Articles from: Editorial

There’s no escaping it, times are rough and tough.  We’ve been bracing ourselves and tightening our belts to the point where we’re running out of notches. Green shoots of recovery? Yeah, right.

Clients are shaking their heads as they ponder budgets for 2009. The IPA and other industry gurus will no doubt be knocking on their doors with some solid scientific evidence that cutting ad spend has a long-term detrimental effect. Will it be convincing enough? Partly. But accountability will be more important than ever.

We creatives can expect a rather large magnifying glass to hover above our heads, scrutinizing our work and looking to extract every last drop of value from it. Clients will be looking us straight in the eye and demanding, “hey smart Alec, stimulate me some green shoots,” as though it’s all our fault.

You can imagine agency presentations across town this year. They’ll be rather like the old Fairy Liquid TV ads. “Your previous strategy only washed this many dishes. Our fresh, new, lemon scented strategy will stretch your budget to this many dishes.”

We’re already seeing conventional reactions to the crunch; big football sponsorship deals being pulled, four figure global lay-offs, corporate art projects canned.

Spectacular big budget broadcast will be seen as spectacular, big budget wastage. “Open on a tropical beach? You’re having a laugh, mate. What’s wrong with Skegness?!” And that’s just in the tissue meeting. Increasingly throughout 2009 you will hear themes of empowerment, sustainability, innovation and inclusion surfacing in articles.

Industry old boys will continue distancing themselves from broadcast, “Did we say tropical beach? Noooo! Of course we meant Skeggie.” New kids will be hyping the relevance of ’social’ and ’service’ design. Digital agencies can go even further: “We open on user generated shots of Skeggie.”

Yet do we need to get all doomy and gloomy about this? Well, it’s not ideal. I’ve seen tropical beaches and I’ve seen Skegness and, with all respect to the Lincolnshire Tourist Board, I know which I prefer. Yet, the new economic climate does open up a very real creative opportunity.

The good news is that clients are on our side. They know that, as the crunch bites down hard, creativity needs to flourish.  Not just in the way it connects them with their consumers, but the way it helps run their business.  Working smarter, innovatively distributing content and creating cost-effective dialogues is now higher up the agenda than ever. CMO’s will be empowered to make the big balls decisions using “the current climate” to reinvent their approach to their budgets.

So let’s not disappoint them. We too need the balls to grasp the challenge.  Let’s reinvent the industry; move from Broadcast to Narrowcast. Embrace Branded Generosity. Be being bold enough to zig while everyone else zags. Connect with consumers by building believable brands; ones that stand up to the scrutiny of the empowered consumer.

The reading list is a new posting category here on the LBiQ blog. These are the ’set texts’, the most useful books directly relating to our profession. The reading list is sub categorised broadly as follows:

Ideas (including ways of thinking creatively, workshopping…)
Writing (inc. long copy, short copy, scriptwriting…)
Graphic Design (inc. layout, typography…)
Experience Design (inc. interaction design, service innovation…)
Drawing (inc. storyboards, scamps, wireframes…)
Photography & Cinematography
Planning, strategy & marketing theory 
Technology
No doubt new sub categories will be created as the list grows. When adding a book please use the Reading List tag category and consider the following classification order.

<Title> A Technique for Producing Ideas
<Author> James Webb Young
<Category> Ideas 
<Optional Image as web link>

<Brief Description> Widely held as the 101 for ideas thinking in advertising. The creative thinking technique outlined in this powerful little book can be summarised thus: 1 Learn - gather everything you can in support of your brief. 2 Brainstorm broadly and without judgment, combine existing elements in new ways. 3 Sleep on it. 4 Let the idea come to you. 5 Invite criticism and consider practical applications.

————————————————————–

The Elements of Style, illustrated edition
William Strunk Jr. (illustrated by Maira Kalman) 
Writing 

Punctuation, brevity, composition, spelling… This book is a lot more fun than it sounds. The Illustrated version is elegantly produced and sensibly edited-down to the core things every English ’speaker’ should know. One of my all time favorite reference books.

————————————————————–

Thinking with type
Ellen Lupton
Design, Writing 

This is much more than a book about typography. Yes it does a good job explaining the anatomy of type and how to set it, but this is a book about how to use type to enhance legibility, reinforce meaning and provoke emotional response. One for the writers as well as the designers.

————————————————————–

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Betty Edwards
Drawing, Ideas 

This is a book about how to be creative disguised as a book about drawing. Based on R.W. Sperry’s research into the right hemisphere of our brains, Betty explains how to control which side of your brain is dominant. Sounds crazy doesn’t it (left = conscious mind, language, rational / right= subconscious, music, visual)… All I can say is I’ve used this book for years and It works. 

————————————————————–

Cinematography, theory and practice
Blain Brown
Cinematography 

As Digital blends with film and TV this is one of those ‘if you read one book on the subject read this..’ moments. Filmspace, lens language, camera dynamics, continuity, lighting as storytelling. Theory and practical techniques in one place… This book is f*cking awesome.

OK enough reading for now. Plenty more to come…