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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Given the importance of Superbowl Advertising for long lasting years and the fact that we are living in the age of social media, Mullen thought about joining both by creating Brandbowl2010.

The idea of this website is simple: gives you the possibility to tweet and follow posts from anyone that is using the chosen tag of #brandbowl. Although, a point should be added here. Due to helpful hand of developers/UX team at Radian6, it’ll be possible to add real time reaction to the brands advertising on the game by considering conversation from everyone on twittersphere, and not by those ones using the #brandbowl tag.

After the expected success of Superbowl, the challenge is now launched for other sort of events. Will be something similar used for upcoming Oscars? Will the twitter be used as a way of ranking the results in these sorts of popular events?

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Many bloggers don’t take into account the incredible work that google can do for you: ranking your pages based on the content you have on your blog. Hence, you need to understand that are some points necessary for increasing the traffic in your blog for a reasonable amount.

Generally, as you know, your blog is composed by a main page and post pages. Each of these pages should be tagged with the necessary information that represent the real information you have in it. Due to the fact that this information in each page is normally big, besides the content you need also to define the follow sections on the header:

• Title
• Keywords
• Description

Title as you can see is necessary to show in one sentence what is your post about. Whenever you are in the post pages you should remember that will always benefit if you had the name of your blog on the end of the post title. Example: “This is the title of my post : This is the name of my blog”.

Keywords are of extremely importance due to the fact that it’s given to these words that google will find your page. So if you define the appropriate keywords of each post, you’ll have more probability that google will index your page accordingly to the content you are displaying. You should use not more than 10 keywords, otherwise google will ignore it and think you are flooding the system, so care is needed to choose the appropriate keywords. It’s also important to define global keywords for your blog (which are the keywords general to all your posts?) and after to add the keywords regarding each post.

Description is also of highly importance. Why? Whenever you get a list of responses after searching for some keywords, google will give you a list of results (pages) with a brief description (150 characters top) below, so you can see now the importance of the description. The better description you have, the higher the chance the users will have a correct idea of what the page is about, otherwise they’ll just skip it.

How to use this information in my blog?

If you are using wordpress you can install the headspace2 plugin which you can find here. If you do have problems installing the plugin or even using it, you can find a useful video tutorial here.

Which Description / Keywords should i use in my blog?

Google offers you a tool to check which are the best keywords to use. It’s called Keyword tool and you can find it here. Again, if you have problems using it, you can check this simple eHow tutorial that explains how to use it here.

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While reading Seth Godin’s latest blog post about ‘What’s expected vs What’s amazing’ I started thinking how it would be possible to change the status quo of some ’simple’ item that we deal with everyday. After a not so long brainstorm the idea of the facebook profile picture came into my mind.

Obviously that the purpose of the facebook profile picture is to show who you are, making it easy for the others to recognize you and possible add you (among other funcionalities). The truth is, that right now people are using to place it other sort of elements: what I am interested in, what’s my favourite football team, how’s my baby like now that he is 2 months. So why won’t we use this prime element among our friends, and friends of friends, to advertise! We can be talking of yourself, your company, or even something else (as far as your imagination could go).

I tried to publicize my own website, and the results are that i had in less than 12hours 200 visits, counting that I have 500 friends at the moment, that’s impressive hey?

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