Small is the New Big?

A few years ago, the big agency Able & Baker were then working for pitched for a government advertising project.
The aim was to persuade Australians about to travel overseas to check the safety or otherwise of the countries they were about to visit on a government website.
The prospective client was asking for, and expecting, a big television campaign.
What our agency came up with was a very simple, very inexpensive idea.
Since nearly all overseas travel was now booked or confirmed by email and e-ticket, the idea was to develop a bit of software that slipped inside your booking process.
This bit of software would recognise your destination and provide a direct link on your e-ticket or booking confirmation, just next to the departure time, to the latest safety information about that destination.
For example if we was flying to Mogadishu, the little bit of copy that would read; 'We hope you enjoy your time in Mogadishu, Able & Baker. But just to be on the safe side, check the safety and security conditions in Mogadishu before you fly. Just click here.'
And that was it. The whole pitch. No ads, no big budgets, just a simple little idea that would have cost a few thousand dollars and delivered new traffic to the website by the planeload.
Of course, it never happened. The agency lost the pitch, a television campaign was duly commissioned and nobody I know has ever gone to the government website.
In business, as in life probably, there is a tendency to assume that a big problem requires a big solution. The corollory of this is a desire for proportionality: that big inputs should incite a proportionally big response.
Of course, in reality this is rarely the case. Little ideas can have an influence way beyond their ambition (such as Justin Bieber's mum posting a video of him on YouTube), while big ideas can disappear without a trace.
In Victoria, the government has spent over a billion dollars and five years on the myki ticketing system whose end purpose is, without a trace of irony, to 'save money'. When for a fraction of that cost, you could put conductors on every train which would have the added bonus of making travellers feel more secure.
Here's a terrific TED talk by British adman Rory Sutherland on the subject.

Is originality necessary?

In April of this year, Melbourne artist Sam Leach won the prestigious Wynn prize for Australian landscapes. His work, Proposal for Landscaped Cosmos (above), borrowed heavily on the 1660 work Boatmen Moored on the Shore of a Lake (below) by Dutch master Adam Pynacker.

The artist himself was quite unapologetic.

"For quite a while now I've been obsessed with 17th-century Dutch painting," he told The Australian.

"I haven't made any secret of where that painting came from."



In film, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocolypse Now won the Palm d'Or at Cannes despite the plot being an acknoweldged reworking of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In music, Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher quite openly borrowed from the Beatles. As the man himself says; 'Here's what you do: you pick up your guitar, you rip a few people's tunes off, you swap them round a bit, get your brother in the band, punch his head in every now and again, and it sells.'

Even the great Steve Jobs claimed that 'good artists copy, great artists steal'.

In pretty much every creative endeavour, it's recognised that pure originality doesn't exist. The best we can do is take what is good and make it a little better.

In every creative endeavour except for advertising.

In advertising, we're obsessed with being originality. When you're a junior, you dread your creative director saying of your beautiful idea: 'it's been done before.'

Bloggers on the amusing, pedantic and often vitriolic creative blog Campaign Brief inevitably greet every new campaign with claims and proof of other campaigns with similar if not identical ideas.

The current villain d'jour is Sydney agency DDB whose new 'There's nothing like Australia' TVC bears a remarkable executional resemblance to the award-winning 'Boom-di-Yadah' spot for Discovery channel.



No doubt both agency and client have been on a long, extensive and expensive journey to get to the destination they have. Yet the two spots are near identical in structure and concept.



But does it matter?

If DDB did borrow from Discovery channel why not proudly admit it, like Jobs and Gallagher?

After all it was a successful, popular campaign. Probably not too many of the people being targetted by Tourism Australia would have seen the Discovery channel spot. And if they had, why would it truly matter?

Why, when open plaigiarism is good enough for the major creative minds of our generation, but not good enough for those who use creativity for commercial purposes?

Fresh Space Monkey: meet Amber Philips.

Meet Amber Phillips, Able & Baker's newest arrival. Before arriving at the aesthetically pleasing yet uneven parquetry at Chapel St, Amber was General Manager at Big Red.

Her job title here is 'Control Freak', which might come as a pleasant surprise to those who've been hitherto engaged with our inverted management structure and frankly unenthusiastic administrative arm.

As well as actually knowing what to do after clicking the PowerPoint and Excel buttons on the computer, Amber has earned her chops on the suity and plannery side of things.

In her own words;

'I've now worked in agency world for seventeen years, at five agencies (Clemenger Sydney, George Patterson & Partners Melbourne, Young & Rubicam Melbourne, cummins&partners nationally; and Big Red for clients like Virgin Blue, Jetstar, Ansett, Nestle, Cadbury Schweppes, Victoria Bitter and Kraft, to name just a few.

I have extensive experience when it comes to creating fully integrated solutions that not only get results, but inspire loyalty amongst consumers. Some of the memorable campaigns I have led include Virgin Blue ‘If only you got Virgin Blue service everywhere’, launching Virgin Blue’s loyalty program – Velocity; Tourism Whitsurdays- '74 Islands out of the blue' repositioning; Picnic ‘Deliciously Ugly’ and managing a unique and award winning loyalty program for Victoria Bitter.'

We like Amber because she loves brands and she loves ideas. If she dressed more badly and kept more erratic working hours, she'd make a fine creative.

We love her. You will too.

Sport; the killer app

There's a fantastic feature in the online Economist about the future of television. The article documents the passage from the 60s, where the conventional wisdom to ratings success was to air 'the least objectionable shows possible', to today, where it seems the media behemoth is under attack from all sides.
Or is it?
The Economist argues that the proliferation of choice has simply cut out the mediocrity in television. And what we are left with is The Niche ('Bass Masters' anyone?), The Great (The Sopranos, The Wire) and The Live. The Live includes such things as the various nationalities of Idol, simultaneous broadcasts of the final episode of Lost and, of course, sport.
Sport is, the the words of the Economist, television's killer app.
It's live, so people can't record and skip the ads.
It's currency; men apparently talk more about sport than women or sex.
And it's mass. Which is why Nike would have spent the equivalent of the Mining Super Profits Tax on this wonderful spot.

Seen on St Kilda Junction....

Moments pass, so catch them while you can.

I don't know too much about Sean Stiegemeier, but when the Icelandic volcano (or Eyjafjallajökull if you are feeling adventurous) erupted he tried to get there to film it. In his own words;

"So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

Wish I had more time. I missed all the cool Lightning and the Lava of the first eruption. But I figure this will just be a trial run for another day."

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

It's pretty amazing. What resonates for me is that he just went out and did it. Didn't wait for a sponsor, or for a better time. He went and captured a moment.

In our line of work we spend too much time deliberating and not enough time doing. And as a result, sometimes the moment passes.

Sean is apparently trying to raise sponsorship to go back, if you've got a few spare pennies.

(Found this originally through brainpicker, probably the most awesomest thing on the internet.)

Creativity isn't something you have. It's something that just visits.

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.