AD TEACHINGS: A FREE E-BOOK ON IDEA GENERATION?!

berniewatt:

adteachings:

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While I was at Seneca College this morning, one of the students commented on the difficulty of avoiding creative block when you’re trying to generate lots of ideas. Every person in advertising knows this feeling, and also the self-loathing it generates.

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Fortunately, there are all kinds…

One for the students, a great resource

This is fine, fine resource. Though there is no better way, at least in my experience, to overcome “creative block” than talk about some unrelated topic for a while and then when you come back around to the problem at hand a solution presents itself.

That’s all you have to do.

Source: adteachings

adteachings:

The contrivance here is heavy-handed: You never see people’s ages in newspaper headlines or TV news crawls. But this is still a powerful idea.

It would be nice to like this. But I can’t. Although I may be overthinking things a bit, the concept of the ad is sold out by the copy. If hate were abolished, or had been retroactively abolished, it would undercut all of the examples of things these people went on to do. (With the exception of Anne Frank but it’s very possible that without the tragedy she went through there wouldn’t be a writing career for her at all.)

One of the unfortunate realities of life is that conflit creates what we do. I am not advocating for hate, or anything the ADL fights against for that matter, but the ad does a disservice to the people it is remembering. It is because of them that we continue to fight for good causes. To fight against issues that poison society.

Now all of the people in this ad may have gone on to do great things in a world without hate or bigotry or problems (even though that world seems highly improbably). But we can’t know. That’s a different world. A alternate reality. 

It simply doesn’t work for me because the premise is flawed. 

Production is a four-letter word.

creative-direction-blog:

“Hey, can you crank this out for me? It’s just a production job, so no biggie, right?”

Sure. I’ll get to it right after I crank out this movie script I’ve been working on. I’ve already got the idea, so writing it should be no biggie.

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I’m not sure why people assume that “production” jobs are simple, but they are most certainly not. Taking a bucket full of information and squeezing it onto a page in a way that is both pleasing to the eye and comprehensible is no easy task.

In fact, I’d argue it’s every bit as “creative” as everything else we do.

It takes an incredibly keen eye. It takes an innate understanding of how we process information. And it takes a healthy dose of patience—because it can take several attempts before you come up with anything that doesn’t make you want to scratch your eyes out.

So why do we undervalue production work so much?

I think it’s all in the name. Production just sounds lame. It sounds dull. It sounds like something a monkey or a robot could do. Better yet, a robot-monkey!

But it’s not lame. It’s not dull. And it most certainly is not easy.

So perhaps we need to give it a more fitting moniker. But how are we going to find a name that aptly encapsulates the many challenges and benefits of this type of work?

Here’s a thought:

Why don’t we simply call it “creative”?

Another thought is viewing things as “just a production job” is detrimental to the values of an agency. To be committed to good work, good effort needs to be extended to every project.

The alternative is letting these little production jobs suck the lifeblood out of an agency. Allows the quality of all work to suffer. Allows clients to believe they can walk all over you.

That’s not good for either party.

angelanatividad: legallyblindobservations: The World’s Quietest Room Scientists at Minneapolis’ Orfield Labs created their own soundless room, an anechoic chamber. Their studies have found that when putting subjects within the chamber, they begin to hallucinate within 30 minutes.  With an average quiet room having a sound level of 30 decibels, the anechoic chamber’s sound level is -9 decibels. The ceiling, floor, and walls of the chamber absorb sound rather than have it bounce off as normal objects do. The chamber is so quiet that the subjects can even hear their own organs functioning. Although extremely interesting, the experience is rather unpleasant. Not one subject has spent more than 45 minutes in the chamber alone. Leaving a person to only their thoughts, the chamber could drive them insane. It was Are You Afraid of the Dark? that first told me we’ve never experienced complete silence, that it simply isn’t possible, and that statement tripped me out so much that it’s survived in my memory long after the episodes have faded. New life goal: spend 1.5 hours in this room. Shoot high.
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angelanatividad:

legallyblindobservations:

The World’s Quietest Room

Scientists at Minneapolis’ Orfield Labs created their own soundless room, an anechoic chamber. Their studies have found that when putting subjects within the chamber, they begin to hallucinate within 30 minutes. 

With an average quiet room having a sound level of 30 decibels, the anechoic chamber’s sound level is -9 decibels. The ceiling, floor, and walls of the chamber absorb sound rather than have it bounce off as normal objects do. The chamber is so quiet that the subjects can even hear their own organs functioning.

Although extremely interesting, the experience is rather unpleasant. Not one subject has spent more than 45 minutes in the chamber alone. Leaving a person to only their thoughts, the chamber could drive them insane.

It was Are You Afraid of the Dark? that first told me we’ve never experienced complete silence, that it simply isn’t possible, and that statement tripped me out so much that it’s survived in my memory long after the episodes have faded.

New life goal: spend 1.5 hours in this room. Shoot high.

Source: news.discovery.com

Neon yellow gloves

Last Saturday I was walking home from the gym. The same route I take every time. South on Canal, west on Roosevelt, south on Halsted. Then reverse on the way there. This particular trip I was on the Roosevelt bridge that goes over the highway (as opposed to the one that goes over the river).

Just as I reached the crest of the bridge, not a very high crest mind you, I saw a girl walking towards me. She was wearing a black coat and some kind of pants, but what caught my eye were her neon yellow gloves. In that moment they were the most perfect item of clothing I had ever seen. Everything else about her outfit was reserved, the gloves were striking in contrast.

I wanted to say something, anything, to her. My mind raced. Would it be strange? Probably. What would I say? I considered for a second shouting, “Your gloves are amazing!” because in that moment that was the most articulate sentence I could string together.

Instead as she passed I looked down at my feet and trudged past, caught up in my own head. Then the moment passed and I instantly regretted it. Thought about how a compliment could have brightened her day. Maybe she needed it.

Maybe I did too.

I really like this house because it’s completely unique. It was the first of its kind and the last. It’s a sort of amalgam of 100 years of houses that all grew together. Sadly, someone in Chicago tore it down. But at least we have this picture.

(via)

This is an excellent idea if industrial age logic is what you’re aiming for. And it’s easy to see how other universities could follow the logic. However, it still relies on students falling in line and acts to reinforce the status quo. Not necessarily a good thing for a troubled industry like higher ed. gjmueller: Transcript for Work The rap on college transcripts is that they don’t tell employers much, thanks to grade inflation and the failure of conventional grades to predict performance on the job. So to try to give their students’ transcripts more heft, a two-year college in Missouri now includes not only their grades, but a job readiness score and their attendance rate as well. Linn State Technical College’s employability rating is fairly extensive. Instructors assign a “job readiness work ethic score” to students in six areas: safety, trust, timeliness, work habits, interpersonal and citizenship. Those scores are listed on transcripts and added together for an overall final grade, all of which employers can see, along with ratings for attendance and, of course, academic grades. Job readiness is scored on a four-point scale. For example, a student must be described as “respectful” and “polite” to land a four in the interpersonal category. Lack of civility and the use of “slurs,” conversely, are on the checklist for a zero in interpersonal. As for safety, which is optional for general education courses, students get points for looking out for the safety of themselves and others, and score worse for the careless use of tools and equipment. photo via flickr:CC | cogdogblog
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This is an excellent idea if industrial age logic is what you’re aiming for. And it’s easy to see how other universities could follow the logic. However, it still relies on students falling in line and acts to reinforce the status quo. Not necessarily a good thing for a troubled industry like higher ed.

gjmueller:

Transcript for Work

The rap on college transcripts is that they don’t tell employers much, thanks to grade inflation and the failure of conventional grades to predict performance on the job. So to try to give their students’ transcripts more heft, a two-year college in Missouri now includes not only their grades, but a job readiness score and their attendance rate as well.

Linn State Technical College’s employability rating is fairly extensive. Instructors assign a “job readiness work ethic score” to students in six areas: safety, trust, timeliness, work habits, interpersonal and citizenship. Those scores are listed on transcripts and added together for an overall final grade, all of which employers can see, along with ratings for attendance and, of course, academic grades.

Job readiness is scored on a four-point scale. For example, a student must be described as “respectful” and “polite” to land a four in the interpersonal category. Lack of civility and the use of “slurs,” conversely, are on the checklist for a zero in interpersonal. As for safety, which is optional for general education courses, students get points for looking out for the safety of themselves and others, and score worse for the careless use of tools and equipment.

photo via flickr:CC | cogdogblog