Sunday 13 June 2010

How to make it as an advertising creative - Simon Veksner




No, I don't want to amke it as a creative, but they are my main target audience for briefings. So it helps understanding what gets them going.

David Droga in the foreword: “We’re still storytellers, but it’s not about a story that starts and finishes within 30 seconds of a TV ad anymore. Our job now is more about instigating a story, and letting it go. We can create momentum. Our work doesn’t have to be as disposable as before.”

I think this one is interesting, because it goes beyond simply telling us advertising people to let go and let consumers do our job with shitty UGC. Yet, if we are in the business of storytelling, the question simply is, how to tell a story, with the participation of your target audience?

Another interesting one, for everyone planning to get hired by an agency: "Ask yourself “What protion of that agency’s creative output would get you hired at that agency?”"

And a classic Ogilvy: “Get rid of the dogs who spread gloom!"

Rabbit, Run - John Updike




“I once did soething right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first rate atsomething, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.”

“”I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this” – he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half-brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world-“ there’s something that wants me to find it.”

”That’s what you have, Harry: life.”

“Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded. His legs take strength from the distinction, scissor along evenly. Goddness lies inside, there is nothing outside, those things he was trying to balance have no weight. (…) I don’T know he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness.”

Friday 4 June 2010

Advertisin Works 17 - Neil Dawson (ed.)


There is not much to say about these books: if you are an account planner in advertising you will love them, if not, don’t bother. It proves the way advertising and ideas work in the most rigorous ways I ever came across. After reading them you can never read an Effie again, without having to laugh out loud and feeling ashamed.

This one is interesting because it got the detailed case of the ‘try something new today’-campaign by Sainsbury and the long term analysis of Audi advertising in the UK. Moreover the authors raise the question, that despite having elaborate measures for how TV advertising works, not many people try to show the distinctive contribution of media decision and the contribution of digital media.

Most importantly: on the CD accompanying this book, I finally got the great old Audi ad ‘If you want to be at the pool before the Germans’