This has actualy been sitting in my 'Drafts' tray for a few weeks...apologies
It doesn't look subversive.
It's a slide from Sam Davy, former Global Creative Director for Apple, at last week's State Of Design. It represents Apple's attitude towards marketing and advertsing.
'Help your customers get the most our of their product.'
It cedes control of the brand entirely to the people who use it.
It passes ownership, to them.
It says 'You know what to do. You decide what to do with our products, and we'll help you do that. Whatever that is.'
It's about ownership, not sales.
It assumes that people are to be around for longer than the ringing of the till.
The 100% Project was offically launched last week by Federal Minister for the Status Of Women, Tanya Plibersek.
The Project, headed by Frances Feenstra (pictured below), seeks maximise 100% of Australia's leadership talent, female and male, equally contributing to Australia's social and economic future.
Able & Baker have been very proud to help out with brand strategy and identity.
I saw this poster at the train station near the Able & Baker office. We're in a rather fashionable part of town. Lots of pubs, clubs and music venues. The walls around the station are plastered with fantastic posters for festivals, DJs and semi-obscure touring bands. In some places, posters are placed over posters over posters. A dozen deep. In amongst all this uber-hippery, in the last place you'd expect, there's this quaint, traditional and rather daggy poster for a wedding photographer. In a wedding magazine, it'd be lost. But amongst all the cutting edge graphics around it, it absolutely stands out. In the 1800s, the American writer Washington Irving stayed at the splendid Alhambra Palace in Spain. Perched high on a hill, overlooking the town of Grenada, the Alhambra was circled by birds that had learned to drift above the range of hunters' guns on the plains below. Irving observed boys from the town standing on the walls of the palace, throwing fishing nets and capturing the birds below from the unexpected angle. In advertising, there is usually a 'right' way to do things. A right way to photograph a car, make a burger look enticing, show a family moment. Because it's the right way, everyone does it that way. And it instantly becomes invisible. The wedding photographer is fishing for birds. It's not a bad theory, is it?
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.
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.'
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?
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.
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.
