This is one of the best TV ads we have seen in a long time.

Here is a video about its creators and how it was made. Enjoy. Look at me. Look at him.

Some years ago I was a creative director for the international agency known as ATTIK in their New York studio. For years and years I’d yearned for total creative freedom that so many young creatives dream of. To me, this was creative Nirvana.

Many of you are familiar with the Noise series of books published by ATTIK and I had been a fan for a long time. These are books filled with design experiments and explorations with absolute creative freedom. This led to some really interesting and stunningly beautiful works that inspired people like me.

Things that you look at and (if you’ve been in the business of advertising for a while) think “That’s great, but you’ll never get a client to buy something like that”. But that is one of the things that made ATTIK so amazing.

The two founders Simon Needham and James Sommerville founded ATTIK in James’ grandmother’s attic with passion and a dream. (Read the story here.) They took their youth and passion for great work and focused everything they had on feeding the fire within. To date, they have created amazing work for clients like Scion, AOL, Adidas, SONY, and so many others, at a level that most “experienced” advertising people would never believe could be commercially viable. Now, ATTIK is part of Dentsu, one the largest global players out there.

NOTE: If you ever have the chance to work with ATTIK, do it. You won’t be disappointed.

Was this Simon and James’ goal from the get go? That I cannot honestly answer, but I would guess not. So why was ATTIK able to succeed where so may others have not?

Innocence? Why not.

Luck? Maybe.

Passion? Definitely.

Unwavering dedication to an idea? Damn straight.

No one can define what exactly is going to make a successful company or effort. It just has too many varying elements. But more oft than not, the companies that I see succeed, and companies that inspire me, share these same attributes.

1. A willingness to explore, push boundaries and have fun
2. No acceptance of “failure”, only learnings toward future progress
3. An unwavering passion and belief in who you are and what you do (not ego driven!)
4. The ability to get out of your own way and let your zeal lead you to people who share the same ideals and values
5. An openness to always learning new things and new ways
6. The absolute rule of never settling for “good enough”

To return to the beginning of the story, when I was at ATTIK we would get hundreds of portfolios from young creative hopefuls every week. So much great design talent out there, but so few with vision beyond the trends of the day.

One of the portfolios that came across my desk was from Ji Lee. There was something unique and different about his work and his perspective. I had the opportunity to meet him. He was an unassuming young man with vision and passion for creative thought. As much as I wanted to work with him at the time, we were unable to make him a permanent part of the ATTIK NY team. I have never forgotten his work, his passion or his ideals.

Today I came across a video of a lecture he’d given discussing the power of personal projects and how that translates to your professional vision. He hasn’t only lectured on it. He lives it. One of the really interesting things I remember from his portfolio was the Bubble Project that he talks about in the video below.

Ji Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, he studied design at Parsons School of Design. In the past, Lee has worked as the branding director at Droga5 and art director at Saatchi & Saatchi. He currently works as the Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York and teaches design at School of Visual Arts. Success indeed.

So my point is this. Don’t let what might NOT happen, what may NOT be “feasible”, what hasn’t been done, or what everybody else does, stop you from thinking, from dreaming or from following that little voice inside that drives you.

Two great thoughts before I leave you with the video. There’s a sign in my office sent from one of our clients (Thanks Leslie!) that says

“Live What You Love”.

And another thought that I ran across today that said

“Redefine what is possible”.

So there are no guarantees of anything here. Just a viewpoint and fire that I continue to feed. That I have to feed. There are a lot of you out there. Don’t let the fire ever go away.

This post was written by Tim Scott, founder and creative director of THEM!. Find out more about THEM! at www.THEMdidit.com or call 541 306 6723 for more information.

There has been much debate on the future of “print”. As technology progresses and information is made available quicker and quicker, print will indeed have to change or die. But also, we need to look at how we define “print”.

To us, print can be defined as any presentation of words or content that the user can take the time to personally engage with. So, therefore, print can be almost anywhere. It’s how it’s executed and presented that make the difference as to whether it will be successful in communicating a message. Or being compelling enough that people will take the time to read, or experience it’s content. Much like any endeavor, it’s the consumer experience that make a difference.

There is some amazing technology being developed that will indeed change how we view, and interact with, print. The goal is still the same, to create a user experience that is both rewarding and fulfilling for the consumer and financially feasible for the producer. Magazine and newspaper publishers have been dealing with this for years. Hell, anyone who produces any type of content that they want consumers to notice have been dealing with this for years. The methods of delivery are changing and we’d better be ready to change with it.

The goals are still the same.

1. Take content, information or some type of message and make it compelling enough that people want to interact with it, or “consume” it if you will.
2. Provide such a unique message or experience that when they “consume” it that it provides a value to them to the extent that they are willing to either take some type of action based on this message, or be willing to pay some amount to be able to continue to have that experience.
3. Be able to “own” this particular space, content or experience for the furtherance of your “brand”.

If these goals sound like the goals of almost any good communications or advertising plan, you are correct. It will be the way that we use these new tools that will make or break the success of these efforts.

The next two often overlooked parts of this equation are design and interface. You may have all the right elements and content, but if they are not presented in the right way to create the best user or consumer experience, there’s a good chance that it may fail.

This is not to say that that things need to be “hyper-designy” or overly pretty. A great example of this concept is the SONY Walkman and Apple’s iPod. The iPod was able to take over the world because it made all of its bells, whistles and music available to the average consumer in a seemingly simple way. It wasn’t over designed with graphics or features, nor was it lacking. The SONY Walkman is actually a brilliant piece of technology. It was designed to do all of the things that the iPod was plus even more things that consumers said they “wanted”. So why is the Walkman not even really mentioned in the music device “wars” anymore?

The Walkman was designed by brilliant engineers and functions as a brilliant engineer thinks and interacts. Your average consumer is not a brilliant engineer (myself included) and just wants to simply access our music, or other digital files or games and be able to use them in a very simple way. iPod was able to create a delivery of a product(s) in a very simple, approachable way. Its design is beautiful in it’s simplicity and the user experience and interface is beautifully simple.

In essence, a lot of what people now use their iPods and iPhones (and any other “smart” device) to access can, by the definition above, be defined as “print”. Read it again and see if you agree. Don’t try to define it in literal, tangible terms, but what it’s trying to accomplish.

So let’s re-examine “print”, how we use it, and how it becomes a valuable asset in the future. We still need great writers, designers, photographers, illustrators and content. Now, with the technology we have coming available we will be able to even further tailor the user experience with the interface design and creating a unique experience with our content. It can be beautiful, inspiring, relevant and valuable just as people in yesteryears defined “traditional print”.

This is a great example of how the “print” experience is evolving and some of the opportunities and possibilities that will be emerging any day now, and it’s beautiful.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ (video prototype footage only) from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This post was written by Tim Scott, founder and creative director of THEM!. THEM! is a creative company founded to find new ways to help companies create marketing efforts that get results and create opportunities, through any technology or media possible. Contact THEM! at www.THEMdidit.com or call 541 306 6723 for more information.

It’s really easy to make our jobs in advertising just another job.

The routine goes on day-in and day-out. Briefs, ROI, turn-key, blah, blah, blah.

Take a second today and try to remember why it is you got into this business to begin with. Mine began at Miami Ad School. Late nights working on a concept, forgetting to eat or drink for hours while you were so engrossed in creating something you believed in with all of your heart. The hours spent tweaking type even thought there was no thought of billings or time sheets. The passion that you talked about an idea with and the fire that burned inside you to create greatness. This is the determination that we need to find again to make our work great.

“Don’t mistake a message for communication.”

Our agency mission is this:

THEM! We exist to create, to experiment, to generate thought, to move people, to push buttons, stimulate conversation, to change minds and to provoke action.

Focus on the idea, the concept, the message, the communication, and not just all of the cool bells and whistles you can do to make it “cool”. Have a great concept before you even begin to think about the execution and let THAT dictate the communication.

Follow that with every bit as much creativity and thought as your concept as you plan your execution phase. Amazing design, perfect media execution and placement, and a thorough and complete understanding of who you are trying to reach will all add up to a successful effort. And let’s face it. We’re all in the sales business.

We don’t have to sell our creative souls to be successful.

Look at how many of the campaigns and efforts that have inspired us to get into this business to begin with have been successful sales efforts for their clients. Doyle Dane Bernbach and the amazing work for Volkswagon. Chiat Day and the iPod campaign. And too many more to list.

“Don’t just start a business. Start a revolution”

Please, let us as an industry get back to our youth. The days of great ideas at all cost. The days of creating movements and not accepting mediocrity. Let’s add some fuel to the fire of our industry and make it respectable again in boardrooms around the world. We do truly have the power to change the world. We just have to believe in ourselves like young students again.

This post was inspired after watching this interview with John Hagerty of BBH. Watch, learn and fuel the fire.

What is your inspiration? What campaigns moved you? Please add your comments below.

One of our really fun clients is the Renegade Rollergirls of Central Oregon. You will probably never meet a group of more interesting ladies than the rough-and-tumble girls that are known as Renegades. The thing is, underneath the “my-mom’s-tougher-than-your-mom” persona, they are some of the nicest, most fun-loving people we know. It’s an honor to work with them.

This season kicks off on Sunday, November 21st at the Midtown Music Hall in Bend, Oregon. Tickets for this event are only $10 and kids under 10 are absolutely free. You can get tickets at the door or pre-order at the Renegades web site.

We really wish you ALL could come out and enjoy this event. If you don’t live close enough to make it, find your local team of Renegades and support the efforts of these ladies. You won’t be disappointed!

This is a great article from 2005 that holds true today. Let’s refocus our efforts and thinking to a way that truly benefits everyone.

THE MARKETING COMPANY COMMUNICATIONS DISCONNECT
And Why Ad Agencies Are Viewed as Laborers Rather Than Architects
June 06, 2005
By A. Louis Rubin

Marketing communications companies are not being given a seat at their client’s strategic table. It’s the sad truth that no one in the communications business wants to acknowledge or admit.

It’s not that brilliant communications ideas don’t have a profound strategic impact on a business, because they do, but that clients view their communications companies as purveyors of execution with a bias toward the “what” of “what’s for sale” in the back room of their various “factories.”

The problem is widespread. A recent informal survey of corporate communications officers found them all in agreement that their CEOs did not value their marketing communications firms as a complete strategic partner to their business.

Boards of large public companies
More telling is how few communications professionals sit on corporate boards of large public companies. An examination of the Fortune 20 finds only GE with two working practitioners on their board (Ann Fudge of Young & Rubicam and Shelley Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather). J.P. Donlon, editor in chief of Directorship, a monthly publication on corporate governance, notes that the “reason why there are few communications professionals on boards per se is that only a handful understand that communications is an amplification of business strategy — not something separate or apart from it. Certainly CEOs need to understand this as well.”

The bottom line is that few communications professionals are invited into the inner sanctorum of marketers’ strategy and planning sessions on the executive committee level.
How did this happen?

Somewhere along the way, ad agencies and other communications companies started thinking less about the strategy and more about selling execution. Worse yet, they started to fill their staffs with people who were craftsmen and not strategists. The result: They began to be viewed as laborers, not architects.

It wasn’t always so
It wasn’t always so. At Scali, McCabe Sloves, Ed McCabe invented some memorable advertisements that were also great strategic synopses (for Volvo: “Safety”; for Nikon: “We Take the World’s Greatest Pictures”; for Purdue: “It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken”). Looking back on those executions today you can see they are pretty simple demonstrations of the strategy. No talking animals, no hordes of barbarians storming the shopping mall, no bikini teams. The executions were not a pantheon of special effects. They had a strategic underpinning that reflected the clients’ overall business goals. They were strategic organizing principles upon which to base all brand communications.

The work that Young & Rubicam did for RadioShack in the early ’90s is another good example of how good strategy affects a business and cements the relationship between client and agency. RadioShack’s “You’ve Got Questions. We’ve Got Answers” campaign was created to recognize that service at the retail level is what was for sale. It gave customers a reason to seek out RadioShack — not just a piece or a part. It told employees what their jobs were about. It was a big strategic idea and Len Roberts, then CEO of RadioShack, invited his agency team in on every key business decision because they offered strategic insight into the client’s most urgent business needs.

What these examples have at their core are big strategic ideas, because the only thing that binds people in an asexual entity called a corporation is an idea that people understand and live by. Says Donlon, “No executive or employee is going to throw himself or herself on a grenade for shareholder value. But an employee at Merck or Pfizer might stick his or her neck out to get a cure for cancer. The job of the communication strategist is to ensure the idea is big enough and powerful enough to convince people that the [business] goal is worth the effort and treasure. It’s also the CEO’s job to reinforce this every day.”

Puerile jokes and titillation
But these examples tend to be the exception, not the rule. Nowadays, execution trumps strategy, special effects reign and puerile jokes and titillation are the platforms from which products are sold. And very few communications efforts represent the strategic underpinning for how a brand can utilize all the tools of an integrated marketing communications program — from Web and public relations to advertising and trade shows, collateral sales material and internal communications.

It’s great strategy, not execution, that can inform every constituent, from customer and salesman, from factory worker and portfolio manager to Wall Street analyst on how to view the brand and the company. The right strategic platform helps employees understand why they work for the company and provides a badge of pride that gets translated directly to the bottom line through productivity and purpose. It tells the investment community why this is a good company to invest in. And finally, it gives customers a deep, fundamental, thoughtful, considered and enduring reason to do business.

How to Develop Good Strategy

1      First acknowledge that strategy is what you are selling. Not an ad. Not a logo. Not a list of public relations tactics. These are only executions and that makes them commodities to be evaluated subjectively, or worse yet, based on price of execution.

2      Tell the truth. Suppress your excitement at having a revenue-potential client at the table and focus on the truth about product reality, competitive strengths and weaknesses and organizational problems and issues. CEOs have trouble determining truth from myth because everyone around them has an agenda to sell. To stand out, tell the truth.

3      Throw out your factory — the daily special on the menu — to offer what the customer wants, not what you have in inventory. You must solve the client’s business problem, not go in with your CFO’s cost structure of how you have to utilize the specialized resources on your payroll.

4      Focus on the client’s customer. Avoid the product attribute discussion that your client wants you to execute. Building a great strategy begins with an understanding of customer needs. And too often execution panders to internal audiences versus a strategic insight about the end-user.

5      Hire people who think strategically. Now this may sound just plain dumb, but how many of you have recruiting policies in place where you go and visit Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, etc. in the spring to find the smartest, most imaginative minds in the world? How can you expect your organization to grow with the best talent if you don’t have a program in place to find them?

If you want your client marketers to respect your thinking, start thinking from a strategic vantage point in an unbiased way. Start telling the truth. Divorce yourself from execution. Find the best fresh minds in the world to help. And maybe then you’ll get invited into that walnut burled conference room.

Another good article on marketing strategy vs. tactics here.

Thursday October 29, 2009
by Ron Ashkenas

Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing “simplicity” as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises “Sense and simplicity” while Bank of America promotes “Clear, easy-to-understand products.” Simplicity also is the subtle message that Schwab conveys when it says “Talk to Chuck” and that Fidelity suggests when it says just “Stay on the line.”

The reality is that simplicity is highly appealing in a world that is getting more and more complex — where consumers have too many choices, where technology is constantly evolving, and where the political and economic environment is unpredictable. In the midst of all this instability and change, people want to get back to basics. They want uncomplicated products, straightforward guidance, and things that work quickly and simply the first time, without lots of extra effort.

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. The result was a huge array of choices that became almost overwhelming and costly.

For example, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that it was giving consumers so many choices for customizing its popular Aeron chair that it had to be prepared to produce over four million variations on the basic model — even though only a few thousand configurations were actually being ordered. Similarly, Cisco Systems learned from its top corporate customers that all the new features in its networking products were actually causing instability in the corporate networks because they couldn’t be integrated easily with existing hardware and software.

It’s easy to create slogans and marketing materials about simplicity. The challenge is to truly make things easier for the customer so that simplicity becomes a competitive advantage.

To do that, companies need to listen to their customers and truly engage them in dialogue about their needs — and their perceptions of products and services offered. For example, Cisco works with a number of customer advisory groups that meet regularly with senior executives and product developers; Fidelity executives either answer their 800-number consumer phone lines or listen to tapes of the calls; ConAgra Foods product managers make field visits to consumers’ homes and to grocery stores.

In addition to listening to customers, companies also need to design their products and services from the customer perspective. When Intuit developed its small business accounting software package, the product developers realized that most small business owners were not familiar with accounting jargon, and in fact were intimidated by it. So instead of using the term “accounts receivable”, they called it “money in.” Similarly, “accounts payable” became “money out.” As a result of developing a product from the customer perspective, Intuit sold 100,000 copies of the software the first year.

Not every company needs to create its own version of the iPod, an icon of simplicity. But there is no reason why every company can’t listen to their own customers and design products and services in ways that better satisfy their customers’ desires for greater simplicity and ease of use. If you don’t, your competitors probably will.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the forthcoming book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done

This article is from the Harvard Business Blog. Original article can be found here.

The state of the “ADVERTISING” business.

Preview:

The Breakup:

The plot thickens:

Thought for the day:
Build relationships. Not impressions.

Here we go again. Are babies, bunnies and cute baby chickens going to work forever?