I know you’re super busy. That’s why you need to take a ten-minute break and watch Nigel Marsh’s TED Talk on work/life balance. It’s insightful and useful.
TweetOn November 30, 2011, In Agency life, Favourite TED Talks, By John Ellis
On August 26, 2011, In Agency life, By John Ellis
This photo shows the damage caused by from Hurricane Camille in 1969. This is fascinating for lots of reasons but check out the two guys on the back of the boat. WTF are they doing? Click to enlarge.
On August 26, 2011, In Agency life, Great sites, By John Ellis
Adding a bit of a creative brief to the crowd sourcing process is getting better results and helping companies make more informed decisions. Instead of trolling through comments and posts or encouraging random thoughts, these guys are asking for specific feedback on real challenges and offering a relevant incentive. This increases the odds of getting workable ideas from crowd participants.
As a content creator, I welcome this kind of dialogue with real people. It exposes the team to customer-speak that can be used to increase relevance and rapport.
Here are three companies that are trying to do things differently.
Open IDEO
OpenIDEO is a place where people design better, together for social good. It’s an online platform for creative thinkers: the veteran designer and the new guy who just signed on, the critic and the MBA, the active participant and the curious lurker. Together, this makes up the creative guts of OpenIDEO.
To become a place where good ideas gain momentum, OpenIDEO depends on participation — your inspirations, his comments, her concepts, our design process. It’s these efforts, these big and small moments of sharing and collaboration, that make this platform a dynamic resource for tackling significant global challenges.
IDEO, a design and innovation firm, developed OpenIDEO as a way to include a broader range of people in the design process through inspiration, concepting and evaluation.
InnoCentive
InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners, and the world’s largest problem solving marketplace.
Our proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology, community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform combine to fundamentally transform the economics of innovation and R&D through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs.
Napkin Labs
Napkin Labs was born out of our experience with innovation and brand consulting for large companies. We saw social business and customer communities as the evolution of focus groups and traditional research, and realized new tools were needed to keep pace in an era of rapid innovation.
We built our platform as an internal tool to connect with external communities, and truly believe that customer collaboration will continue to change the way businesses operate in the future. At Napkin Labs, we believe great ideas can come from anywhere, but that the greatest ideas come from working together. We built our company to make that belief a reality.
When we’re not working, you’ll usually find us hiking or skiing in the Rockies, enjoying a microbrew in Boulder, or catching a show at Red Rocks.
TweetOn August 25, 2011, In Agency life, By John Ellis
I arrived on the agency scene just in time to experience the creative freedom of a personal space where I could surround myself with inspiration and sometimes retreat to give one thing my full attention or talk privately or not have to smell the all-day consumption of fast food. Those days are gone for most creative professionals and I don’t think it’s a good thing, despite what people say about collaboration or how they try to package their cost-cutting strategies.
“Three Walls is a documentary traces the development of the office cubicle since its inception in the late 1960s to its current status as the dominant form of office furniture in North America. More than a bit of social history, this documentary captures the melancholic absurdity of the modern day office and examines the larger issues surrounding the shifting nature of white-collar work.” (IMDB anonymous summary)
There is little information about this doc on IMDB but I will try to post more if and when I remember to follow up.
In the meantime, you can read a flowery apology for the cubicle in the NYT. Interestingly, all the comments posted on the site disagree with the hypothesis that we all want to share our lives with strangers.
TweetOn May 11, 2011, In Agency life, Writing for the web, By John Ellis
Thinkbox, UK specializes in television advertising. The company site is simple, easy to navigate and includes a section called Nickable Stuff, where you can download free slides for your next presentation. This is a nice way to share with the community and create repeat traffic.
Watch the spot to see how Thinkbox promotes television advertising and poke around the site for inspiration.
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A wonderful first novel by Joshua Ferris.
‘Then We Came to an End’ has been out for a few years but its bullseye wit has not gone out of fashion. Anyone who has spent time in an advertising agency will laugh, cry or both. You’ll love it or hate it.
Here’s a little bit from the New York Times review when the book launched. You can read the entire content here.
It is a brave author who embeds the rationale for writing his novel into the novel itself. But 70 pages into Joshua Ferris’s first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office. Ferris has the good sense to make Neary’s earnest project seem slightly ridiculous. Neary describes his book as “small and angry.” His co-workers tactfully suggest more appealing topics. He rejects them. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me,” he says. “A small, angry book about work,” his colleagues think. “There was a fun read on the beach.”
TweetOn March 9, 2011, In Agency life, By John Ellis
Overheard this morning:
“How long is this snowfall supposed to last?”
“Dude, solve for X.”
A generation introduced to objectivism used to say, “Who is John Galt”, quoting the highly quotable ‘Atlas Shrugged’. The simple meaning was and is: who knows, or how the f*&K should I know?
Is Charlie Sheen a big, fat faker?
Is the Internet really a fad?
Solve for X.
On January 25, 2011, In Agency life, By John Ellis
I proofread and approve a lot of work created in haste, by people who have to deal with hundreds of emails and IMs as they work. On the light side, it’s job security. Little mistakes are everywhere.
But when people get killed (for reals) it’s time to shake our heads and admit that this shit doesn’t work. There is an article in the New York Times titled, ‘Multitasking In War Has Its Perils‘. A bunch of guys, distracted by monitoring “the drone’s video feeds while participating in dozens of instant-messages and radio exchanges with intelligence analysts and troops on the ground” flew their drone toward a crowd (the wrong crowd apparently) and blew up 23 Afghan civilians.
Multitasking is a myth. Look it up.
I promise the next post will be a happy one.
TweetOn January 21, 2011, In Agency life, By John Ellis
Ambiguity is a luxury afforded (and abused) to most professionals in the middle ranks of communication management. But the writer is not welcome at this buffet of non-committal lingo.
The writer cannot reconcile real-world contradictions in a brief that was approved for its balance of retail and brand messaging. The writer can’t simultaneously push the buttons of two people with nothing in common. Nor can the writer achieve a 60/40 split between “security and convenience” messaging.
The greater writer must commit. No sort-ofs. No kinda-likes. No bit-of-this and bit-of-that.
If the ad is ambiguous, there’s a good chance the brief was written to get approved, not to get results.
If it’s results you want, fall back to basics: Find the one thing you want to say. Commit to that one thing. Then ask your writer to find a truly inspirational way to say it.
That’s all there is to that circus.
TweetOn November 22, 2010, In Agency life, Great sites, By John Ellis
I came across the expression “no-assembly-required, batteries included idea” in Tom Wolfe‘s latest novel, ‘A Man in Full’. Now, I’m obsessed with the idea and plan to revisit it on Ellisism, often.
Here’s my first attempt to put this into practice: Creative teams love a brief that they can use straight away. They open the box and begin to play. They don’t want to “see the website” or go to a server for more information. And they don’t want to summarize the research spread across a half dozen conflicting reports. They expect that work to be done by account managers and planners. And that’s fair.
The no-assembly-required brief comes ready to use. Ideas have already been connected. The logic already works. Someone has taken the time to figure out what has to be said. All that remains is figuring out the best way to say it.That’s what creative teams do best.
The opposite of the no-assembly-required brief is the Swedish-furniture model. This approach dumps a pile of crap and an allen key on people who didn’t train to be nimble-fingered assembly workers.
If you want your teams to do their best work, give them something they can work with. Give them a short, tight brief with everything they need to create relevant, engaging creative. Don’t send them to the store for batteries. They might not come back.
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