In the latest issue of Showroom (http://www.theshowroom.se/ ) Eric Block, the Managing Partner from design firm Duffy & Partners, tells us that design is the future.

“People don’t want to hear what you have to say, no matter how cleverly you say it or how slickly produced your story is. This includes anyone involved in a profession that’s about telling a story - particularly advertising.” The solution he says, is design. He mentions well designed products and brands such as Apple and BMW.

“All of them put design at the forefront. Good design influences everything they do. Design can make things clearer, simpler, personal - all things people want today. Put your money into the design of your product, not into elaborate stories about it no one wants to hear.”

I partly agree with this, nobody listens to a boring person - but, a pretty person with all the right gear won’t hold your attention very long either if it turns out that they have nothing interesting to say. Remember Bernbach “Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed… but dull?” The solution is not just to design better products - but to not be boring. Boring comes from telling stories nobody wants to hear. So while we hail design as the way forward, don’t forget to pat research and development on the back as well.

One mustn’t forget though, that the consumer never really cares to make your brand famous, they want to make themselves famous. MTV style VIP-treatment prizes are a bigger hit than a few bucks and a chance to see their own ad on TV. Heck, put their name in the ad on TV, and I’ll promise you they’ll work harder to win. What wins though?

The best ad from a strategical standpoint, or the one with the popular vote? That’s a rhetorical question as the consumer doesn’t have any interested in keeping the brand alive for years to come.

I don’t think that user generated ads are the end-all solution to the problem of reaching consumers these days, nor will it die soon - like the jingle-contests, it will always be around in some way or another. Right now it’s having a hyped up field day because it is refreshingly unlike the big agency produced big ads for the big client, who have spent the past ten years creating ads for the greatest number of people with the least common denominator. User generated ads are actually oddly targeted, and that is why they succeed.

So we’re back to square one. Why is it so, that when the web can offer pinpoint targeting on specific consumers, agencies like to paint with the big brush still? It’s not shouting into a megaphone that will get you more customers, it’s leaning over at the right time and whispering the right thing in the right ear. Remember kids, advertising becomes information when in context.

I’ve always wondered why the web, which is a medium perfectly tailored to be perfectly targeted, so often carries advertising that is not. True, people don’t like to be spied on, and rarely leave the true information about what they earn in a year on some form they have to fill out - if they even bother filling it out - but how difficult is it, exactly, to place baby clothes ads on expectant mothers’ sites, and apple software ads on apple fan sites? Thanks to google adwords these days,
you can place ads nearly everywhere that fit quite well in the context they are in. But advertisers tend want a bigger bang than a few points of text on some random blog.

Enter user generated ads. Back in the times of pens and home pianos, it was “write our slogan” or “write our jingle” contests that were all the rage. When everybody had cameras, photo competitions took over, and now that seemingly every kid has a video camera, a software editing suite and loads of spare time, we’ve arrived at “make our commercial”. User generated ads
are simply a new twist to an old truth: to get the consumer involved with your brand, involve the consumer.

One mustn’t forget though, that the consumer never really cares to make your brand famous, they want to make themselves famous. MTV style VIP-treatment prizes are a bigger hit than a few bucks and a chance to see their own ad on TV. Heck, put their name in the ad on TV, and I’ll promise you they’ll work harder to win. What wins though?

STAY TUNED (The rest of Ask’s post will be up before you can say, ‘WEEKEND’)

Outfoxing the Small Business Owner: Crafty Techniques for Creating a Profitable Relationship, by Gene Marks (2005, ISBN 1-59337-157-8) is worth reading if you’re thinking of freelancing. Small businesses make up the vast majority of potential clients, and the approaches you’ll take to work with them profitably are different from those you’ll take with large corporate clients. I’ve worked with both, and found this book to be up-to-date and practical.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I received my copy as a gift for contributing to one of Gene Marks’ other books about small business management.)

I am among the last generation of copywriters who sat with art directors and designers as they sliced into type galleys to hand-kern letters, adjust word or line spacing, or piece together new words and sentences.

“Can we cut seven characters out of this copy block?” they’d ask, and I’d take up the challenge, think of another way to say the same thing in the same voice using not only seven fewer characters but also only the words and characters already typeset.

It was the final, laborious polish on the mechanical, and it was a team effort.

Now it seems there’s less sweat equity in the way copy looks. And that’s too bad.

Why accept an imperfect line break, a stray widow or orphan, or a repetitive word stack when the solution might be a minor re-write? As a copywriter, I think anything that enhances the visual appeal of copy, makes it more inviting, is worth doing.

It’s not just about legibility. It’s about fine-tuning the details to create great work.

When the ideas flow, concepting is fun. When they don’t, I grind away over award books, archives, and stock photo sites producing page after page of tedious, trite, irrelevant, stupid ideas. Yes, I may be laying the groundwork for later brilliance. Or not. That’s why, when the deadline looms, it pays to have a few different approaches to concept development in one’s mental toolkit.

Here are more than 100 creativity techniques to unclog the brain. Many of them are actually information-gathering or evaluation techniques, but there are still a lot of different ways to approach a problem here. Three techniques that I’ve found useful are Brutethink, Laddering, and Osborn’s Checklist.

http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques

An ad concept does not exist to win awards, or to set trends, or to break rules. It exists to solve a problem. That’s the challenge of commercial creativity.

The glory part is that if you solve the problem in an unexpected way, you sometimes achieve those other objectives too. But, you have to solve the problem. And, to do that, it helps to start with a good creative brief.

Here’s the form I’ve used as a starting point for 20+ years. I like that it’s short, yet comprehensive enough to suggest other avenues of exploration. I’ve tweaked it many times over the years, so feel free to modify, copy, and use it as you please.

CREATIVE WORKSHEET PDF

A new restaurant, La Familia, just opened in our community. It’s not upscale, by any means, so although they’ve put some effort in making it look nice, they’ve not been able to go all-out with decor, design, promotion, and so on. I was especially struck by the menu, featuring a decorative font that was popular maybe 10 years ago. At first I rolled my eyes (to myself, of course) at this cliched and ineffective use of typography. But then I recognized it for what it was, a fashion decision, not a design decision. There’s the half-life of fashion in action; the font is increasingly unappealing as time marches on, but for the fringes it still symbolizes what it once may have meant to designers - fun, fresh, optimistic. Good design may be timeless, but practical applications show us that fashion, even out-of-fashion, may be the economically viable alternative.

See the full version of the menu

As promised yesterday, here are a few more places I often visit for inspiration.

Simon’s Skip: Advert and Brochure Archive. Simon Moses graduated from the University of Brighton (UK)
with a degree in Design History. His personal website houses a small collection of British ads and
brochures for household appliances, mostly from the 1960s but extending into the 1970s.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/adverts.html

Design students might also explore the sections on vintage electrical appliances, Art Deco buildings, and this page housing a small collection of 1970s car brochures.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/carbrochures.html

Finally, Simon has posted an academic paper looking at retro industrial design trends as sanitized social nostalgia. Worth a read.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/nostalgiaessay.pdf

American Package Museum. This online museum shows about 140 examples of 20th century package design.
http://www.packagemuseum.com/

Dan Goodsell’s Tick Tock Toys Archive and Gallery. Food packaging, store displays, fast food merchandising, ad mascots, newspaper ads and early television commercials, gum card art, and irresistible snapshots from times gone by.
http://theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html

Advertising Character Collection of MLT Creative. This creative services agency in Atlanta, GA has a private collection of about 45 advertising mascots to view online, each with a brief history or commentary.
http://www.mltcreative.com/collection.html

TV Party! Saturday Morning Commercials. See what creative teams did with 60 seconds of broadcast time, an almost unimaginable luxury today.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomsat.html

Also, on the same website, see how cigarettes were marketed on TV.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomcig.html

Prelinger Archives of Moving Images. Look for the short films and collections of classic television commercials.
To Browse, click here

When I get tired of leafing through current award books, it’s often more productive to reach deeper into the past for ideas to steal inspiration. That said, here are some classic advertising and design archives.

Key things to think about as you browse the archives are:
• the graphic history of iconic brands
• the evolution of the relationship between advertising and its audience
• the ebb and flow of design trends, including typography, illustrative styles and proportions, and color.

The first three are from Duke University; tomorrow I’ll show some more from all over the web.

The Emergence of Advertising in America. About 9,000 categorized, searchable ads from 1850-1920. It’s also worth looking at the timeline, to see how far back the roots of viral and buzz-marketing concepts go.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

Ad*Access. This picks up roughly where the previous collection leaves off. There are about 7,000 categorized, searchable print ads from 1911 to 1957.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

Medicine and Madison Avenue. This specialized collection has about 600 categorized, searchable drug and health-related ads from the 1910s through the 1950s, and a timeline that runs from the 1840s to the 1990s.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/