When he speaks, we listen.

Toni Segarra presenta el Master Communication Design Lab from IED Madrid on Vimeo.

Tony Segarra is one of the smartest Creative Directors in the world. He is also a successful leader and an impressive creative.

In this video he speaks about the role of the "new" creative director and the talents of the new communication creative.

Noticed the used of the word design in the masters title!

Enjoy it.

5 ways to improve your portfolio

We are exposed to hundreds of opinions and points of view daily. Perhaps it is the truly significant revolution of this past decade, the surge of the advise.

Every where you turn, there is someone giving you tips, shortcuts, advise, insight, rules, laws... This comes from the need to position oneself as a "brand" that adds value to the community, yet a lot comes from offer and demand... the more people come to the internet, blogosphere or twitterville looking for knowledge, the bigger number of people who offers it.

Identifying the true valuable advise from the noise is also an exercise of patience and practice, but there is a lot to be learned daily from a few well known and not so well known individuals and magazines out there.

In this case, I found it in BitRebels (a first time visit for me)

Creating a portfolio online is easy, but creating a portfolio that stands out, sells your talent and gets your foot on the door is a bit more difficult.

I found these 5 point to be simple, insightful, logical and smart (which tend to be good ingredients for analytical thinking)

1. Do Good work –

2. Make it Simple and Concise –

3. Include Case Studies -

4. Give your Portfolio a Human side –

5. Killer design -

I have come to learned that the most difficult step is to keep things simple.

Here is the beef.

Classics.

These ads came out when I was starting my career as a junior copywriter and they helped me to understand what good creativity looks like.

Thank you to everybody who made this happen.

For everyone

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.

You should follow this advise:

Be different and stand out, create something, put it out there, get feedback, be real, be humble, try again, don't listen to the majority of critics, do your own thing, develop you own voice, be respectful, be tasteful, be meaningful, do something that makes you proud, execute the idea, be an idealist, adjust your expectations, read, watch, communicate, socialize, respect women, love kids, understand differences, do what makes you uncomfortable, ask for directions, leave the table still hungry, believe in the idea, never give up and surround your self of people who are smarter, faster and hungrier.

To Ander, Alani, Avi and Amaia.

TAXI wisdom.

TAXI is a Design/Creative network I just recently discovered.
My humble apologies to those who have known about it for discovering it with such delay. Pero nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena and in this case, the reward is valuable.

Obviously the people running TAXI are doing a lot of great things. Great contributors, Portfolio Showcasing, Careers, articles and even interviews with brilliant Designers and Creative Directors.

And it is in the interviews section where I found this interesting interview with David Nobay, partner at Drogba5 Australia and the No. 1 most awarded Creative Director in Australasia.

I really like some of his thoughts about your portfolio if you are starting in advertising:

I’d rather see one brief, pushed out into every possible media opportunity, than 8 or 10 convenient couplets of poster and TV scripts.

On business partnership:

But passion is what keeps up the energy in a start-up. All of us expect the same level of commitment and honesty from each other. That sense of balance is a real key.

On direct mail and digital:

most people in adland dismissed what we did as “junk mail”, but at its very heart, the methodology was not dissimilar to the eulogy you hear from so-called digital gurus today: The science of accountability; The journey to a response; The sense of brand-utility. Attention/Interest/Desire/Conviction/Action.

Sound familiar? Twenty years ago, it was the rudiments of every successful mailpack, but today it’s just as current to the connectivity of the web. Sure, digital and mobile are a much more exciting palette to paint ideas with, but the basic challenge is the same: take people on a journey that’s based on them interacting, connecting and responding.

On being a creative leader:

Winning awards is easy compared to building a team of creative people who truly believe in you and your mission.

And about the present (not the future, refreshingly)

These are scary times for many. But for those of us who are comfortable with the currency of ideas, it’s also the most exciting period in our history.agency team.

And finally:

What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the creative world for the next 10 years?

David Nobay>>Momentum.

If new business is your business.

Alex Bogusky offers great insights into their (CP+B) new business process:

1. Tell other people your dreams.
People would laugh and they would point and they would say “There go those guys that wanted to be great!” FAIL! But to succeed you have to risk failure. So eventually decided to tell the whole agency what we wanted to become. Our mission statement. We had a friend who was at Fallon in the early days and he had been a part of creating there’s and I don’t know if I remember it exactly but it was very simple and basically said that they wanted to be, “The most awarded agency in America.” We thought about what we liked about the ad biz and it wasn’t awards it was the culture jamming. So our mission became, “To create the most talked about and written about advertising in the world.” Within weeks the stalemate between the status quo and something new had been broken and the agency began to clearly move toward this new shared goal. Out of the thousands of little decisions that shaped our future you could feel that more than half were suddenly talking us someplace we wanted to go. I wish we had had the courage to do it sooner.

2. The clients you currently have are your true new business machine.
I see so many people overlook this. “If I only had a client like this or a client like that.” It’s key to have a clear idea in your head of the new ground you hope to break and the new case history you hope to prove with each new client before you start work. What is going to be different about the agency six months after the arrival of your new account? How is this new revenue and this new campaign going to make your agency smarter and more capable than it was prior?

3. Find some real passion in the building for the business or take a pass on it.
We have a rule that says we can’t pitch a piece of business unless at least one of the partners is passionate about that business. In the end you will be defined by your clients. There are no two ways about that. Such is the lot of the parasites of the business world. Agencies.

4. Don’t model yourself after other agencies.

Great points, all of them. My favorite is the importance of a mission that' s easy to embraced by people.

That makes the whole difference between being successful and not. Knowing who you are and what you want, and being able to communicate that.

PS: I also agree with the title of his post: if-you-have-to-be-afraid-of-something-then-fear mediocrity

Advertising is not a magnet of talent.

During an interview with Jeff Benjamin, the Interactive Executive Creative Director at CP+B, Jeff discusses the amount of talent available or the lack of enough talent rather:

It's not that we don't get talent, we just don't get the volume of talent that we need. We need to think about what we are doing to attract people.

We need (Google quality people) to come to our agency, but they are not interested.

What we value in this people is their entrepreneur spirit, they invention abilities, but the agency is not making and attractive pitch.

People want to make things that matter, but big advertising agencies are not perceived as the ideal place to the nurture entrepreneur personality.

The one question I ask during my interviews is: what's the last thing you invented? because I want to know that people can think and deliver ideas, passionate about making things that have not been made before, because it's a big part fo the interactive future.

Great points made by Jeff, that compliment perfectly with this post "the time is now" about how fear is killing creativity in advertising agencies.

We know where we are, we know what we need, the talent is out there, let's make this happen, let's rush forward into the future where advertising is again the magnet for crazy talent and rebels and mavericks.