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Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

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Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#31

Post by nostrademons »

adorton wrote: post #24
nostrademons wrote: post #18

Is this why the ad industry is getting eaten for lunch by Google/Facebook?

How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.

In the short run, yeah. In the long run, the Internet has fundamentally changed the value proposition of ad agencies, and their old core competencies aren't that useful anymore.

I'm reminded of how in high school and early college, every teenager thinks that the way to get your ideas heard is to shout louder. But if you actually look at effective leaders, ones that change the world, the quality they share is that they listen more. That's what the Internet provides us: a way for brands to listen more to their customers. And when you have that, you don't need an industry that grew up around being able to shout louder.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#32

Post by blankenship »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #27
TomOfTTB wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you sho…

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

They're not art (typically) they're design—they exist to solve a problem. They're not all trash, sometimes they're rather brilliant solutions to selling a product or service or experience (of course they're still selling).

Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#34

Post by TomOfTTB »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #27
TomOfTTB wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you sho…

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

To say Art isn't Art unless it's the highest form of art is silly. Is the work of a great comic book artist not art because it isn't Picasso?

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#35

Post by kitsune_ »

jfarmer wrote: post #20
InclinedPlane wrote: post #9

If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense. If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so. The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

When it comes to producing amazing work, quantity beats quality. That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfect 1. In the end the quality will be higher. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_e...

I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on.

Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.

Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.

Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#36

Post by jiggy2011 »

Detrus wrote: post #26
adorton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.

Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers. Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the indust…

Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional advertising to me.

When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation based ads that have been around for even longer.

Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as "you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly "this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10 seconds".

A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing 10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge the advert. I can see this becoming more common, pherhaps even to the point where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about the brand of washing detergent featured".

I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would).

I think it will be a very long time before we have good enough data mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we would probably be mostly redundant anyways.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#37

Post by mgkimsal »

ryanlchan wrote: post #8

If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.

My takeaway was that creativity doesn't have to suffer because of time constraints imposed, not that creativity is necessarily enhanced by them.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#38

Post by skb_ »

kitsune_ wrote: post #35
jfarmer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to producing amazing work, quantity beats quality. That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfect 1. In the end the quality will be higher. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_e...

I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on. Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- an…

My own work-flow is kind of a mixture of the two. I find that I have to play around with my synths a bit just to find that right sound - it might not be the right sound for the current project, but I save it just in case. Same thing with melodies, I have a ton of files with unfinished melodies that I mine ideas from.

My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off.

It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my past ideas into the one good idea.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#39

Post by mmcdan »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #27
TomOfTTB wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you sho…

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

Although this is an "ad" for wearing a seatbelt, I still watch it occasionally because it is so artistic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-8PBx7isoM

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#40

Post by JoeAltmaier »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #34
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

To say Art isn't Art unless it's the highest form of art is silly. Is the work of a great comic book artist not art because it isn't Picasso?

A comic book is so far above an ad as to make the comparison silly.
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