All entries for the month of August, 2010.
Talk about reaching your demo. The most brilliant about this idea for “The Last Exorcism” by The Visionaire Group LA is how incisive the media is. What more dead-on place to reach the young male demographic than ChatRoulette?! Get ‘em while their horny. They’ll def tell their friends!
Joseph Bianco
The hardest part of creativity is discriminating between what’s a sinking rock and what’s worth polishing into gold. That’s where ‘Killer Work’ comes in. The class provided me an opportunity to really ‘trial and error’ my way through my own creative process to find what worked. The class really helped me realize that you have to use TNT and let the ideas explode out of your mind before those few nuggets of gold will strike you over the head. From there – you polish.
The first day of class, Mark laid out the 3 key elements that make an ad work. I haven’t looked back since. These three criteria have become my mantra when evaluating my work. I’ll leave it to the guru to teach what these three keys are.
I highly recommend ‘How To Do Killer Work’ to anyone interested in not just creating a great book, but in developing their thinking.
You can contact me at Bianco.ja2@gmail.com
Amgad Fawzy
While most other courses are concerned with the DOs and DON’Ts of what makes good advertising — something you could read in Hey Whipple — this course helped me think consciously and honestly about the creative process and the behaviors unique to me that help me get into the mindset of generating great ideas. The course also encouraged me to not stop after I’ve come up with a good idea, but to keep pushing myself to in search of a great idea.
The process I’ve developed here will not only help me in developing my portfolio and throughout my advertising career, but it will have a positive impact on my writing in general. My greatest take-away from Killer Work is that truly great ideas aren’t simply clever or funny, they must be insightful and tell an inherent truth about the product or about life.
While the format of the course – students take turns presenting their work, which is then critiqued by the instructor and the other students – was identical to that of other portfolio course, the element that differentiates Killer Work from other classes is that Mark takes the time to discuss the creative process with students, drawing on his personal experience, while always emphasizing that each person’s creative triggers are unique.
You can contact me at fawzy.amgad@gmail.com
Jerry Oulds
How To Do Killer Work was an ABSOLUTE TEN out of 10!
Questions? Contact me at Jerry.Oulds@gmail.com
Just saw this one for the first time on AdPulp. It’s the 3rd in a series (from what we remember) created for Malibu Rum by comedy writer/actor Eric Fensler. In our opinion, it’s the funniest of the three, because the mock-morning show setting captures so many info-idioms, including all that super-duper enthusiasm, the convoluted problem-solution logic, and amazed clown-sized smiles. It’s about as stealth a mention for a product as you can get, and truth is, it may work better as a spoof than as an ad. The Mike Morgan character (is that the actor’s real name?) is so damn good, we’d hire him to do the real thing.
We can see how, on paper, the idea of a show-between-the-show for its iconic brands might have gotten Unliver excited. The big risk is, it must be executed with genius. By this we mean, it must use its insider-ness to give viewers a funny or poignant insight by pulling back the curtain in a way that an ad agency can do — because they’re true insiders — that a show runner cannot.
Otherwise you run the risk of being a poorly written and painfully executed parody.
Unfortunately for both Unilever and Mindshare, this Dove ad was nothing more than an updated version of 2 c’s in a K. A dull slice of ‘Mad Men life’ missing any kind of brilliant insider wink, or freshly minted irony.
In fact, both agency and brand missed the big opportunity here, because they lost sight of the deliciously simple, larger picture. In the message breaks for a series that is a peephole into how advertising got such an awful reputation, there has also been an attempt to celebrate the creative side — the artistic, uhm, less manipulative side of the biz — by holding up a simple mirror to it, as BMW did in this season’s premier with the Martin Puris’s BMW interstitial. It gave viewers an authentic glimpse behind the curtain.
We couldn’t have said it any better than ‘Steve of Westmont, IL’ who commented in the Ad Age Madison and Vine article on the effort:
“The ad was obvious…and very poor. Why try to recreate a show that is already on the air? You cannot elevate ad actors to the level of the show actors in a 30 sec spot… trying to recreate an ad agency environment to sell a product during an award winning show on the same topic is ridiculous.”
Well said, Steve of Westmont.