Category: advertising

Questions for your Portfolio


I’m teaching a portfolio development class at Miami Ad School again this quarter. For many of the students, it’s their final quarter of getting their portfolio in shape before heading out to look for a job. For the first class, I put together a page of questions to ask yourself about your portfolio before you take it out there. Let me know what you think or if you have anything to add.

DOWNLOAD THE QUESTIONS.

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How to Read an Awards Annual

You’ve probably already gone through the CA Advertising Annual and preordered your copy of the One Show. (If not, why haven’t you?)

It’s easy enough to go through these books page by page, thinking “Cool…Cool…How’d that get in?…Cool…I had that idea…”

But if you’re serious about understanding what makes an award-winning ad, you can’t just flip through the annuals. You have to study them. Yes, study.

One of the best techniques I know came from my old copywriting professor, Coz Cotzias. Here’s what you do…

  1. Sit down with an annual and a pack of Post-It notes.
  2. Go through the book flagging every ad you totally dig as a creative.
  3. Put the book down. Go see a movie. Read a book. Whatever. Just step away.
  4. Come back to the book, but this time, viewing only the executions you tagged as a creative, look at them as a consumer. Tag the ones you dig as someone who might actually buy whatever it is that’s being advertised.

These are the ads you want to aspire to. Why? Because they’re not just clever. They’re smart. They’re effective. They’re the ones that are rooted in a strategy. The ones that are really solving the client’s problem creatively.

For extra credit, go through all of these ads and see if you can figure out what the strategy was and who specifically they were trying to talk to. This isn’t to turn you into planners. It’s to make you better creatives.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Gary Goldsmith…

We all pay less attention to the process than we should. If doctors and scientists operated in the same manner that we do, it’d be a scary world. What they do is creative, too, in its own way. They’ve devoted a lot of thought to the way in which they arrive at a diagnosis, and the way in which they treat it. But with us, it’s almost like we have this thing in our head, we don’t need to do that, we should just sit down and come up with ideas.

Match Wits With Professor Layton

I’ve been playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my Nintendo DS. It’s a very addicting puzzle game. Here’s the trailer…

There are over 100 puzzles in this game, from simple riddles to chess games to jigsaw puzzles. A famous riddle that appears in the game is this: “If A is the first letter, and B comes after, what is the last letter of the alphabet?” Of course, you immediately answer “Z,” which is incorrect. Because the question’s really about the last letter of the word “alphabet” and not the 26 letters.
I was really stuck on another one where I had to create a + on a field of pegs. Given the parameters, it seemed impossible. Until I realized that if I tipped the + on its side to make an X, the problem was workable.
What does this have to do with advertising? Almost without exception, the puzzles in this game are solved by looking at the problem from another angle. They’re deliberately phrased to make you assume one thing, but it’s not until you see past those presumptions that you’re able to crack the code.
Like approaching a new assignment, you go in with some presumptions. Like you can’t do award-winning work on packaged goods. Or the client never buys humor. Or the answer is a full-page print ad. Or any kind of an ad.
Presumptions. Scrap them. Ignore them. Pay them no mind. That’s what Professor Layton does.

My book is my boss.


A couple of posts ago I asked “Who will you work for?” My answer (which most of you hit on in some form or another) is this:

I work for my book.

It sounds selfish. Ego-centric. A little self-absorbed. But it’s the only answer I’ve found that really makes sense to me.

When I work for my book…

I win. Because I know I’m pushing myself creatively, and I’m more likely to end up with a breakthrough idea. If my end result doesn’t garner any awards, I’ll still know that I didn’t phone it in, and I’m that much sharper for the next assignment.

The agency wins. For all the reasons listed above. The agency gets another number by its name in the index of the One Show and/or I’ve become that more valuable to the office as an employee.

My creative director wins. For all the reasons heretofore listed.

The client wins. I can’t do great creative if the client’s not benefiting from the effort. It’s not creative if it doesn’t sell. And it probably won’t sell if it’s not creative. Also, outside the industry, when a great ad appears, it’s the client who becomes famous, not you. Happy to live with that.

Your alma matter wins. No matter what portfolio school you went to, they get to say that you went there as a recruiting device.

The industry wins. I think we’d all agree at least 90% of the advertising out there is garbage. Work for your book and you’ll automatically be in the top 10%. Better yet, you can be part of the effort to push the percentage of bad advertising down to 89%.

My bank account wins. Keep your eye on the ball. But, yes, this too will be affected.

Work for your book. It’s the only thing guaranteed to follow you to the next gig.

Salesgenie.com: Is any press really good press?

About a year and a half ago, my agency was approached by a company out of Omaha called Salesgenie to do Super Bowl spots. Apparently the CEO had picked us because he saw some of our work and liked it. Naturally, we were stoked. The whole creative department worked on the assignment, and we pitched several ideas to the CEO. He thanked us, said he liked the work, but his board wasn’t convinced that the Super Bowl was a prudent use of their budget.

Apparently, they changed their mind, because they did run an ad on the Super Bowl last year. It was written by the CEO himself, and was voted the worst ad of the 56 Super Bowl ads by the USA Today poll. Here it is:

Pretty bad. Offensive? Probably depends on who you ask. But they raise some interesting questions, I think:

1) What’s their deal? Salesgenie’s strategy is to intentionally do bad ads, as explained in this article. And if it makes the company a profit, that’s good, right? Are brands crazy for trying to get people to like them when all they have to do is get people to talk about them?

2) Is there no difference between being famous and being notorious?

3) The CEO of Salesgenie is an Indian man. Does knowing that make the first one less offensive?

4) Where’s the line between so bad it’s good and just bad?

5) The Superbowl’s audience is mostly American, and the country can hardly be held accountable for every ad our companies air, but I felt embarrassed and not proud at all for being in advertising, and even a little American when I saw these. Anyone else agree?

Aristotle to the Rescue

Again, some really great, interesting comments on the last post. Here’s my take. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

It’s Aristotle who inspired the question of advertising things we don’t really need. And it’s Aristotle who helps me deal with it.

Aristotle’s philosophy held that people can only be happiest when we are doing all we are capable of doing.

We can’t be truly happy knowing we can and should do something, and then not act. We can’t be truly happy lounging around when we know we’re capable of starting a business, organizing a club, or writing a letter to the editor. We can’t be truly happy passing a homeless person on the street when we’ve got a dollar in our pocket we know we don’t really need. And when you’re capable of doing intelligent, creative, brilliant advertising, that’s what you’ve got to do, too.

While some may argue that no one really needs a Porsche, vitamin-enhanced water, or an iPhone, I would also argue that the producers of those goods are probably happy because they’re doing all they’re capable of. They’re trying to engineer a better car, make more interesting water, or make media more accessible by whatever standards they set. They’re innovating. And that’s what we do as a species. And if I really believe that about a product, I’m happy to help advertise that.

So how does this relate to any of you today? The One Show College Competition is currently under way. I understand the deadline is February 21st. You’re all capable of getting in that book. What a great opportunity for you to be happy.

Aristotle in the Market

Imagine you’re one of Aristotle’s disciples. One day, he leads you and several others to the market (that’s him on the right). All the merchants have their wares on display – haute couture togas, leather-bound copies of the latest epic poem, designer torches for setting your sacrificial animals on fire. And the masses are lining up to buy these things. Booth after booth, it’s the Times Square of ancient Greece. And this is what Aristotle says to you:

“Look at all of the things I don’t need.”

I was in Baltimore a couple months ago. I stayed right on the Harbor, and as I stepped outside my hotel I could see a Barnes & Noble, Hard Rock Café, ESPN Zone, P.F. Chang’s, Williams Sonoma, and a California Pizza Kitchen. I saw the exact same sight in San Francisco a while ago, and I can look out of my office window and see pretty much the same thing along Michigan Avenue.

“Look at all of the things I don’t need.”

Yet I’m in advertising. I spend my days trying to convince people to go to the market. To drop their drachmas and buy the latest high-end discus. Is there a conflict here? No one really needs a Porsche. Or an iPhone. Or vitamin-infused water. Right?

I’ll tell you how I’ve made my peace with this. But I’d like to hear your ideas first. Any takers?