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.

what's the point of the story?

Ira Glass shares with us how to tell stories.

he’s talking about video production, but his points are easily applied to any other "creative" realm.

In this insightful series of videos he explores anecdotes and reflections and what they mean to the story.

But hidden within his "reflections" are some very interesting thoughts, like being in charge of telling a story means being ruthless editing what works and is interesting.

Finding a decent story takes more time than producing the story. Anybody in the creative field should spend enough time looking for stories.

Failure is a big part of success. You need to be on a schedule to produce things every week and before you know it, you will have something special, something people are going to want.

The most important thing for you to do is to do a lot of work. (my personal favorite)

The first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good — it’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.

And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. We knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing to do is — everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.

Two mistakes most people who start make are: we imitate the people who are already doing what we want to do.

But you need to be yourself. There is already a real one of who you want to imitate.

The second problem is that we tend to be interested about ourselves, but in most stories the other person is more interesting.

Make sure to watch all 4 videos on you tube.

You can't survive on content alone.

What drives the creative process of a Wired cover?

"Attention to details", says Scott Dadich.

I think that the information in the talk is interesting, but what my main take away is some people are natural communicators and some are not.

Perhaps regular people are suffering due to TED and FORA itself, who offer us such a range of amazing conference and talks, hosted by brilliant communicators.

The truth is, speaking, presenting or sharing information in front of a crowd is always hard and intimidating.

The more value to those who can be memorable and entertaining and unforgettable.

If focus groups were in charge of Human evolution.

It is not a surprise that creative professionals have a hard relationship with Focus Groups. Overall the type where ideas are subjected to approval and scrutiny.

That is why we need to watch this video and ask ourselves, what would have happened if?

Focus groups are an ideal tool to gather information about the consumer's needs and state of mind towards a category or product.