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So You Think You Know How to Present?

So you think you know how to present? Let me be the first (or maybe the 10th) to tell you that you don’t. In fact you have no idea how to present. How do I know this? Because you’re making it to finals and you’re not winning. Why? Because you are focusing on yourself and not the client. It’s that simple.

Talent with a Capital T

Okay, jargon alert! I’m going to talk about T-shaped people. While I’m there I may throw in the odd reference to silos, pushing the envelope and fluffing the sausage. So get your jargon bingo cards ready and eyes down for a full house…

Two is the Loneliest Number

The world might not end in 2012 as the Mayans predicted, but you don’t need an ancient calendar to see that the traditional way advertising is created, and more specifically the way ideas have traditionally been created, is quickly becoming extinct.

In the good ol’ days of advertising, the joined-at-the-hipster duo of copywriter and art director was the most efficient way to develop ideas into a campaign. Whether they were locked in an office together, in side-by-side cubicles, or sharing a table at the local coffee house, these two people were expected to change a client’s fortunes, or at least come up with something decent for the agency reel.

The Portfolio of the Future

I know it makes me sound old but eleven years ago I was job-hunting for my first art director job. Since I’d decided to study web and art direction at the same time, I had a combination of interactive and print campaigns in my book. The advice I got from CD’s was always the same: “If you want to be a web developer, make a web portfolio. If you want to be an art director, make another one but don’t mix them up. We don’t care if you do web.”

Spread A Little Happiness

In the run up to Christmas I had an invitation from Uniqlo – to climb aboard the Happy Machine, which offered online discounts every lunchtime for a week. It didn’t quite leave me with a warm glow, but did almost make me buy a sweater.

I also had a festive invitation from Coca Cola, to ‘open happiness,’ in the latest incarnation of their longstanding brand campaign. If only it were that easy, I thought. Which also made me think a bit deeper about happiness generally, and how brands and we as advertisers contribute to it. Or – according The Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) in the UK – don’t.

Embracing the Unknown

I once presented a chart to a client many years ago that unintentionally scared the hell out of him. It was based on a speech that you may be familiar with, about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq by the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. My chart had three concentric circles. Inside the smallest circle was written ‘What we know,’ inside the next largest was written ‘What we know that we don’t know,’ and inside the outer circle was written ‘What we don’t know that we don’t know.’ This particular client didn’t really appreciate my honest suggestion that, despite our best intentions, we can only depend on so much for the long-term plan we were proposing. He wanted it all figured out, a guaranteed roadmap that he could show to his boss.

Does This Idea Make Sense in Spanglish?

The officer at the Airport Customs saw the “O 1” Visa in my Brazilian passport and in order to check it he said, “What does this Visa stand for?”

I explained that it is a Visa granted for people who have extraordinary talent in media and arts. And he goes, “Extraordinary talent in arts? What do you do, you paint like Picasso?”

I don’t know what Picasso would have said about that, but he definitely could have said it in Spanish… or Spanglish.

The Awards Gauntlet

Awards season is well and truly upon us and the entry deadlines are starting to come thick and fast. It’s a mind-boggling process as more and more festivals seem to pop up every year and some poor soul has to run the gauntlet of the dreaded entry process.

Cannes Will Never Be The Same, Fortunately

I don’t know when it was exactly, but it was roughly ten years ago. I wasn’t enjoying the Cannes Festival anymore. Why, I thought, I have had great fun here for years? What’s changed?

After giving it some serious thought, I knew: absolutely nothing.

Do We Have The Reputation We Deserve?

I’ve just spent the last week surrounded by advertising folks at the Eurobest festival. And as always at these shindigs, I’m struck by the contrast of how genuine, likeable, interesting, smart and inspiring the individuals that I meet are, versus the appearance of shallowness, selfishness and narcissism we as an industry present to the outside world.

It’s ironic that as communications experts we fail so completely to communicate much that’s positive about ourselves. We’re obviously not saying the right things. But in a world where every action is potentially public, are we doing the right things either?

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