Sally Hogshead’s hair is on fire (she is redheaded, tall and on a mission). She hits the stage and sucks the oxygen out of the room. Think you are a fascinating person? Don’t flatter yourself. Compared to Ms. Hogshead everyone at the WOMMA Summit 2011 was wondering if we were “interesting” enough to carry her bags. Sally knows how to get people talking, brands excited + deliver the “unexpected” = the essential oil that I believe is in the DNA of every remarkable creative idea.
Sally is a well-known speaker and author of “Fascinate,” “Radical Careering,” and the creator of F-Score Test. She has held a creative director office at several major ad firms in the U.S.: Wieden + Kennedy, Fallon McElligott, Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Under her own shingle she is a trusted brand innovation consultant, helping companies develop messages that persuade and captivate. Clients past and present include Nike, MINI Cooper, Aflac, Cole Haan, Target, Coca-Cola and Godiva.
When I spoke to Sally on Thursday I found myself nervously trying to capture and remember her quotable nuggets. Here are just a few:
“Creativity is not a platform, it is a tool that takes time. It is called a breakthrough for a reason.”
“Control every deliverable on the innovation process and sell up. Help people visualize your idea.”
“Don’t rush the creative process. You need to live in agony — that is where the best ideas get challenged and refined. If you try to find alignment on everything you will come up with a camel. As we all know a camel is horse designed by a Committee.”
“Take a piece of your customer into every product discussion, every campaign and every social influence program.”
When I go to these conferences I find myself listening to a Chris Farley-like motivational speaker who pushes me toward the lunch cart. This year WOMMA was lifted by Sally’s appearance because “Word of Mouth Marketing” as we know it is shifting, and doing so quickly. Social influence tools are no longer want-to-haves by big brands but essential need-to-haves. Making an impression and fun whimsical engagement are okay now. I couldn’t help think that the traditional measures and analytics will be meaningless soon if creative coming from wonderful agencies, like the one I work at, don’t show how conversion impacted sales. Your ideas must fascinate and inspire a proved action. As Sally Hogshead points out “if your goal is to be comfortable, it’s not big enough.”
Daniel Stein, from San Francisco digital creative agency EVB, authored a post today with the provocative headline “PR Agencies Are Ruining Facebook.”
Compelling content?
Not surprisingly, this caught our eye.
But beyond that controversial headline (always the best kind), Mr. Stein makes excellent points about the quality of content that public relations has traditionally created and how we need to stretch our creative abilities for the new audiences that we are reaching through social media. It’s true that PR has traditionally created content for the media to consume, interpret and adapt, and that kind of content doesn’t resonate on social media and certainly doesn’t usually invite engagement.
It’s true that the advertising discipline has been able to flex its creative muscles around content for a longer time. But we are closing the gap, as evidenced by the beautiful and engaging site WE Studio D designed for the Sasquatch! Music Festival.
And when we are talking about compelling content that fosters engagement, infographics are increasingly powerful, and PR has an edge on advertising because it’s accustomed to taking complicated news and information and making them digestible.
Finally, while content is key, the other half of success in social media is having a long-term, relationship-building strategy, again something PR has deeper skills in than the other communications disciplines.
So, Mr. Stein is right that PR needs to up its game in creating content that entertains, answers questions, intrigues audiences on social media and, ultimately, fosters engagement. We are adding more of the “pixie dust” of creativity he references, along with our deep understanding of how to make that compelling content drive influence and engagement.
Jennifer Roth (producer “The Wrestler” and executive producer “Black Swan”) looks at the infamous “staple scene” from “The Wrestler” like it is her wedding video. The scene starts with Mickey Rourke working out a routine for his match with Necro Butcher, his goateed, staple gun-wielding opponent. We don’t see the match instead the film cuts to “The Ram,” Rourke’s character, walking back from the ring bloody and stapled and reddened. He is about the collapse.
Recently, at Microsoft Corp., Jennifer delivered a Waggener Edstrom Worldwide-organized master class talking about the choices she and Darren Aronofsky faced maintaining his creative vision despite their project constraints. Why she views that scene with such pride is that instead of shooting the entire match with some “Rocky”-like bravado, their limited budget forced Aronofsky to re-evaluate the best impact for the sequence. He chose instead to represent what happens to “The Ram” in the ring in flashback. It saved them a day in their production schedule and a significant amount of money. The way the sequence is filmed and how it progresses is extraordinary. This scene alone almost cinched Mickey Rourke his first Oscar for Best Actor.
The challenges of low filmmaking are well-known. The budget constraints that agencies and their clients face every day are not too dissimilar. Jennifer left us with some wonderful nuggets on how to handle creative challenges with limitations.
Jennifer sees directors and creatives like brides just about to get married, with visions of a William and Kate wedding (and sometimes a shoestring budget): “I tell them to tell me the three things that they can’t live without. After that I do everything to fight for those things or at least come very close.”
“The dozens of other priorities truly become secondary when a director sees that I’m advocating for the things they believe matter.”
Focus on the top two or three things that matter most. Oftentimes, we can’t have it all. Oftentimes, we don’t really need it all.
The story/message has to be first always; if it is, then you don’t always need a big budget to create something great.
There is a way to tell stories that doesn’t involve complicated logistics, effects, processes – find that voice.
Trust your own taste/gut; it’s gotten you this far.
Love what you are doing and believe in it.
If you do good work, you’ll make good money.
Jennifer Roth recommends that anyone working with creative people should read “Shooting to Kill” by Christine Vachon and David Edelstein. “Shooting to Kill” is a good mixture of practical, hard-edged information and road worn knowledge. At work when you face your own “staple scene” challenge, you may be able to look back on that experience with the pride of watching your wedding video.
I’m a man well into his 30s. So it should surprise no one that my music collection is relatively Justin Bieber-free. I say “relatively” because I came across a brilliant twist on The Bieb’s music recently that both blew me away and got me thinking about pushing limits and evolving in a creative environment.
Last month, music producer Nick Pittsinger gained viral Internet fame when he used a free audio editing program called PaulStretch to slow down Justin Bieber’s song “U Smile” by 800 percent. The result, whether by accident or design, was a yawning, aching, spectacular soundscape that washes over you in waves and melts your brain into lava lamp globs. No joke. Put on the headphones, close your eyes … this song will make you fly. I promise.
Did Pittsinger know his experiment in sound would transform JB’s normally cavity-inducing, bubblegum pop into a soaring work of sonic art you could easily file alongside Sigur Rós or Dead Can Dance? I seriously doubt it. I mean, he knew he’d end up with something different. But I don’t think he could possibly have imagined the result would be as magical as it is.
At Waggener Edstrom, we put a lot of emphasis on creativity. And to achieve creative results, we often challenge ourselves to attack common ideas or problems from many different angles. Take something you know, turn it on its head or run it through various filters, and see what you come up with.
There’s no guarantee the time and energy you invest in creative experimentation will yield the “happy accident” outcome Pittsinger found. And when you’re as busy as we all are, setting off on potentially fruitless endeavors is difficult to justify. Still, as this song reminded me, unexpected and beautiful results often lie at the end of untraveled roads. If we’re going to find what’s there, we need to walk them.
I recently found myself in a brainstorming session, working to come up with possible names for a global microfinance program. For two hours, several colleagues and I considered the audience this program is hoping to appeal to, the business needs of the client and the market place in which the program will be competing. We made lists of names that we felt took into account all of these things, revised them, and then threw them all out and made new lists.
Names and thinking of them is particularly relevant in my life right now because my husband and I are trying to name our first child, due in January. Our process has been much less organized than the one my colleagues and I participated in that day. And by less organized, I mean non-existent. Typically it goes like this: one of us proposes a name, the other one thinks about it for 2 seconds and then says “I like it!” or “I knew a girl in high school with that name and she was really mean, so no.”
So I’ve been thinking, what’s the value of trying to organize the naming process? Isn’t coming up with a name a matter of gut instinct?
“I’ve had people challenge me on this a number of times,” Dave Mahlmann, Vice President of Ideation and Creative Insights at WE, explained to me. “People say to me, ‘You have this formal process for naming, but I bet we could get into a room and think of just as many names as you do just by throwing darts at the board.’” It’s true, Mahlmann says, that sometimes names just come in the form of momentary inspiration. But by using an organized process, we make sure that we have taken into account the whole ecosystem that this product or company is going to be a part of. Among other things, we ask ourselves if the name will give the program room to grow, who the name will appeal to, what the logic is behind it.
And the thing is, even when we do “throw darts at the board,” we’re actually engaging in an organized thought process — we just don’t know it. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a few years ago, parents have been trying to choose more unique names since WW II. Yet, as Brooks explains, even though parents may “think they’re making an individual statement,” in fact, “their choices are shaped by the networks around them.” K names, for example, have become popular recently. You may think you thought up the name Konnor with a K, but you’re probably giving yourself too much credit. (If you haven’t seen it, check out Laura Wattenberg’s endlessly fascinating website, The Baby Name Wizard, where she charts the rise and fall of individual names throughout American history.)
Back to the business of naming things other than people. If you’re working on naming a product or a campaign, here’s a couple interesting things to take into account:
Back in the dot-com salad days, nonsensical names, or “empty vessel” names were all the rage. Think Yahoo and Babel Fish. As the branding agency Interbrand explains in a recent report on naming trends in 2010, now that times are tough we’re drifting back to names that represent real actions and ideas. Bing, for example.
Given increased transparency, businesses can no longer get away with inventing or exaggerating a brand heritage. As Interbrand points out, consumers can now Google names like “Haagen-Dazs” and figure out just how authentic that name is. Companies are instead opting for names that reflect universal truths — like the recently launched line of ice cream called “Five,” which refers to the minimal number of ingredients that go into the product.
As for me and my husband, I have a feeling that in the end we’ll fall back on what just feels right — and hope that our subconscious figured out the rest.
Creativity comes to each of us in different ways. For Shinya Kimura it is by building motorcycles. This remarkable short by Henrik Hansen shows how Shinya makes works of art out of chrome and steel. Art that goes super fast. You don’t need to like motorcycles to understand the peace and fulfillment he feels making a custom bike. Watch and be inspired.
What creative pursuits give you that satisfaction?
In the communications industry, “creativity” carries a wide array of meaning and interpretation. All too often, the word is aligned with designers and marketing specialists who are responsible for creating a fancy brand or dreaming up a viral PR/ad campaign. Dangerous.
For agencies large and small, it’s all too easy to bucket out creativity without recognizing the crucial importance of infusing a creative mindset across an agency setting. In essence, creativity should never be thought of as that “thing” that you focus on only during client brainstorms. Similarly, creative resources should never be aligned with “X person” at your agency that is identified as THE creative head.
The reality is that each and every person at your agency has the potential to be creative. How your agency activates and leverages that potential as an asset to your client base and as an overall competitive threat is a key capability differentiator.
Last week, I had the opportunity to chat with David Mahlmann, VP of Ideation and Creative Insights at Waggener Edstrom to discuss his thoughts on infusing creativity into agency culture.
I couldn’t agree more with David’s thoughts on the topic. Personally, it’s the creative nature of my job and the industry that keeps me excited each and every day. In the world of communications, there are no boundaries to how we craft messages, build narratives and develop compelling prompts to generate action.
Whether it’s the physical environment of your agency, your team’s approach to brainstorming or the unique way you pitch new business and market yourselves online, take a moment to think about the multitude of ways creativity can separate your agency from the pack.
As anyone who’s worked with any of us at WE Studio D can attest, we’re not the biggest fans of jargon appearing in any sort of communications fit for human consumption. To be honest, we’re not huge fans of jargon in general, but some will argue that if it’s internal, acronyms and shorthand can certainly speed up certain transactions. And in that limited scope, we’d possibly agree.
It’s when corporate-speak creeps into a company’s outside communications through press releases — and yes, shudder to think, even blogs — that we begin to climb atop our soap boxes. It will come as no surprise then that we were thrilled to see woot.com’s distinctively human approach to communicating its news of an Amazon acquisition. Well, actually, there was a rapping monkey in the official announcement video, so I guess it’s about being a highly functional primate with more than a fair share of creativity.
OK, these guys have taken it to the (near) extreme, but they’re staying true to themselves. Given the positive response that’s resulted from this use of decidedly noncorporate speak, I sincerely hope communications professionals everywhere are taking notice. Speaking like a nonhuman drone isn’t going to win you any friends in the media, is quite likely to outright confuse your customers and will overall alienate most everyone else. With that, I recommend you skim through an excerpt from CEO Matt Rutledge’s acquisition letter below, watch the aforementioned rapping monkey video and, for bonus points, add “Fight the Bull — Why Business People Speak like Idiots” to your business books archive.
I know I say this every time I find a picture of an adorable kitten, but please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. Today is a big day in Woot history. This morning, I woke up to find Jeff Bezos the Mighty had seized our magic sword. Using the Arthurian model as a corporate structure was something our CFO had warned against from the very beginning, but now that’s water under the bridge. What is important is that our company is on the verge of becoming a part of the Amazon.com dynasty. And our plans for Grail.Woot are on indefinite hold.
The style of multi-touch table that we are building relies on the “seeing” of infrared light to pick up IR reflection and subsequently use that information to convert those reflections to “touch points” (for details, see Multi-Touch Table Kickoff). To accomplish this we converted a webcam for this specific use.
Digital image sensors can inherently “see” IR light, but you’ll find that most cameras and camcorders will contain an IR blocking filter that blocks the IR light before it reaches the sensor, which minimizes IR distortion in the final image. This is a good thing for a majority of the intended audience, though sometimes, whether for creative reasons or geeky, tech reasons (in this case), we want to be able to see that IR light. To do this we need to remove the IR filter from our selected camera, the PS3 Eye. Once that is done, IR light is allowed to pass through the lens and onto the sensor. However, we want to fully isolate what the sensor sees so that it is only IR light. This is done by then filtering out the visible light coming through the lens. We can either do this by adding a more expensive bandpass filter to the camera, which only allows a certain wavelength or “band” of light to pass through it, or go the less expensive route of using a piece of floppy disk to act as our bandpass filter. While not as clean at filtering visible light, the floppy disk does a more than adequate job for our purposes. Plus, we now have a use for that electronic copy of my old undergrad thesis, which is, thanks to the era in which I got my degree, backed up on a floppy disk. Here’s a sped-up version of the conversion process:
In short, we replaced the camera’s IR filter with a bandpass filter to allow only IR light to pass through it. At this stage we were able to test how well this conversion worked by connecting the camera to the computer and positioning it facing the table’s acrylic top while up on its side. We turned on our 850nm IR lights, bouncing light into the acrylic, and once that acrylic was touched it created a reflection point for the IR light, which was immediately visible on the computer monitor. Not too shabby.
If you would like to see the detailed video of how this is done I’ll direct you to the wonderfully informative PeauProductions tutorial.
In my last post, I introduced an internal project aimed at creating a multi-touch computer from the ground up. I introduced the project and talked a little bit about the method we chose to work with (FTIR).
In an FTIR setup, IR light is cast from the edges into an acrylic sheet where it gets trapped, bouncing around within the pane. A “compliant” surface (typically a vellum sheet with silicone on one side) is placed on top of the acrylic. The compliant surface acts as a projection screen for a projector placed inside the multi-touch cabinet. In addition, when touched, the silicone squishes against the glass, scattering the light out the bottom of the acrylic sheet, where it is picked up by an IR camera. The IR camera is attached to a computer, and the touch points are converted to “blobs” via an open source API. Depending upon the API and methods being used, the blobs have size, direction, velocity, etc.
All of that sounds really cool, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. We need something to house all this good stuff. Given a limited budget and the fact that we’ve never done this before, we’re not going to spend a huge amount of time or budget on the cabinet. We agreed we wanted a stand-up table rather than a sit-down type, so with all of this in mind, I used Google SketchUp to create a design for the cabinet, shown here.
The desks we have in our office have a crank that allows us to raise and lower the height. We tested a few heights, starting with a normal kitchen counter — around 36 inches. This seemed a little too low for tall people, so we bumped it up to 38 inches, which seemed to work well in informal testing for a variety of people from 5 feet 1 inch to 6 feet 3 inches. Our touch surface will be 24×30.
Whether or not we go with pressboard is still up for debate, but I’m in favor of painting the cabinet black with a flame job… have other ideas? Know somebody that wants to make us free furniture in exchange for a signed copy of my book? Let me know in the comments or by e-mail! Just remember, we’re on a limited budget…
