximize the potential of digital media as well as traditional media.

It's not just print, outdoor, TV, and radio. If it’s digital; it’s also a potential media. Anything from rich media banners to social media assets to mobile apps and games.
Our creative team must not only create material to place in media. The media itself must be incorporated into their concept from the start.

Integration across media must be seamless, but concepts also need to work across platforms and delivery devices.
They must do more than address the target’s primary needs. They must look at tangential needs and find new ways to facilitate them.
Their solutions will not be confined to two of three campaign periods a year but will need to engage consumers and deliver value every day.
In some cases, they may even be called upon to create solutions that fund themselves.
That's a lot to ask of even the best copywriter and art director.

Today I run an ad agency and brand consultancy. About five years ago my partners and I concluded that developments in the digital world (specifically social media, mobile media and the evolution of the Internet) would fundamentally change the advertising industry. So we began the process of adapting to those changes. The first thing we realized was that adapting would not simply be a matter of hiring a web designer and a few geeks. We had to go one step further and change the way we develop solutions for our clients. Processes that worked well for creating campaigns in traditional media were not producing the type of solutions we needed in the information age.

The first casualty of this restructuring was the creative team. I loathed to do it. I thought too many cooks would destroy creativity, but what I found was an exponential increase in creativity. Creativity was no longer confined to our pictures and images. Our campaign concepts began to routinely integrate innovative ideas across the entire marketing mix from media, product development, and distribution to sales, pricing, and PR.

What do our creative teams look like today? It is no longer a duet; its a quintet: copywriter, art director (preferably a digital art director), web designer, and social media architect. More often than not the strategic planner, who used to drop off the brief and leave the creatives alone, is also in the group. As soon as the ideas begin to gel we add our SEO guy to the mix to make sure anything we create is made to be found from the start.

Different people. Different creative process. Great results.

Our best clients today demand creative business ideas as well as creative communication. We are able to provide it. Sacrificing one of advertising’s most hallowed institutions is the price we had to pay. This may be bad news for agency traditionalists, but it's great news for clients and job seekers who are in tune with the changes in the marketing landscape. If you are either of the above, I’d like to hear from you.

10 Secrets to success in the "consultant" business.

AAAH! You’ve made the decision to leave the safety of a steady paycheck and venture into the world of consulting:

1. Treat It Like a Business – Repeat after me: consulting is not a hobby, nor is it a transition step as you look for a new job. It must be your focused, long-term decision. Trust me, if you want to be accepted as a consultant, it is imperative that you treat it as a business from the get-go. Immediately create the line of demarcation between your business life and personal life. Necessities include a separate checking account, business credit cards, and detailed bookkeeping.

2. Create A Network of Trusted Advisors – Building a strong business requires laying a solid foundation. Having a team of experts assisting you at the outset with legal requirements, possible liability issues, overdraft protection, financial guidance, and IT (an expert who makes “mouse calls”), will help you deal with real-world problems as they arise.

3. Charge Appropriately – Most newbie consultants underestimate the amount of time it will take to get the business, get paid for the business, and actually do the business. Do not simply take your former annual salary and divide by the number of hours worked in order to determine your hourly rate. You are selling value that is a culmination of your years of experience and you should be rewarded accordingly. Furthermore, maintain fee integrity: do not lower your fee unless there is an alternate form of compensation.

4. Never Stop Marketing – Even if the foreseeable future is packed to the gills with clients, do not stop your marketing efforts. If you do, you will feel the effects in six to 12 months and will literally have to build momentum all over again. Marketing today prevents famine tomorrow. And, of course, your efforts afford you the opportunity to trade up your client base and focus on the most profitable business.

5. Don’t Print in Bulk – With today’s rich media and constantly changing environment, it makes no sense to print hundreds of brochures, biographies, or even client lists. Instead, spend wisely on business cards, the one printed item critical to first impressions. And even there, limit quantities based on realistic expectations, not lofty dreams. Make sure to load your website with easily printable data. In electronic communication, you can simply attach necessary PDFs or in the case of proposals, custom create and color print only what you need.

6. Always Have a Signed Contract – Although many business deals may be concluded over a handshake, I insist on signed contracts and so should you. A solid contract clearly spells out deliverables and helps to manage expectations so that you can exceed them.

7. Don’t Nickel and Dime Your Clients – Create a policy now for how you will deal with travel expenditures, overnight delivery, messengers, fee-based online research, and other incidentals. I make it a policy to never charge for postage, copying, or other minutiae. These types of bill-backs to your client tend to cause more ill will than you can ever recover. Having a clause in your contract that all expenses over $100.00 will be approved in advance by your client also ensures that there will be no surprises at the end of a billing cycle.

8. Volunteer for One Philanthropic Effort – Pick a group or cause that you are passionate about and donate your expertise to the board. If, for example, you are an accountant, offering to handle the books for a charity is a great way to give in-kind. It also demonstrates your core competency to high level board members. If you can perform your task so brilliantly for free, the organization can easily imagine what you can accomplish when you are actually hired for an assignment!

9. No “Picking Your Brain” Allowed – You’ll get this request often: “Please, can I pick your brain?” The answer is always “No," Your most valuable and limited inventory is your time and intellectual property; giving it away is giving away your profits. You can, however, give away a small, free sample (similar to offering a small taste of Mrs. Fields' cookies, but in order to get the baker’s dozen, a purchase of 12 is required).

10. Be Cautious With Meals – Wining and dining can initially seem like a great idea for establishing a firm relationship. However, it also can be tricky. If you are taking out a client, establish the rules: you can charge for your time, you can expense the meal or you can charge for both. And, there are occasions when your time and meal are your gift to the client as a special thank you. Remember, when networking with colleagues, the last thing you want to do is continue to pay for expensive lunches; the net result might be gaining weight while losing money!

Harry Potter newspapers soon to become a reality

Harry Potter show us the way with his "Daily Prophet" newspaper edition.

It seamed impossible at that time but today with the new iPad it seams more than possible.

It's reality. To prove it WIRED magazine is creating this App that shows the way to this future.

For magazines to ignore it is like keep defending that the world is flat.