Much more cleverer

Advertising has always been an industry with big egos. When all you have to sell is your opinion, you have to hold your ideas in some value. But wandering through the halls and corridors of St Vincent's Institute, longtime Able & Baker client and serious medical research heavy hitter, you can meet some incredible people who'll make you feel quite small indeed.



While we're worrying about the size of a typeface or the nuances of an edit, these guys are quite literally solving cancer. And diabetes. And heart disease. And childhood obesity. And a dozen other things besides. SVI has long been a pioneer in the field of protein crystallography, a process by which biological processes are broken down into their most essential elements so that they might be examined in 3D. It's essential in the development of 'smart drugs'.



Researchers travel from across the world for the opportunity to work with SVI's director, Professor Tom Kay. People don't travel quite so far to work with foundation CEO Robin Berry, but he's a convivial fellow, sharp mind and excellent luncheon companion.


If you have any interest in the field, Robin or Tom regularly take tours through the institiute. They also run a series of high-profile and excellent dinners throughout the year (David Parkin, Daryl Jackson and Kevin Rudd being notable speakers). And of course, the researchers on the ground are always looking for funding, so donations are always, always welcome.
Oh, and they're nice enough to let us do their annual report for them each year. Photography by Andrew Wuttke. Special mention to the immensely patient Dr Anne Johnston.

WIRED magazine and a possible publishing future.

As advertising creatives, we're caught.
We know that what we do is changing, and that the iPad, TIVO and such are changing the fundamentals of our interruption-based trade. Yet the cheese still plops out from the same hole in the Skinner Box, and the briefs for TVCs, outdoor and magazine ads still vastly outnumber (and out-budget) those for the digital stuff.
Our clients aren't leading us, so should we be leading them?
And if we should, where to?
Even Rupert can't work out a paid-online model for us to advertise on/in/within/however.
But maybe WIRED is heading in the right direction. Watch this. What do you think?

Writing better briefs

As a creative, I've read literally hundreds of briefs. Nearly all of them were rubbish. If you are a planner or a suit, here's the best explanation of how to do it, by some chap called Nick Emmel.

Creative Brief Workshop

View more presentations from Nick Emmel.

Vegemite

We did this for the Sydney Olympics. It never ran (as far as I know) but I still like it. Directed by Steve Rogers of Revolver.

New TVC for Mazda 2

Mazda has been killing it this year. Hopefully with this ad, guided by the lovely Mike O'Hare and Georgine Toole's parting gift to CHE before moving on to DDB, that will continue. There's some print too, which we'll post later.

What happens if you don't allow for a real model in your photography budget.

You get the Creative Director in there instead. For an upcoming annual report cover for St Vincent's Institute.






Real photographer (not the monkey with the iphone) Andrew Wuttke.

Chapel Street Junky

Shock! Ads work!

Here's some nice statistics from client Mazda, for whom we do some work through the good offices of agency CHE.

* Mazda CX-7 January 2010 sales up 99.4% year-on-year
* CX-9 sales for January up nearly 40% year-on-year
* Mazda 3 finishes 2009 as the best selling small car, shading the once mighty Corolla.

You can read the full press release here.

Finally, our name on the door.

Well, the name of two space monkeys at least.

Be my Bastard

Consumer insights are a good thing. Knowing how people think about your issue or brand gives ideas a handy reality check.
But insight alone is not a strategy.
Take this poster pasted up at Windsor station.
The insight is clear; people think banks are opportunistic, fee-hungry undesirables.
Hence the headline: Sign up to fight unfair banking. And what I presume to be the new NAB tagline: More give, less take.
Which would all be fine if you were something other than one of the big four banks who created the unfair banking in the first place.
Bendigo Bank could run this poster. The teacher's credit union could run it.
But NAB can't.
Every time any of the big banks report those multi-billion dollar profits, people think of all the petty little ways their hard-earned savings have been siphoned off.
Two bucks to use another bank's ATM. Six bucks for making 'too many' transactions. Thirty-five bucks for bouncing a cheque.
The irritating nature and random lack of generosity of these charges (ATM fees are a particularly naked brand of opportunism) stick in the craw most.
While it may well be true that the ninja account has no 'unfair' fees, it's certain they're gonna get you somewhere else.
So why persist with this strategy? There must be something in it since each of the big four are all doing variations of the same theme.
ANZ has 'Barbara' the bank manager.
CommBank has their good marketing folk protecting us from the shallow American ad guys.
Westpac's have their 'Dog WIth A Bone' managers.
And now NAB.
No doubt that all these spots will 'track well'. They play to our preconceptions.
But they don't change them.
Nobody likes being sold to. And we're pretty good at spotting phoneys.
Because banks won't and can't stop charging the infuriating fees they do, the strategy of 'we're your friend, we're just like you' will, in the end, fail.
They're banks. Big, huge, behemothic banks.
And THAT surely is where the gold lies.
In fact, the big four banks are all amongst the twenty biggest banks in the world. And through acquisition both here and overseas, they're only getting bigger.
They're also rated amongst the world's safest. And most profitable.
If my bank is big, safe and knows how to make money, I'll forgive them the paltry fees. Because they are doing the job I hired them to do: keep my money safe.
So that's the rolled-gold, Able & Baker-approved Big Bank Strategy. We might be bastards, but we're good at being bastards. So let us be your bastard.
I'd rather have a hard-nosed bastard in charge of my super than a nice chap with a pleasant smile and a flair for tea-cakes, wouldn't you?
Of course, as a strategy it isn't especially new.
Over to you, Hannibal....

Why Advertising Creatives Shouldn't Have Jobs.

Miles Davis never caught a train at 8am, rode into the city and up an elevator to the 7th floor.
Miles Davis then never walked under strip lighting, past rows of manned, partitioned workstations to a white laminated desk and a phone list.
Miles Davis then didn't answer emails for twenty minutes, attend a work-in-progress meeting, attend a second meeting about a blowout in the stationary budget before tidying his section of the office in preparation for important visitors later in the day.
Miles Davis didn't do this, because he was in the business of creating sublime, original and wonderful music. And commuting routines, nondescript office spaces and work-in-progress meetings are precisely the wrong environment for creating anything.
Yet this is the daily routine for most advertising creatives in the world. Particularly those in the larger multinationals that churn out the majority of messages on our screens, magazines and newspapers.
Agencies spend fortunes on brilliant creative directors, who in turn spend slightly smaller fortunes on talented art directors, writers and producers. Having harnessed this prodigious talent, they then crush the living daylights out of it by imposing regular office hours, hollow working environments and the filling-in of timesheets.
In my last multinational job, as a creative director, my whole day was filled with administration and meetings. The only time we got any creative thinking done was after 5.30, when the rest of the office (and my clients) had gone home.
In the two or three years since then, this seems to have become more prevalent, not less. Tighter margins mean fewer people are doing more work. Client-side procurement folk want more evidence of labour. And agency management, keen to meet new business targets, seek new ways to provide it.
The upshot of all this is that creative people in agencies are spending less time being creative.
Not only are the hours spent in WIP meetings hours not spent creating, they turn the creative process into a grind. We find ourselves having to create on command, during small 20-minute windows between internal reviews.
This is an horribly inefficient use of resources.
The worst place to have a good idea is in an office. The worst time to have one is when someone else is telling you to have one.
The best time and place to have ideas are the moments and spaces when you're not looking for them. The time between turning off the light and going to sleep. Soaping your armpits in the shower. Driving the kids to school. Jogging. Between the third and fourth beer at the pub. Talking to your mum.
These are things that every creative person knows. So why do we go to an office every day, as if we were doing data entry, kidding ourselves that hours spent equals more genuine progress?
Because of head-hours. This is, traditionally, how agencies charge their clients, and thus how they reward their employees. The more chargeable head hours per employee, the more profitable each one becomes.
The trouble is, this doesn't necessarily lead to better ideas, and often results in worse ones.
The solution? Maybe creative people shouldn't have jobs.
Rather than expecting copywriters and art directors to be at their desks at nine every morning, simply give them the brief, the right information and a time when you need the answer back.
Rather than being paid a salary, pay them to produce ideas. Those that produced the most and best ideas would be paid more, those that produced fewer and weaker, less.
Where and how these ideas are produced becomes immaterial. If sitting in an art gallery works for you, go for your life. If watching polar bears mate at the zoo gets your juices going, ditto.
The only thing that matters is the quantity of quality ideas you come back with.
Good creatives could consult to multiple agencies. There would be more scope to develop high specialties, such as car, beer, pensioner insurance or itty-bitty computer chips.
Agencies could offfer clients a broader range of creative thinking than simply that of the folks they can afford to have on staff.
With less time lost on non-creative activities, creatives have more time to develop their skills. Producing better ideas, building better value into their own careers and delivering better value for clients' money.
What do you think?

Crash course in social media.

On October 22, A 62 year-old woman drove her BMW SUV into a gym car park. Something happened, and said BMW ended up mounted on two other cars, one of which was a Hyundai Elantra.

You can see the security camera footage above.

The video had more than 1.6 million views. In a nice touch, Hyundai Canada offered to replace the Elantra driver's car. Just eight days after the initial incident.

Courtesy Mashable.