Realize Your True Creative Power

I cannot think in a better Hack to start about creativity than the one about concerning realizing about your own and immense creative power.

It was built a myth around creativity: Some people are creative while others are not, no matter what you do, it’s something innate, you were born with it or not. This is wrong!

Obviously not everyone has the same cognitive power in the same domains. This explains easily why in nowadays society where creativity is mainly related with arts, if you whatsoever have no skills in this area probably people will look at you as ‘non’ creative, possibly gifted in other areas, but no matter what the creative tag is somehow just for that restrict group of people.

There’s not much else to say, realize your strengths and use them with passion. For me being creative is that, realizing your strengths in a given domain and producing/creating something new (or not) that will have some impact / added value to society but above all will make you happy while creating them.

Be happy while being creative!

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After receiving a couple of comments on this blog related to the fact that ‘Why don’t I accept guest posts from other people interested in Advertising?’, I thought, well, why not?

So, after realizing that no blog carnival is active at the moment, starting this week I added this ‘Advertising Notebook’ as a Blog Carnival, where every Sundays at creativity o’clock will be a deadline to receive material that will be posted in this blog.

So if you have any interesting Advertising related material to share (copy, motion, art, creativity, independent projects, innovation, internet, marketing, social media, video ads, print ads, viral videos,…) please let me know, it’ll be posted in this blog with your own name and respective link to your blog.

So far we already have four posts in the waiting line! So hurry up!

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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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