If you are familiar to the Advertising world you already noticed that brief is one of the words most used in daily talk. In this post I’ll try to show its importance.

Brief itself should be separated in two distinct ones: the client brief and the creative brief.

The client brief: Whenever a client contacts an agency in order to develop an advertising campaign, a list of attributes should be given by the client to the agency. Without this list, the agency would never be able to build up a successful campaign if they don’t know what’s the main objective of the campaign for example.
The essentials that a client should provide to an advertising agency that constitute the client brief are:
- Where are we now?
- Where do we want to be after this?
- What are we doing right now to get there?
- What’s our target group? Who do we need to talk to?
- How come we will know that the accomplish the objective?

This pretty much is what needed to be presented by a client to an agency in order to guarantee that the agency has enough input to create a successful campaign. (Other issues are related with market search and the campaign planning style are also of extreme importance, however I won’t tackle them in this post).

The creative brief: After the client brief has been received by the agency, now the account management and account planning teams are responsible to transform a client brief into the creative brief, which will need, obviously, to be approved by the client itself.

We can say that a good creative brief is the one that stimulates creativity and enhances original ideas by the creatives. There should be enough space for imagination occur, the creative brief shouldn’t be too restrictive that will be just possible to work in one direction. We should remember that at this point creatives will come to some idea of how the deliverables will be, which will serve as input to the production team, so we should always keep in mind that in the first steps of the creative process to leave it as open as possible, and not act in a ego-related fashion.

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As a magic trick that entertains an audience by creating illusions of seemingly impossible actions, I believe that a viral video uses the same idea of the three stages of a magic trick: The Pledge, The Turn and The Prestige.

The Pledge: Here is when something ordinary is introduced to the audience. Normally it can take most of the time in the viral video. It can be seen as simple story telling that induces the audience to a given mind set that will have continuation in the next stages.

The Turn: The second part of the viral video is where the spotlight attention of the audience is switched to something of particular interest. At this moment, the audience already has some background information (given in the previous stage) and now their total attention is in this particular issue, where they necessary will feel curious and anxious of what’s going to happen next.

The Prestige: As expected, this is the glorious part of the viral video, where the audience start laughing, if it’s a comic ending, or feel shocked if it’s a dramatic ending. The point made is that the illusion created over the last stages ends here, in this so-called emotional stage. This last stage itself doesn’t need to be that spectacular, but due to the story telling presented to the audience and the curiosity generated by them, a good prestige will just blow your mind, and make you share it with all your friends.

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As it is known in the advertising sphere, the unique selling proposition (USP) is indeed the most important issue that the agency and the client want the viewers to remember after they’ve seen/heard the advertisement. In the early fifties, Rosser Reeves developed this concept at TED Bates advertising agency. The idea of USP was that every single brand had something that could distinguish them from their competitors. Hence, this powerful unique element could be easily turned into the added value of the campaign.

This idea came about 70 years ago. I think it’s about time to rephrased it according to the new age of viral video marketing.

As well know the future of online video advertising is already here, and we should learn from the past in order to take the best advantages from the tools we get the opportunity to use in the future. UPS is one of them.

In my opinion, the spread of viral videos have two reasons of happening
1) The fact of being funny, engaging and letting the consumers identify with it.
2) The fact of being mysterious.

(Check this post by Seth Godin to understand more about how spread happens in social media)

If we understand these two reasons of why viral videos spread, it’s clear to understand that the UPS does not make much sense in this new context. We don’t want the viral video to distinguish from its competitors in its core content. What we want is in the prestige (final part of the viral video) the UPS being finally presented to the consumer, creating an illusion of what actually the video was for.

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Online video advertising became part of our lives. At the present moment, video portals such as youtube and vimeo, became the host of thousands of videos uploaded everyday that we, internet users unable to not press a link when it says it’s a video, watch, laugh and pass around our friends and share in social networks. My focus in this post will be one kind of videos: Viral videos.

Virals became part of guerrila advertising not so long time ago. Advertising agencies realized its power to spread, and reach in a couple of hours thousands of views, impressive we have to admit. It’s indeed a powerful tool. But my question is, will the power of virals be constrained just to the world wide web? Could it be possible to be used in other forms of media?

My answer to this question is: IT SHOULD. I see a good viral as a band playing in the street. If it’s good music people will stay to watch until it’s over, they’ll call their friends, their friends call other friends, and people will gather around. This metaphor i find quite interesting because I believe that the future of viral videos is in ambient advertising: leaving the internet surface and going to outdoors environment.

I believe it’s not really complicated to imagine this scenario. Outdoor advertising is getting old, advertising needs new fresh air in the streets. It’s already happening here and there, but what I’m talking is that it’ll become global and people will decide which viral will be in it. How? simple, cellphones are in the pockets of everyone and one text message away of deciding what they wanna see. I believe that there are endless of opportunities in this field that from what I’ve known hasn’t been explored quite yet.

Conclusion: Guerrilla advertising viral videos, in my opinion, will become a daily basis in outdoors advertising, where everyone would be able to be involved and choose which is viral that should be playing right here and right now.

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This following post relates to my conception of Advertising. The difference between the producers and the consumers in advertising, and mainly what good advertising essentially is and the rules of the game when it turns to engage users to some form of advertisement.

Make Consumers feel more Intelligent. Everyone loves to feel good and feel that they are smart when perceiving something. It can be a simple mathematical operation, or even associating a song to a movie. The rule is that people love to discover the link that connects A to B, which makes them feel good with that they are interacting with. I believe it’s the same thing occurs in Advertising, people want to feel smart when they look to a piece of advertisement in front of them. Unconsciously they want to connect the different parts, the visuals with the words, the words with the sound, and the sound with the motion. Being end users of advertising, consumers want to understand the magic trick beyond it. Hence, my point here is that what differentiates good advertisement from bad, is that you need to give that space to comprehension and the conclusion to be taken, that’s exactly what people will remember from the ad. The visual? the copy? Maybe they will, but probably they will be bombarded with 10 thousand more that day and possibly they will forget, but in what comes to “their own” achievement they got from seeing the ad, that will last longer, that’s how human brain works.

Make Producers feel less Ego-Related. The creative brief is the necessary input for the production team. The problem i want to point here is that during the course of the production (graphic design+motion design+flash design+…), care should be taken in order to always keep in mind what’s the objective of the campaign. As so-called artists that belong to the production team, they tend to treat their work as a big canvas where perfection is the word to remember. The fact that most of the times is forgotten, is that beautiful work is pointless if it does not comply with the client brief and so with the creative brief. Ego-related action regarding the production part, creates the division between beautiful work that does not really fulfill what was asked for. If the objective of the campaign was to increase sales by 200% then obviously that the flash banner should have a clear button saying “click here”, or something similar, if in other hand, the objective of the campaign is to increase the awareness of the brand for the target group from 15 to 25 years old, probably the visuals will have the biggest importance in the deliverables. The key point to remember here is: special care should be taken when it comes to produce a given idea due to the fact that first it needs to comply with the objectives of the client, and just then it should embrace the infinite creativity of the production team.

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This video gives an incredible overview about the stats of internet usage up now. Amazing how in a couple of years offline became online. Check the video below.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Web: 1.73 billion internet users worldwide, 234 million websites
Facebook: 30,000 servers ; 350+ million users; 260 billion pages views per month = 6 million page views per minute = 37,4 trillion pageviews in a year
Twitter: 27,300,000 tweets a day
E-mail: 1.4 billion e-mail users worldwide; 247 billion e-mails sent per day (200billion of those are spam!)

Impressive eh!

I wonder how in … 100, 10 years will be like! What do you think?

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1 – Fully understand what’s the exact role of the copywriter in the creative process. What’s exactly is its function? Within each advertising agency the role can be slightly different, so it’s important to know what is required from you, and what is expected you to produce.

2 – Realize that normally the best copy content comes whenever you work in creative teams (normally composed by two persons). Don’t be selfish in keeping the ‘good ideas’ just for you. Share what is going in your mind and improve it with the help of others.

3 – Learn how to think metaphorically, out of the box, independently. Be able to connect your work with the client brief, the creative brief, the concept, and the work already produced before. Your work should extend what was produced. You shouldn’t think of it as independent from the rest, you should think of it as a piece of puzzle that needs to fit with the others pieces of puzzle, but more than just fitting, the image on the piece should be in the right place when looking from a more generic point of view to the whole puzzle.

4 – Understand the psychology of the end user. Imagine what do they think when they see/read the ad. Realize what’s the real purpose/objective of the advertising campaign: Is it to increase sales? Increase awareness? The work you produce should, most importantly, be based on the objectives of the campaign and less on personal taste. It’s not about you think it’s good, it’s about fulfilling the requisites of what was asked you to do. The client always has the final work in approving the campaign or not.

5 – (Related to the previous point) If you are tired of working with exigent client demands, and if you think that’s blocking your creative abilities to produce beautiful and insightful start your own independent advertising projects. It’s not that complicated if you think about it. Think about a concept for an advertising campaign, and produce it (poster, video, etc) with whatever are the tools you feel familiarized with. This time you don’t need to worry about the client demands, you are the client!

6 – Ask advice from people that are not necessarily inside the advertising sphere and oppositely from you are not exposed to tons of advertising campaigns every week. Sometimes these kind of people tend to be not biased, and indeed can give you some insightful ideas in how you can improve your work, ways that you never thought about it.

7 – Do it! Don’t be afraid to error and make bad copy content. Everyone was a beginner once, remember? Be able to share your work and be open minded when you receive feedback from people, that’s the only way to reach excellence. Even if it’s a negative comment, it means someone is trying to help you to improve. A bad comment is better than no comment at all.

8 – Check constantly online advertising! Connect with known copywriters and people from the same sphere, ask advice from them! The best way to improve is to create a mini social network of people that do the same thing you do, and love it. Connect with the best from the field, this way you might end up like them. Connect with passion, and remember that anything you do, if you are motivated doing it, you’ll do it faster, but more than that you’ll do it better.

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For long time the subject of “How to generate new ideas” came into my mind constantly. I wanted to discover how this could be achieved and not think of it as something that “happens” sometimes. I wanted to take control of this process myself. I wanted to break down this and understand the reasoning behind this subject.

In this post I’m going to present the way I look at this subject and how easy is to copy this technique, that everyone actually already uses it (empirically without thinking about it most of the times).

Whenever you want to create something (a new blog post, a new advertising idea, ..) think about it as creating a child. As a child has two parents, also your new idea will derive from other already existent ideas. The point that I’m trying to make here, is that a new creative idea is nothing more than a mix between other existent ideas in order to make sense. This seem quite obvious, but the truth is that so-called new stuff comes out that is exactly the same from others that already exist.

You don’t need to be magic or as a so-called ‘creative’ by nature, you just need to master how to think metaphorically: create comparisons where none exist, challenge the standard status quo, and remember, innovation is the key for success.

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This post is specially for people that are starting now in the advertising world and are in need of building a portfolio and don’t know how to make it work.

Objective: Create work that later on you will be able to show as portfolio whenever you are in a job interview or just to show to someone what are you capable of doing.

How: Start mini advertising campaigns.

Step 1: What do you like to do and what are you good at?

Before even starting doing something it’s important to stop and think what are you actually capable of doing? Set up a list of tools you know how to master (photoshop,illustrator,flash,etc). Set up a list of capacities you have it could help in the process of creating an advertising campaign (are you good in creating concepts? are you good in creating good copy content?). This is of extremely importance due to one of most basics flaws in human ego: wanting to do everything. You should set priorities in what you are good and in what you can learn in a short amount of time. Obviously that over time if you continue, you’ll master more and more tools, but you should remember you shouldn’t fall in the error of spending more time learning than actually producing what you want to do. You should always remember, actually doing something it is the best way of learning about whatever the subject you are working on.

Step 2: Connect with your friends. Find other people that are in the same situation.

Connect with peers around you that are in the same situation. Start a group discussion in facebook, post a message in a blog. Somewhere in the world someone is interested in doing that. Don’t wait for the others call you, be the one to call them. Most of the people just need to be triggered by some external force (which at the moment you realize it’s you) to start doing something that actually also benefits them but they didn’t have the courage to start the process. Be the first shouting out loud!

Step 3: Start now!

Pretty much that’s it, there are no excuses if you really wanna make it work. Depending on your motivation and networking capacities it’ll go slower or faster, if it’s the case that you really want to make it work. Send an email to a couple of friends telling you what you think about this, I’m sure some of them will appreciate this idea and will say yes. What are you waiting for!

Next..

In the next post I’ll write more about the practicalities about this whole process, and show an example of my own.

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As expected, thousands of twitter users participated in the Brandbowl2010, making it a huge hit. You  can check all the information regarding Brandbowl2010 here.

The three top brands according with the total tweets ((# of brand mentions):

1. Doritos (19937)
2. Google (15728)
3. Focus on the Family (10629)

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