I'm worried. In fact, I'm wondering just what this industry is doing with itself. Over the last 5 years I have been a judge at two of our largest direct marketing industry awards shows, The DMA and the The CMA. And frankly, the work sucks. Which is a gross and usually unforgivable generalization, but in this case, the adjective stands. For an industry that trumpets creativity as a critical secret sauce, there's a steaming pile of pablum out there. Too many writers are regurgitating ideas across categories (FI/pharma/auto), too many art directors just mirror the latest magazine styles, too many production managers are still bound by 1990's technology. The result is a bland, impotent mediocrity of messaging that is lucky to generate a 2% response rate. Are there any new ideas out there? Only for the tenacious. So, yes, I'm worried. But more accurately, I'm angry. It's time to push harder away from the safety of the pool wall.
Cats in Montreal
Montreal, spreadsheets, 9 hours of strategy development, lousy coffee, 4 Robaxacet and one delayed flight.
Oblique Widget
Oblique Widget is a handy implementation of one of my favourite brainstorming tools...Oblique Strategies. This rather unassuming deck of cards was devised by musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt to, in the words of a fan "keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure. They realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind." This dashboard widget is a quick and easy introduction to the idea, and makes for a quick one-button thought starter (for Mac OSX Tiger users at least). My favourite so far is...
gapingvoice
Hugh is on a roll, both graphically and entrepreneurially.
"The thing is, when you start turning your products into commodities, you start treating your customers like commodities." And, "We live in a era where China does the making, and Wal-Mart does the selling. In this game margins are wafer-thin, so for every hundred dollars of inventory you sell, you'll be lucky to clear the price of a can of beer as profit. And next year you'll be lucky to clear half a can of beer etc. Because your shareholders want more than a few cans of beer in return for their investment, you're going to have to sell a lot of stuff to keep them happy. Billions of dollars worth. So to sell all these billions of dollars' worth, you're going to have a build a big company full of factories and cubicles and corner offices and meeting rooms and warehouses and fax machines and watercoolers and bad coffee, with legions of business-casual meatpuppets running around droning & number crunching. It's not pretty, but it's what we got. Commodities galore. Commodities forever. Luckily, some of these commodified meatpuppets earn lots of money. And as an antidote for all that commodification they've been doing during the week, during the weekends they're going to want the exact opposite, and they're willing to pay for it. So they'll spend their money on "non-commodity", in other words, "Bespoke". That could mean anything. Handmade suits or designer ice cream or yuppie furniture or wooden sailboats or Laura Ashley curtains or Tiffany necklaces. Anything that makes them feel special and unique. Anything to wash off the stink of the day job. The more intense the WalMart-China commodification curve becomes, the more demand there will be for bepoke products i.e. the more intense the demand for an antidote will become."
The Black Bayou
Off to the Deep South tomorrow, to visit our friends in Monroe for a few solid meetings. Hot, humid and thundery according to the dashboard widget. All the more reason for an early iHOP, and a late Waterfront Grill Catfish Desiard. Phrase of the day: Gap Closure!
Just do it.
I don't think I've ever talked about the specific campaign that inspired me into this business. It was 1990 and the campaign was Nike 'Emotional Running'. Just 3 simple print ads, with copy so sparse and so powerful it immediately made me want to write for a living. Maybe it was a thrown gauntlet, an equivalent of a mountain to climb. And not a 1.800 in sight. Anyway, I was astonished that the potency of poetry could be used so... commercially. The agency was, of course, Weiden & Kennedy. Even today, it still reverberates. The ads, in miniature, are above. The copy, in close-up, is here: Street Bridge Farm
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