It's all about optimism.

I really like the blog by W+K London. Its called Welcome to optimism and it's a refreshing dose of smart writing and creative company culture.

I like this post about advice to creatives showing their book at an agency. I kind of feel like I should have written about this subject. Oh, well... it happens.

Here is the list:

1. Keep it quick. Creatives looking at your book have limited time so make the most of the opportunity. Keep storyboards and radio short and sweet.

2. A balanced book tends to have between 7-9 ad campaigns and a few other creative ideas.

3. Get to the bottom of a brand. Try to find out what makes them different to everyone else and what’s at the heart of their product and their company.

4. Demonstrate different tones of voice. How does this brand talk to people? What’s their personality?

5. Find different ways of talking to people. You don’t always need to conform to the conventional. Logos don’t have to sit in corners. Photos don’t have to be funny. And long copy is not scary.

6. Do more than just press ads. There are many other interesting ways of exploring an idea. What are the appropriate media for your idea? What medium is right for your audience? What will draw people in and surprise them? (TV, press, radio, online, viral, ambient, talking dogs…)

8. Expand at least one of your ideas into a big campaign and prove it’s not just a one off poster or TV ad.

9. We like to find out about you as well as seeing your book. Show us your matchbox collection, the short film that you’re making on the side or your greatest baking success. We see tons of ads, but sometimes it’s these little funny things that sums up who you are.

7. Listen and take notes too. You’d be surprised how many people don’t! Which is annoying to creatives who’ve given up their time to see you.

10. The advertising world is small so don’t piss people off or others might get to hear about it.

11. If you like a particular team, try to go back to them again with more work. Try to build a relationship. This will help you make more contacts, they may recommend you to their advertising friends and colleagues.

As a junior creative, when yuo don't know where you stand yet, and senior creatives give you their professional opinion, remember what they say in Hollywood; at the end of the day nobody knows anything.

The life cycle of a creative idea.

I found an interesting analogy on The Pixar Touch by David A. Price that I think applies to creativity and how is handled by agencies and clients.

The cycle of a film is like that of fruits and vegetables. You try to plan it well in advance and you lay your seeds, put your fertilizer on, you water it, make sure it is nourished and all that. When it is ready to pick, it is ready to pick.

I think its brilliant because the creative process (or any other process for that matter) is this simple and this useful when you follow it.

• Plan it well in advance means understanding that creativity (like fruit and vegetables) follows a process that takes time and doesn't happen overnight.

• Laying the seed is about picking the raw materials with the best quality. This is about the hiring of the right creative minds, building the right team, selecting the type of "fruit" you will be picking up later on. You can't plant a potato and expect an onion.

• Put your fertilizer on. Without nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium the plant simply cannot grow because it cannot make the pieces it needs. The chemicals elements of the creative mind are a defined and simple goal, confidence, freedom to explore and collaboration.

• Water it, make sure it is nourished and all that. In one word: love. Achieving a balance of love is important though. Just like with water, too much or to little could ruin the outcome. It's love given to small ideas and big ones, for ugly ones and cute ones. Love as in providing room for an idea to grow. And believe me, is all about love.

• When it is ready to pick, it is ready to pick. If you have done everything right, the weather helped, the soil was good and you got lucky, you can go and pick the idea up. Its amazing to me how many people inside the business think that creativity is just the action of going to the field and picking up ideas.

Every creative enterprise goes through this cycle. If you respect it and follow it, you'll pick up great fruits and vegetables.

What bacteria can teach the next creative generation

TED is full of wisdom. No matter who talks, about what subject, sharing whatever type of knowledge. One always walks away improved.

Watching this passionate and useful presentation by Bonnie Bassler I thought about creativity and the creative professional.

The market is shaping new roles and new disciplines, and the marketing creative is not inmune to those changes.

Bacteria is kind of a superhero. Powerful and always present, and I think that we can learn a little bit from bacteria when thinking of the super creative of tomorrow.

• Its all about DNA. Anybody can be creative. I believe that to heart. But not everybody can deal with tight deadlines, be creative on demand and be conceptual with restrictions. Is more about who you are and whether or not is in your DNA.
• Bacteria do many things. Mostly good and some bad. Creatives create 30" TV ads, but that's just a small % of your talents. Creative will do many creative things.
• Bacteria turn on group behavior. They talk to each other, are inclusive and cooperate. The creative lone rider is, I think, no longer working.
• Bacteria is Multi-lingual. Creatives need to speak different languages to collaborate with multiple disciplines: Planners, engineers, web designers, art directors, product developers, user experience designers, clients...
• Bacteria develop defenses. I think that adapting is essential for creatives. New clients, new brands, new partners, new boss, new rules, new playground. But same game: generate ideas with value.
• Bacteria do things together because it makes a difference. They have collective behavior and carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals.
• There is chemistry between bacteria. At the end of the day, without chemistry bacteria wouldn't accomplish any of the things its supposed to accomplish.

Perhaps creatives could become the new bacteria of the marketing industry. Wouldn't that be sick!

The ideal candidate

The advertising industry has one of the highest turnovers in the professional world.
It's not surprising though.
This fast paced world of high emotions and big egos is draining. Most people I've worked with are always looking for the next opportunity, a deserving promotion and a bigger check.

Now we are facing a delicate situation because of the economy downturn and the next opportunity might appear sooner than expected.

That's why I thought about sharing what makes the ideal creative candidate as well as the ideal boss (I don't think that we should look up to for the traditional agency anymore. As a matter of fact, the most creative work, with the most challenging briefs and most rewarding accounts might be in digital agencies, design studios and small creative boutiques)

The Ideal Candidate

• Your talent can't be restrained. No TV? No Print? You did coasters. You edited old Nike commercials into a 30".
• You always offer solutions. Your positive opinion is important. Add value.
• You are interesting. Your creativity reaches beyond marketing and advertising.
• You are curious. you want to know why?
• You have a reason. Aimless creativity is the worst kind in this business. In art is cool though.
• You flirt with strategy. Your best friend is a planner. Even better, you are married to one.
• You explore everywhere because you know that ideas are found.
• You know that all this is just a big dance, and you are a good dancer.
• You stay ahead of me. Making yourself essential for me to stay ahead.
• You push forward. And you know when to stop pushing.

The ideal boss. (A human angle from the great Creative Director)

• Your ideal boss is not cynical. Having seen it all doesn't mean hating it all.
• Your ideal boss still cares. Because if the boss doesn't care, who cares?
• Your ideal boss is still learning.
• Your ideal boss is ahead of you. Making himself essential for you to stay ahead.
• Your ideal boss writes a blog. if you have to ask read the previous point.
• Your ideal boss doesn't discuss politics. That's why he is the boss.
• Your ideal boss listens.
• Your ideal boss pushes you. And knows when to ease the push.
• Your ideal boss works with you. It takes a team.

If you find the right boss, take the job. Forget the salary if you can. The reward will pay itself back to you a hundred times more valuable than money.

I know is hard, but talent survives. It always does. Don't settle. Keep on learning. One day it all will make sense. I promise you that.

The ideal candidate is optimistic.

Post inspired by summation

Inside the creative mind: Craig Davis

Wouldn't it be great if we could get advise from the best creative minds in the world?
Inside the creative mind is a series of posts bringing you exactly that through Luzer's Int Archive which is a magazine that showcases outstanding print, Posters and TV advertising from all over the world.

Every issue is anxiously awaited at agencies because its pages are an incredible source of inspiration for creatives worldwide.

In each issue they interview someone who has managed to put together a successful career in the creative arena. Not an easy accomplishment. That's why I decided to share with you a summary of some of these interviews.

The first one is with Craig Davis who at the time of the interview was Regional ECD in Asia and Africa, but today is JWT chief creative director Worldwide (those titles keep getting longer)
I decided to go with this as the first of the series because I happen to believe that what he says is key for successful agencies, the essence of innovation and the true job of a good creative director.

The role of an ECD? Find people who can deliver world-class work. Helping them do it, developing people and helping client embrace that kind of thinking. Basically, getting good ideas and making them happen.

A lot of people are capable of finding strong ideas. The tricky thing is to make them happen. I think that most agencies are the same, The key difference between a greta agency and an ordinary one is that the great agency is much more successful in getting interesting thinking into the marketplace.

I think my job is to simplify things. I think that what we do should be pretty simple but it's just made complicated. I try to simplify expectations, and try to simplify briefs and simply the idea.

Perspective is worth up 10 IQ points.I think that the best solutions are often discovered by people who are not up to their neck in the problem.

(Agencies) We are in a problem solving business.

I'm not a big fan of processes. Repetition breeds similar outcomes. changes will invariably lead to fresher, more interesting solutions.

(creatives) You need to be hungry for information. You need to collect sources of inspiration and ideas from all over the place.

I think more often it's people who are willing to explore and who can throw a lot of ideas out, and can later on come back and sift through them... that's interesting... To me that's the way it works. I think that you've got to sweat out a hundred ideas and if you are lucky, two or three can be really cool.

That's another thong I do, encourage people to think past the obvious, because the obvious is normally pretty dull stuff.

In this business you've got to enjoy thinking. You've got to enjoy the exloring part.

I think people think that they are born with 100 ideas, so they keep those 100 ieas really close to them. Because they have a career ahead of them. But I think that there are a million ideas out there running around all the time.

I think that tehre is a growing number of clients either frustrated with that (tradictional agency) process or with the outcome of that process. I think that there are lot of smart clients who see that the value is in the idea, the value is in the solution.

The competition to a client is not the other people who produce the same kind of products or provide the same type of service, the competition is music videos, films, television, news, newspaper content, etc. You have to give people surprise or delight. You have to touch them in some way.

I believe he is one of the great ones of our generation. I love his approach and his philosophy.
Look at the work of JWT recently and you'll notice his influence.

I hope you enjoyed it. There many more coming up. Stay tune.

Absolut creative

The Absolut Vodka print creative (developed by TBWA ad agency in New York) is another brilliant campaign that has influenced my career and the career of millions of creatives around the world.

Last week I focused on Nike as an example of brand and agency producing some of the best creativity of the last 20 years. Nike and its "Just do it" campaign is a complex combination of clever insights, talented creatives, brilliant execution and bold decision making.

A good example of this complexity is that although everybody understood "Just do it" very well, very few people besides W+K were capable of delivering a comemrcial with the right "Just do it" feeling.

With Absolut we find a different case of creative brilliance.

Everybody could and probably did create an Absolut print ad. (this fact was embraced by the agency and resulted in the first global collaboration between artists from all fields and a brand to create advertising)

All you needed was a bottle and your own interpretation of the campaign. This attribute (where everybody can contribute to the campaign with a valid idea is perceived in creative departments as a sign of having a good concept.

This "ease of creativity" is rare in advertising, and in the case of Absolut (and probably MasterCard, which will be subject of a future post) is one of the main reasons for its popularity: Everybody understood the creative idea.

The brief of the campaign wasn't promising:

Adman Geoff Hays of the TBWA ad agency in New York was asked to come up with a campaign for Absolut Vodka. The Stockholm team had taken great care to outline a campaign for the new product based on very specific guidelines - all advertising should center around the bottle, the product should not be identified with any particular lifestyle and the approach should have a timeless yet contemporary feel to it.

Its amazing how much creativity could be born from from such uncreative set up.

But it is a good remainder of the magic of the creative process and the creative idea (TBWA was and stil is one of the most creatives and innovatives agencies in the world. And I don't believe in accidents)

Keep this message from the brand in mind:

Creativity is that simple surprise and delight of seeing familiar things in a new way. From the very beginning, when Absolut vodka was first exported, we decided to be different - to surprise and delight.

Why is this important? Because all the decisions made by the Absolut brand were measure against this strategic vision.

• Be bold. In 1980 you couldn't find many alcohol brands that had such a conceptual message. It was one of the first campaigns that really said more about the consumer than about the product itself. In the 80"s!!! You wanted to be seen with that brand, wear it, be associated with it. Absolut said a lot about you; clever, playful, classy, sensitive... creative. (is it surprising that the same agency creates the advertising for Apple?)
  

• Make the product the hero. Many times the creative team forgets that the whole purpuse of the ad, is to seel the product. But don't be too harsh on us. Its part of the creative exploration and the process of landing on the right idea. I always say that the product has to be the center of the drama. In this case the Absolut bottle is the main character, and the name Absolut the story. what else could a client ask for?

• Surprise and delight. I remember being attracted to the absolut campaign long before getting my first job as a creative in advertising. I found them... surprising. I remember getting winter gloves with a copy of the New Yorker in 1993 "Absolut Warmth". Following their strategy, to surprise and delight Absolut had to think outside the conventional print ad, within the limitations of the print ad world. I can ventured to say that without that brand vision, the creative team would have never searched for alternative ways of delivering the campaign in the way they did.

• Ready, set, go! Once you realize you have something big, make it huge. I'm looking at the Absolute Gallery and it is amazing to see the unbelievable amount of ads they created. There are collections about fashion, painters, Hollywood, cartoon artists, photographers, Album covers, Latin American cities, Chefs, designers, flavors, zodiac, literature and even the 7 deadly sins. Everybody in any field of creativity wanted to do an ad for Absolut Vodka.
  

I hope you like this campaign as much as I do. It offers great lessons about creativity and the innovation process.
But it's also consistent with some of the lessons from the Nike campaign:
Be bold.
Never be satisfied.
Try everything, fail, learn and keep on trying.

Absolut is to date one of only three brands inducted into the American Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. The other two are Coca-Cola and Nike.

One hand. No car.

their purpose and effectiveness is still a mysterythe pleasure of driving. BMW is now associated with those emotions inside our brain, in our hearts.

Do you like to drive? BMW does too.

That's branding, and that's long lasting, solid, unique and difficult to forget.

That's why branding is hard to do and that's why this ad does it so well.