Happy New Year

All the best.

Digital Agencies.

Interesting benchmark on how we're doing on digital. These agencies I love, but we need to get on the boat and remember we are in the business of speaking in behalf of our brands no matter what the media is. The message and the experience tied to consumer-product relevance.

Which makes me think. Souldn't our first brand be our own agencies?

Thoughts?

What Is A Digital Planner?

I would love to hear any thoughs on differences between a digital planner vs what we know at "traditional" agencies. Anyone?

What Is A Digital Planner

View more documents from Heather LeFevre.

Free Book Giveaway of The Creative Process Illustrated

It's been a month since the last post (job hunting is tough in this economy) so I thought I'd make it worthwhile. Former UT Advertising teachers Glenn Griffin and Deb Morrison have written a groundbreaking book about the creative process.

To win a signed copy of The Creative Process Illustrated: How Advertising's Big Ideas Are Born by W. Glenn Griffin and Deborah Morrison, 1) please leave a comment saying why you like this blog. 2) Be a facebook fan of The Ranch Blog. The winner will be randomly picked by me.

How did you choose whom to profile?
We collected nearly 80 of these drawings over a period of several years. When we found a publisher for the book, we worked with our editor to choose 30 that we thought were most representative of the varied and interesting submissions we’d received. It was a tough cut to make – so tough that the editor permitted us to include a few more as we started writing the manuscript. We really learned so much from every drawing.

What was the inspiration behind the title?
Our publisher actually proposed the title of the book! We’d always called the project “Pure Process” because it represented a study of personal creative thinking as opposed to the partner- or team-driven process that’s typical in advertising. The folks at HOW Books thought The Creative Process Illustrated would be more descriptive of the book’s content and make it more appealing to potential readers. We still love “Pure Process” (you can’t beat that alliteration!) but we like the new title, too. “Pure Process” lives on as the title of our website, so it’s still out there.



Both of you have extensive teaching experience about advertising and creativity and you have touched the lives of so many students. Why write a book now?
Wish we had some brilliant master plan to share with you (!), but the book just sort of happened in the right spot for both of us. Deborah had just finished a book called Idea Industry with Brett Robbs, a great colleague of ours at the University of Colorado – Boulder when we decided to write a new book proposal based on these process drawings we’d been collecting for the past several years and the insights we’d derived from them. We got a book contract in the Spring of 2009 and the rest is history!




Part of the Pure Process mantra is "...also about good stewardship of that process: doing good work, being responsible and revealing the industry as the force for positive change it is and can be." What are your thoughts about the post about a consumer who is appalled by advertising? '
That letter has made the rounds and a lot of people are talking about it, but why? Is there anything we didn’t already know in that letter? Of course there’s advertising out there that’s dumb. Of course some of it annoys people. And (of course) there are some cranky folks out there who won’t ever be happy with anything we do. We are big believers, however, that advertising CAN be smart, CAN engage people and actually do positive things for the world. Nope, we can’t tell you what went wrong with that sausage campaign, sir. But we do know that there are terrific people in our business who know about the “Brians” out there and don’t want to invite more criticism of the industry by doing bad work. Instead, they want to show people what advertising can do when it’s done well. We see lots of examples (thank goodness) of great work out there that gets lots of love from consumers for all the right reasons. That’s the kind of work we want to keep pushing our students to do.



How much sweat equity (hours spent writing, researching and interviewing) is in this book?
Hmmmm. Enough to make us ask two questions: (1) Why the hell did we sign up for this? (2) Okay, what’s the next book going to be about?
We figure that’s about right.

News Roundup

Thanks to Naveed's Weekly Digest for all the links below.

• Tan Le demonstrates a headset that reads its user's brainwaves.


• Hello HTML5. Goodbye Flash.


• Some ground breaking news about the new health care reform bill: Children strongly oppose one aspect of it.


• Naveed gave a presentation about the effectiveness of the Old Spice campaign to a packed house.


• There are three types of happiness. Which one are you?

An Open Letter To All Of Advertising And Marketing

Click on image to enlarge.

I am not sure if this is written by a real consumer or someone posing as an every day joe. Either way, it really makes you think about where and what advertising and marketing people are coming up with these days.

Via PSFK

Recap of Portfolio Night 8 - Austin

Note about the illustration:
Austin is famous for having N. America's largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats underneath the S. Congress Bridge(750,000).

Portfolio Night is a thirty-five city event where aspiring junior creatives and advertising students show their portfolios to seasoned and highly regarded art directors (such as Ignacio the founder of Portfolio Night), copywriters and creative directors. This year on May 20, Austin was included in the creative host cities for the first time.

READ MORE...

Two ways to make your brand really stand out

I enjoy reading the Brandchannel e-mail newsletters as they do a good job of keeping up and reporting on the latest branding news. Below are two brands they recently featured.



KIND snacks differentiates their brand by doing cause marketing using social media, random acts of kindness and other methods.

READ MORE...

The wisdom of John Wooden

While legendary UCLA head coach John Wooden (October 14, 1910 – June 4, 2010) is famous for winning ten NCAA championships, he is also known for his life lessons or "Woodenisms." My favorites are in bold.

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out."

"Never mistake activity for achievement."

"Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then."

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."

"Be prepared and be honest."

"Be quick, but don't hurry."

"You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one."

READ MORE...

über-cool Chiquita Banana stickers

Many design, marketing and advertising blogs have already covered the redesign of the famous Chiquita Banana stickers. However, I saw them for the first time only recently.

These are a good marketing idea because

READ MORE...