raising ideas

:: ruminations on the mad ad world by Anais Keenon (future Account Planner)

[anais-keenon]

(27) Amoeband

An idea that is simple, easy to install, and adaptable. This is the stuff brilliant ideas are made of. 

[anais-keenon]

(26) I'm a Roma Woman

Romas are possibly the most misunderstood ethnic and cultural group in Europe. This video attempts to combat the stereotypes of Roma women as illiterate, lazy, irresponsible and the bearers of large broods. Sound familiar? It should - think about the stereotypes that Latinas or mothers on welfare often face in the United States. 

[angryblue]

[anais-keenon]

Loving the visuals on this! Wish I had thought of it. ;) 

From angryblue:

Weapons of Mass Creation: Music is a 2-color signed/numbered screen print limited to a run of 150. Appx 15x24”. $20(+shipping) It only made sense to release the other two and have these as a set! You can buy them individually, or for $50: have the full set! www.angryblue.com

[anais-keenon]

I couldn't resist adding this once I found it. 

Journal pages from the 1000 Journals project. 

[anais-keenon]

(25) Website Debut

It's taken me a long time to figure out how to develop my identity in the public sphere.

Privately I've always been a strong person that's made good impressions, and if I trust you then I will sing like a canary about my life. But publicly I am often quiet - I don't share many details about my life on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm finding this state of affairs increasingly hard to maintain as I delve deeper into the advertising world.  

But without any further ado, I'd like to introduce the beginnings of my portfolio website:

http://cargocollective.com/anaiskeenon

(be kind... my portfolio and website alike are a work in progress!)  

Added a few hours later: One of the great side effects of making a website about you and your work is that it forces you to think about who you really are. 

[anais-keenon]

(24) Don't Buy This Jacket

Design problems aside, this ad raises interesting questions and implications for Patagonia. 

In brief: Patagonia is an outdoor clothing company. On Black Friday, they published this ad in the New York Times. On Cyber Monday, they repeated the ad online. The ad is a plea from Patagonia for customers to buy less of everything - even their own clothes - because of their negative environmental effects. 

On the one hand, this brutal honesty about the environmental costs of their clothing helps Patagonia's image as an outdoors-friendly company, concerned about the environment. On the other hand, it will probably hurt sales when you tell your consumers not to purchase your products because they'll be contributing to climate change. It could go either way with consumers: Some may feel guilty and refuse to buy the product; others will be impressed with Patagonia's transparency and continue to buy from them. 

Patagonia, in my mind, is a company like those I've talked about before in my brand philosophy - Patagonia is a brand brave enough to care about the impact it has on the community and on a social issue. I think Patagonia would be a perfect client for an ad agency to work with on developing some real solutions toward climate change. It wouldn't be an awareness campaign (I'm pretty sure the whole planet's aware of climate change by now, even if there are holdouts who still don't believe in it). However, it could be that Patagonia helps to sponsor a global discussion on climate change, or does something to make things easier for people to be environmentally friendly - maybe helping to pass legislation in its area, maybe changing its products to become more environmentally friendly, etc. There's some potential here. 

[anais-keenon]

How color affects shopping decisions - great infographic!

Click on photo to see full infographic

[anais-keenon]

(23) Thinking About Ideabooks

(page from Mattias Adolfsson's sketchbook) 

Ideabooks are flexible, fluid, adaptable. 

Some people approach ideabooks as a sketchbook. They draw, scribble, use sharpies and watercolors and inks. Maybe even crayons. Or markers. Markers are good. Paints are okay but they wrinkle the paper. Wrinkled papers aren't always bad, though. It adds personality. 

Some people approach ideabooks as a written log. They write and write and write. Pages and pages and pages. It isn't a diary. It's a record of ideas that pass by, lyrics that refuse to leave, and a funny sound. Or two. Like the sound a particular chair makes if it leans too far to the left. Kind of a skrelchy sound. 

Ideabooks can have stuff glued into them. A ticket to a play. A receipt for a painfully boring purchase. Glossy photos from magazines. Pictures are arranged to show relationships. A tricycle is a million miles away from a bee. A skull snuggles with a clock. A Victorian woman is hopelessly in love with an ancient Roman senator.

Ideabooks are sketchbooks and records and places to play. In theory, ideabooks should be carried around and loved and used almost daily. Or at least weekly. Maybe even monthly (though we're getting on thin ice there). Ideabooks are a tool, one of the most powerful tricks of the trade. Small or big, written or visual, every ad person should have one. 

My ideabook is a jumble. I glue things, cut things, paint things, draw things. I write on so many random pieces of paper, and save them to cut out the important things and glue them into one place. I am still woefully behind on developing my ideabook. 

I wonder... is it better to be relaxed and have leisure to work on an ideabook? Or does way lead on to way, and the generation of ideas means the generation of more? 

[anais-keenon]

(22) The Devil Is in the Details

I realize I've been posting quite a few videos lately, so I promise the next three posts will lay off the television commercials. I happen to really like video advertisements (especially ones that are visually rich) because I think they are an excellent medium for allowing people to linger in a whole story. Videos provide depth in terms of the details, enough so that the audience can become really engrossed and invested in a story. For me the only comparable print medium is books - and if I could post entire books up here, I would do that too!  

As someone who's always had a liking for atmospheric horror stories and the things that go bump in the night, I was delighted to see the cinematic horror approach to this advertisement - and even more delighted to see the twist at the end. Now THIS is an ad destined to air around Halloween time: It has the Halloween horror vibe without being cliche.

The devil really is in the details! 

[anais-keenon]

(21) We Are Storytellers

Is this video an ad? Not that I'm aware of. There isn't a product or website I'm referred to, and nowhere do I see a logo of any kind. 

But Weiden + Kennedy put together this stop-motion video to tell a story. The story of "Gulp," of being eaten by a giant sea monster. They used sand and mannequins to tell the entire story, and shot the whole thing with a comparatively miniscule camera. 

It's not an ad. But it's an epic playtime, in the vein of W+K's famous "Fail harder" pushpin board. 

Why is play so important? Because we often come up with unusual connections or explanations or insights when we just relax and play. All those doodles and scribbles and making a costume for the Mardi Gras parade are actually useful things to do - not necessarily for the products that come out of it, but for the process that exercises a creative muscle. W+K is well-known for taking those playful chances, and as Tim Brown talked about in the last post, you can't be in a creative industry and not be (to some extent) playful. 

[anais-keenon]

(20) Tim Brown of IDEO on Creativity + Play

(subtitles are available on the video)

Hot dang, kids. 

This is a longer video (about 30 minutes) from a TED 2008 conference on Serious Play, but wow it's an important presentation to hear. The presenter is Tim Brown from IDEO, and he's talking about the importance of playfulness in a creative industry. 

There are many wonderful gems in this discussion, but the top ones for me are highlighted below: 

To play, we need to be in a trusting environment. We need to be working with all 500 of our best friends at our jobs to produce great creative works. We can't play nearly as well if we don't trust our colleagues. 

As adults, we adapt a lot of behaviors that don't help creativity: we self-edit as we work (which limits the quantity of our ideas), we are self-conscious about showing our good and bad ideas to others, and we categorize new experiences and objects (in other words, we always ask "What does it do?" and rarely ask, "What can we do with it?"). 

Play is not anarchy. There are rules to play, especially group play. Everyone needs to understand the rules - mass quantity, no judgment, the parameters - in order to have productive play. One person cannot be pretending to be on Mars while the other pretends to be a dinosaur. We are either on Mars or we are dinosaurs - or we are dinosaurs on Mars. 

There are two different modes of creativity. There's divergence and convergence. Divergence is pushing the boundaries of what's possible, getting as many ideas out into the world as possible, and requires a very playful spirit. Convergence is getting more serious and narrowing down ideas and developing ideas. People shouldn't think in absolutes, that a person can only be creative or serious. It's an "and" situation: People can be both creative and serious in generating ideas. 

More people need to think with their hands. Thinking with your hands (building something, drawing something) allows complex ideas to spring to life and be tested by others much sooner than if you were trying to describe the idea in words only. 

[anais-keenon]

(19) Pubslush Press Project

I want to applaud this. I really do. On some level, Pubslush probably should be applauded. But I have three problems right now. 

First, I'm kind of wondering about their transparency. After digging through their website, I was eventually able to find their current projects (supporting a library and orphanages in Kenya). However, their blog is confusing to navigate and isn't very clear on what's happening at the moment. Which means if any visitor starts to wonder how their money is being spent, that visitor might have a hard time figuring out what's happening.

Second, the premise isn't clear to me. I know that Pubslush allows people (the audience) to decide what they want to publish. Authors can submit proposals for books, and people vote. For every book sold books get donated (what kind of books?) to a library and orphanages in Kenya. My point is that the linear process doesn't seem that clear to me. How does choosing to publish a book by an unknown author translate into appropriate, useful books being sent to Kenya? Some clarity would help. 

Third, I'm wondering how the library and orphanages were chosen. Did the founders of Pubslush meet the people involved there and tour the schools? Because of what appears to be stock footage and random inspirational quotes, I'm hesitant to trust Pubslush Press right now. 

Again, that's not to say that I'm not just being paranoid. However, if you asked me if I was willing to donate money or votes to this group over a well-known organization such as Oxfam International, I'd probably say no. I would need more clarity and transparency before I would be willing to agree donating something. A solution may be as simple as tweaking the design of the site so that information is easier to locate (or perhaps even add more information in the first place). 

[anais-keenon]

(18) It's Time! 

Beautiful. 

A television commercial that shows the soul and truth of a story. 

It's a story. It's an advertisment. It's proof that one doesn't (and shouldn't!) have to exist without the other. 

P.S. - It's technically an Australian ad, but this story would translate quite well to the United States. I think it should be aired here as well. 

[anais-keenon]

(17) Remembering Hugo

 I won't set up any spoilers in this space, but the story of Hugo isn't what I was expecting at all. After hearing a summary ("orphan boy lives in a train station in 1930s Paris") I was expecting more of a wartime story. What I got was a visually compelling homage to movies and to dreamers. 

Granted, the storyline is slow-paced; at times I found myself wishing it would hurry up a little bit. But the visuals are so sweeping and dominating that it's easy to forgive the minor faults of the story. As a steampunk fan, I was mesmerized by the clock and automaton and machinery gears. As an aside, this is one of only two films I know where 3D beautifully enhances the story instead of being a pricey gimmick. It's worth the money in this instance. 

So let's talk movie advertising for a minute. Advertising for movies is challenging because a) it's usually advertised through very traditional channels [trailers, posters, billboards, newspapers] and b) trailers must entice and woo audiences without revealing anything important. Sometimes movie advertising can be really out of the box - look at the entire ad campaign for The Dark Knight. Other times, movie posters can represent the feel of a movie so well that they become iconic in their own right, such as the posters for Jaws and Black Swan.    

After watching the movie and then seeing the advertisements, I can see why people might be confused about the premise of Hugo. Besides having way too much text in the billboard (shown below) and the poster, I feel that most people wouldn't really have a good sense of the film's personality. Sure, people could probably pick up on the sort of magical element, but I doubt they would be able to pick up much else. It's a children's adventure film in the style and tone of the French movie Amelie. I would have used a completely different typeface than the title (for starters) and tried to capitalize on the French adventure aspect of it more. 

[anais-keenon]

(16) A Dose of Reality

In a country that's so nervous about sex (even straight-up missionary heterosexual sex), the new PSAs from the Ad Council and the Euro RSCG agency in New York are a welcome dose of reality. Whether you believe teens and twenty-year-olds should be having sex or not, the fact is that a good number of them do, and in that case, they should be as safe as possible - which is the mindset of the client, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

This campaign is said to be one of the first to target young women ages 18 to 24 about how to prevent unplanned unpregnancy. I'd wager good money that this campaign is also one of - if not the - first to adopt a more realistic and sex-friendly attitude. From a strategic standpoint, it's a great persuasive angle to take because it doesn't demand negative change ("Don't do this!") but rather positive change ("Don't forget your birth control!"). It's an accepting message, not a message of exclusion. 

My only sad point about this campaign is that it depicts only heterosexuality. I know, I know, the focus is on preventing unplanned pregnancies - but frankly, all individuals involved in sexual activity should be thinking about safe sex. And since this is the first sex-positive national campaign I've seen, I would have liked some representation or acknowledgment of the LGTBQI community. They need to be safe, too. Birth control isn't only about preventing pregnancies. 

Other media used in the ad campaign: 

Video #1

Video #2

Website: Bedsider.org

[anais-keenon]

(15) Thanksgiving Warning

As we all digest our Thanksgiving meals, I want to give major props to this video.

It's a short and simple PSA made by Walmart and ad agency JWT New York, warning all cooks to separate their meat and produce. The ad itself is a traditional "Don't do this, Do that" which isn't a tactic I'm all that fond of. 

But the top reason I am giddy is that there are automatic English subtitles on the Youtube video. I can tell you right now that it's rare to even have captions on a Youtube video, and then for it to be automatically turned on? 

Walmart and JWT NY just got some karma points from me. 

[anais-keenon]

Click on the photo for more info