“
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
” —Banksy
http://thefoxisblack.com/2012/02/29/banksy-on-advertising/
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“As such, productivity is not about how efficient you are at work. Instead, your productivity is really about how well you are able to make an impact in what matters most to you.” — Making Ideas Happen
aja:
via Adam.
If first you fail, try and try again
In a new agency there may be a small number of founders / shareholders who club together and do all the work themselves. Most of the clients they have are a result of relationships forged by the founders. In order for the business to progress I have understood that it is key to make sure that the business that you get from a client is not forever dependent on the relationship with an agency founder. A transition has to take place from a single project relationship to a steady flow of projects or service/fee agreement where the client can be relied on as a long term source of business.
This transition is one where the values projected by the founder members as a result of both personality and the agency’s chosen niche are translated into processes.
Why should an agency define its processes?
1. Processes are an agency’s key asset. If you consistently produce great work as a result of a process, the process can be touted to clients as the key to success of the project or client/agency relationship. Client’s come back to you and no matter who is managing the project, the client knows the way things work and that way….works.
2. The processes defined by the founders are a guarantee that the original values of the agency are carried forward and the founder’s vision for the agency lives on. The reason most agencies come into existence is because the founders believe they can do a better job than anyone else. So, why not write down how a better job can be done and replicate throughout the organisation.
3. Agency founders do not have to be involved in every project in order to guarantee good work. This means an agency can grow without stretching the founders until they snap. This also means that the agency now is a functioning breathing entity with an instilled culture because recently employed creatives, accounts and planners are independently following and improving on the processes and passing this knowledge on to those that come after them.
Conclusions
Make the process awesome
Get people excited about the process
Train every new person in the process
Make sure the process is being used
Don’t mention the word process as many times as I have in this post
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I think it may be time to set up an award for effectiveness in advertising on the Russian market. Why?
1. To give agencies something to strive for that coincides with client aims. (clients do not see the correlation between creative awards and business success)
2. To develop a database of case studies that act as benchmarks for future campaigns and their effectiveness.
3. To encourage a transparent and honest feedback loop based on actual results to improve future campaigns and to recognise the value that agencies provide.
There may be hurdles that can be overcome
Here is the judging criteria for the case studies submitted to the Jury from the IPA website:
Clarity of case: How well written, structured and presented is the case? Scale of task: How difficult is the task communication the entrant was asked to undertake? Strength of solution: How imaginative or impressive is the strategic, creative or media solution? Scale of effect: How impressive is the return from communication investment? Strength of proof: How convincingly and credibly does the paper establish the link between communication activity and commercial performance? How difficult is the measurement task? Use of channels: How well have the communication channels been exploited and evaluated? New learning: Has the case taught us anything new about how communications work (e.g. ‘longer and broader’ effects, interactions between channels), or about how to evaluate them?
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Usher will be the face of the limited edition Belvedere vodka series that will see half the profits go to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. It does seem as though it is a must in the vodka category to offset the fact that IT’S VODKA by donating to charity.
This follows on from last year’s the Louis Vuitton special edition bag co-designed by Bono and his wife. The proceeds from the bag went to TechnoServe, a nongovernmental organisation that fosters enterprise in the developing world; Conservation Cotton Initiative, which supports sustainable farming in Africa, and Chernobyl Children’s Project International.
Beluga Vodka have donated to the Raisa Gorbachev Fund over recent years as part of their. This is a trend that I really hope we can see lift off in Russia over this year.
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“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.
And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence something helpless that needs our love.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, 1904
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