Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Urgent Genius

If you're working in a cross media agency like Lemz, concepting goes a bit faster. You don't have the entire week to come up with a print campaign. If you're working with big campaigns like the ones they make here, you have to think fast and to act fast. You cannot give all the seperate elements in a campaign the attention it needs, but it does force you to think fast and to put all the media in service of one central idea.

It's a more modern approach to making advertising. Somebody who truly understands the value of this principle is Grant Hunter, creative director from Iris Worldwide. He is busy making a book about 'Urgent Genius', which is a theory about a new way of making advertising. It's about real time creativity. Not only reacting fast to topical events, but also about being instantly creative at the right moment. And there's a place reserved for the IKEA 365 campaign in the book as well. You can see many examples of the theory here.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Fun

A quite unusual commercial made for Ford

I'm getting quite sick of clients trying to rationalize advertising. With the precision of a mathematician they're trying to figure out what is the best way to communicate their brand. In the end there's no room for experimenting anymore. And the communication totally lacks passion.

Luckily, there are still a lot of agencies who understand what how to make advertising entertaining. Ogilvy Paris made a commercial for Ford and the more I think about it, the better I think it is. If you rationalize it, this car has absolutely nothing to do with dogs. Still, the dogs are in there, just because it's fun.

Furthermore, this commercial takes two minutes, but to explain the idea (the dog parking the car) you can also do it in 15 seconds. Instead, the creatives have broken the common rules of advertising and made an entire dogshow of the commercial. The reason why? There is no reason why. It's just fun! And the amount of hits prove that the commercial works: 1.686.670. Breaking the rules pays off.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Reanimation

Yes, my blog is still alive. I've been doing it for more than 5 years now and the trick is to post something on it on a regular basis. And posting something -anything- is not that difficult. It just takes 15 minutes of concentration to translate your thoughts and experiences into an entertaining set of words.

But sometimes you just don't think of writing something. Or you just don't feel like it. And when it takes longer, you've experienced so many things and you've been inspired so much, that you don't know where to start. It's impossible to fill the gap in the blog of these last few weeks. I've just had too much inspiration. Too much to talk about. Exhibitions at the Rietveld art academy, unique cinema shows, spontaneously meeting my cousin after more than 10 years, going to good parties, doing a French course, planning a new short film with director Robbert-Jan Vos, working at Lemz and a crazy weekend where I ended up walking alone at a beachparty in Belgium without knowing anyone.

These were interesting weeks but impossible to tell in one blog post. And because you feel obliged to write about about everything, you get the feeling that the longer you wait, the more difficult it gets to make a post again. So I just start with this very general article. To reanimate my blog again.