Enuff Advertising. Enuff doing stuff for money. Enuff impressions. Enuff ROI. Enuff Technology. This is an art break. Doing something for the fuck of just doing it. Music for music. Music for saying something more than a sale. Music for making a movement. To me in the late 80's early 90's, Fugazi was gospel. Here are the top 5 Fugazi clips on YouTube just as I see it (in not particular order).
Waiting Room
Turnover
Margin Walker
Glue Man
Oh
So here on the forefront of digital advertising. It's becoming official, at least for the work I'm creative directing for a certain CPG company. No Flash on sites. OR, all sites created must have just embedded SWFs and an alt. jpg image so it can be viewable on other devices.
There's such a huge push for SEO from our clients (not to mention some other devices that can't see Flash), that were back (or forward?) to creating sites solely through HTML, Javascript, or some crazy AJAX (whatever happened to that shiny object?). Digital Production agencies are telling me, don't worry about HTML5, yet.
Anyhow, I've seen some animations that aren't that bad done with just straight HTML, I mean, it's definitely not FLASH ... but I still wanted to report, that it feels like were out of the mostly-Flash site business. At least in my neck of the SuperWebs.
What's the FWA going to do?
It's not a new business forcasting tool. It's filiming on objects. And it's pretty dang cool. There's been quite the influx lately of projection mapping on cars, buildings and now shoes. A great technique that could be used on a lot of things.
I'm going to do a projection mapping film on my Thanksgiving Turkey this year.
Mucho props to Nick Jones (Interactive AD) and his exploration of the "agencies of the future" and their "futuristic" mobile site FAILS. That blew my mind. If you haven't seen the post, it lives here.
Of course, then, I thought, who is doing it well? And what's the expectation of a mobile site for an agency of the future? What info do I really need from it?? And who's the audience???
I find there's 3 categories of distinction when it comes to agency mobile sites:
1. Download Flash. FAIL.
2. Squint & pinch approach. Normal site viewable. Platform agnostic.
3. Refreshing. Designed for mobile. IMHO.
TOP 10 MOBILE AGENCY SITES DONE RIGHT(ish)
I don't know how many clients are hiring agencies based on their mobile sites. But if they are, we should be ready!
I had scanned a blog post by ex-BBH strategist Ben Malbon about some things he had learned while at BBH. And it was uber-refreshing to hear him articulate one of the same creative philosophies I've had for a long time.
PEOPLE ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ASSETT A CREATIVE AGENCY CAN HAVE
Many times I hear agencies (including my own) talk about the importance of the work, "It's all about the work," "We must do better work,"... And while, yes, ideas and the work that goes around creating them is why we have jobs and why agencies exist, and I get all the importance that goes around that.
But how many of us have worked at a place where the work was the only thing that mattered? Where the quality of life of the individuals was always secondary, always put behind "the work." It's not very inspiring, did it make you want to do better work? Probably not.
I believe "the work" is important. I belive "ideas" are important. But those amazing ideas and award-winning work only happen when the right (and talented) people get together in an environment that fosters great thinking.
What a lot of pro sports teams and creative teams begin to forget is that the people matter most in the equation of coming up with ideas or better performance. Granted, we all need to be cohesive in our approach toward a common goal, but that also can't be overshadowed by the "health" of the group striving to get there.
I had a creative director, who I thought was a brilliant leader, he told me once, "My job is to make the nest so all my creatives can lay golden eggs."
I couldn't agree more. As a creative director, I view myself as an enabler of great thinking... (part guide, of course, too)... and many times I have to put myself between the corporate regime and the people trying to do the work, to protect those just trying to come up with great ideas.
I think if more agencies switched their focus to "from great people come great ideas," they'd have a lot more success. People would want to work harder, they would feel valued (a common human truth), and align more quickly toward the common goal.
What if you worked at an agency that said, "we want to build great people" instead of "we want to do great work"... how would that make you feel? Would you feel more empowered? Would you be more dedicated toward your craft? Would you try harder to push beyond what you think is a good idea? Would you have more trust with your agency?
Think about it. I think it's true. Maybe someday I'll start something with that philosophy in mind. In the meantime, keep laying Golden Eggs.
The fish sandwich principle is based on the idea that in a vacuous environment (void of anything), the FIRST object placed within that environment will be the only thing that's considered "true" or "real."
One time, in a galaxy far, far away; I had this client that was fairly new to digital work. Along the path, they hired this Digital Guru, who was actually a guy who knew just enough about the digital space to be dangerous... and wrong. This guy comes in with a huge presentation to the entire company and spreads his version of Digital Gospel. And he shows awful digital creative, but deems it as excellent and effective. This POV reigned supreme and there was no room for any other opinions.
This is the Fish Sandwich Principle. Because this guy came in first and said, "Your digital strategy is FISH SANDWICH!," the clients would have believed it. Honestly, the guy could have said anything and the client would have eaten it up. "Everyone should start clicking their mouse with their feet," and the sheep would have been nodding in agreement.
So my super-music friend KevLilly tells me about these 5 guys that take their phones to a RadioHead concert in Prague and film the whole thing from 5 unique vantage points. Radiohead catches wind of this after the guys posted their edited film. RadioHead says, "Hey, we'll give you the soundboard audio to synch up to it, but you can't make any money off of it." The 5 guys say, cool! And the result is pretty amazing.
I love the idea of technology enabling basically anyone to make art quickly, dynamically and then influence others to do the same or get on board... in this case, Radiohead.
Maybe you've experienced this. I'm in the middle of developing a fairely hefty iPhone app for a CPG company. While in the middle of development for the app, we were alerted to the fact that an iPad version was going to need to be developed as well (same timing). Much to my dismay, we were told to just "resize the iphone app to the iPad dimensions." Obviously, no one thought about actually how much more real estate there is to play with and how we should completely design a different experience just for the iPad. Fortunately, we sold through our POV on designing specifically for the device.
Ok, the whole point of that laborious setup is this: OUR TARGET IS PROBABLY NOT USING AN IPAD. The people that ARE using the iPad are the VPs of this CPG company and they just want to be able to see the app on their iPad. It's the total "make something for the VPs" effect or the ever popular, "secondary audience"... you make something for the people, and also for the people who are paying for it :) I'm happy to be making an iPad app, it's awesome to begin thinking for that device, but I'm guessing it'll have about 10 downloads :)
