awesome!!: Where do ideas come from? by @sethgodin

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Where do ideas come from?

  1. Ideas don't come from watching television
  2. Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture
  3. Ideas often come while reading a book
  4. Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
  5. Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
  6. Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
  7. Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
  8. Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner's mind. A little awareness is a good thing
  9. Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
  10. Ideas come from trouble
  11. Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they're generous and selfless
  12. Ideas come from nature
  13. Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
  14. Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
  15. Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we're asleep and too numb to be afraid
  16. Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we're not trying
  17. Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
  18. Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
  19. Ideas don't need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
  20. An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn't join us here, it's hidden. And hidden ideas don't ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.

 via sethgodin.typepad.com

 

About one of the most important problems in our industry - Creating inspiring briefs: a note to clients by @adliterate

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Creating inspiring briefs - a note to clients

This is a short paper I wrote for Clients to help them create better briefs for their agencies and therefore get more effective work out of them.

Lets start with a clear definition of roles – for the people and documents involved in briefing.

Clients are marketing professionals and brand guardians. You understand what performance the business needs from its portfolio of brands, the problems that those brands face in delivering this and the way marketing communications can be applied (alongside the other weapons in the mix) to get the results you need.

Client briefs should reflect this role and should act as a contract between client and agency to deliver communications solutions that meet that brief.

Agencies are creative problem solvers that understand the way to engage people with brands both strategically and executionally.

Agency creative briefs are internal documents we use to get the solution you need from the various creative disciplines in the agency. That’s the fundamental way in which they differ.

As a point of principle I don’t believe that Clients should sign off Agency briefs but maybe Agencies should be signing off Client briefs – by which I mean an agency signature on the client brief would represent a commitment to deliver against it.

The quality of client briefs is an enduring issue for all agencies and it’s a situation that appears to be getting worse

That’s if we get a written brief at all. So the starting point must be write a brief, always write a brief, no matter what the project is. They discipline your thinking forcing you to articulate exactly what is needed and they act as a reference point to go back to when evaluating work.

And don’t start by trying to write a brief, start by thinking about what you need and how communications can deliver against this, this latter point is absolutely critical. Then sit down and write a brief. The famous sculptor Eric Gill once said “first I think my think, then I draw my think”, we should all think our think first and only then write our think.

Use a briefing format if you like (it tends not to matter to agencies whether or not you do) but make sure that you are still writing a brief and not filling in boxes. They are not creative requisition forms.

Don’t write briefs by committee, we can spot it when the edges are knocked of good client briefs by multiple stakeholders all pursuing their own agenda. Sure it’s important to hear everyone’s voice in the process but one person should be responsible for delivering the final brief.

All briefs should be both inspirational and directional. Inspire and direct.

Inspiration is far more about the ambition of the task than it is about flowery language.

The most inspiring part of the brief for an agency is the objective, the problem that you are seeking to use communications to solve.

Advertising agencies are problem solving companies, albeit that they solve commercial problems by applying creativity to the task. Nothing gets an agency’s rocks off more than a juicy problem.

T-Mobile – take the lion’s share of the £30+ monthly contract market

Teenage binge drinking – reduce the harm that comes to young people when they drink too much

Police recruitment – attract quality recruits to the Metropolitan Police by making 999 out of 1000 people realise they could never be a Police Officer

Raising awareness doesn’t count as a credible objective.

Then tell us how you believe communications can be used to crack that problem and exactly who needs to be affected by the work.

Poorly articulated or ambiguous target audiences are the bug-bear of the agency particularly the use of primary and secondary audiences. And we are far more interested in a factual definition of the audience than fabricated pen portraits or quirky segment descriptions.

Tell us what they need to do – buy for the first time, start buying again or increase their weight of purchase. We are here to change behaviour not simply to change attitudes.

Tell us how you would like people to feel following the communication. No simply how you would like them to feel about the brand but specifically as a result of the work.

Briefs should give us every piece of information that we need to find a solution to the task at hand and nothing else. They are not the place to parade your prejudices or invent mandatories that are not absolutely mandatory. Creativity comes from clearly defined parameters but also from space to play, you can always rein things in later on.

Use the agency to help frame the brief. They will probably have been working with you on the strategy anyway and they will be clear on what is going to be helpful. The planner is probably a good person to bounce stuff off anyway and it avoids push back from the agency when the brief is issued.

Try and brief in person – certainly if its a project that is important to you. It makes the Agency feel the project is regarded as important by the Organisation and it allows for instant clarification.

Take pride in your briefs. They aren’t the end product of what we all do together but they are an important stepping-stone and the critical moment when responsibility for solving the problem moves from client to agency. You should love the brief that you have written.

Remember that we are in this together.

Comments

The last sentence frames it perfectly. And I wish "Raising awareness doesn’t count as a credible objective." was written into everyone's DNA, agencies are just as guilty of the wielding awareness stick in my very brief experience.

Excellent stuff. Should be required reading for all, agency and client alike.

Posted by: Sam Ismail at May 10, 2010 10:52 AM

Agreed. Good stuff

Posted by: Rob Mortimer at May 10, 2010 01:46 PM

Not only should this be read by agency and client people as Sam points out, but by every single one of my fellow international business/marketing students.

Posted by: Thomas Wagner at May 10, 2010 09:21 PM

Great post - spot on. I love the quote "Advertising agencies are problem solving companies", very important for both agency and clients to understand. Well done.

Posted by: Nathan Bush at May 11, 2010 08:33 AM

4ways to change the conversation

4ways_to_change_the_conversati

I had the pleasure of learing deeper about contagious ideas that change the conversation around 3 years ago from working with Richard McCabe, Calvin Soh (@yerrowman) and a lot great people at Publicis Singapore.
The fun pic above shows 4 ways to change the conversation in the market:
- IGNITE
- OWN
- CONFRONT
- SUBVERT.
A key point about it is that everything starts by LISTENING, not only as a reputation tool but as the begining of the strategic analysis.

 

some tips for young planners

Short

Recently I was invited by @CHMKT (one of the top digital spaces about planning in Brazil & Portugal) to give some tips for young planners. This was my article:

 

A lot of people have given tips for junior planners before me so I will try to avoid the most common ones in order to add some new value.

Since I joined Razorfish, Spain 1 year ago, all my colleagues from traditional agencies asked me how it is on the digital side of planning and how digital planning works. My answer was simple; I’m still doing the same but it’s more complex. This fact has a lot of implications for the way each planner does their job. For instance besides the common strategy framework, you need to have a deeper knowledge of technology and touch points, and not just in helping to tell a story, but also in helping to create interaction and engagement with the target, it is more about story-telling.

I think it would be a good tip for newcomers to have it clear that our task is not about digital planning but planning in a digital World.

More than ever, planners have to be connected to culture; that’s how we detect emerging adoptive behavior and get spontaneous feelings about our target.


Listening first. Planning is the process of going from information to inspiration and currently we have real time information in conversations that helps us to focus on a starting point in the strategic process.

The art of Disconnection & Balance (very useful also if you are in a relationship and have an iphone)

- Stop being 24/7 connected to the Marketing World, to campaigns… you need time to organize your inputs and think about them

- Look for Balance, look for feeding your life with real and not mk experiences.

- Being connected can turn your mind into merely a machine of references; Steal as much you can, but make it your own. 

- Use Zoom Eyes: Currently you have a wider range of thinking, be flexible to play with macro and micro behavior and to move between big ideas and small ideas, because size matters.

Do & help to do things

- Be nosy & problem solver.

- Get balance between being a producer of content & consumer of content

- Destroy your cv: you don’t need it. It’s better to show what your potential is, (i.e the google job experiment,  Graeme Anthony used youtube annotations for his video cv or the guy who created a social ad focus on razorfish fb group to get an interview, etc..)

Work on your POV, don’t hide it in public meetings, don’t let it dilute inside the group but embrace the failure and build it again.

- Be more collaborative and generous, 24/7 Brainstorming relationship mode.

Warning: Planning is more than just Social Media Strategies, I make this remark, because lately I see a lot of juniors who have great knowledge about social media, but poor knowledge about how to be and to build a social brand.

I miss a bit of “passion” in junior planner’s faces so please show your passion and above all have fun!