JasonTheodor.com

The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught. And yet we waste billions of dollars in time looking for them where they’re not.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

In the ad agency world we often pretend that we have tamed and trained Creativity. We have efficiently commoditized the magic of imagination. We have It all tied down and caged in timelines and budgets. We trot It out in meetings and force It to jump through burning hoops to great claps (or gasps). Everyone is amazed (or terrified) by It’s beauty and relevance.

But where do we catch this mythical beast? Where does Creativity come from? It comes from a serendipitous collection of connections, a combination of fate and physics that touch our consciousness (or unconsciousness). It comes from looking and doing and discovering seemingly random elements. It comes from filtering the projected ‘media’ of the Universe through our own unique perspectives and experience. It is a distillation of our most interesting selves. It is practiced magic.

No matter how much we try to capture Creativity in our work, It originates in play. And play, by it’s very nature, is undefined. Creating timelines and budgets around play is like asking how much your ideas weigh. So how do agencies do it?

Ad agencies charge admission to an improvised Circus of the Imagination: sometimes Creativity is a reduced to a tent full of opportunistic freaks, and other times it is a once-in-a-lifetime three ring circus of awe and wonder. Presentations of Creativity are always filled with suspense. You never know if someone is going to get mauled or a miracle is going to occur. Either way, it is wild and unpredictable— which is precisely why it stays interesting.

Posted via web from Jason Theodor’s Creative Method and Systems Channel

Patrick Glinski (@glinskiii on Twitter) of Idea Couture, breaks down the repercussions of changing vs not changing a client brief. I love this simple matrix, showing the results as binary.

If you always do exactly what is asked of a client, even if it is wrong, you are destined to fail. A bad client will get angry and blame you for the dismal results. A good client will still pay you, but ask you to do it all over again, eventually drifting into the ‘bad’ column.

If you question the client, tell them they may be wrong, a bad client will fire you. But a good client will respect you. A good client will begin to think of you as a partner instead of a lowly vendor.

As much as we all like money, I think it is important for the creative and strategic integrity of all agencies to push for the upper left quadrant, the strategic partnership. It is the more difficult, long term path, but it will lead to industry respect and longer term revenue. It also may lead to better, more effective advertising.

Thanks Patrick.

You can rant and rail and gnash your teeth all you want about the missing camera, the closed environment, the lack of Flash support, the limited memory, no USB, etc. But when you see a 4 year old interact with an iPad, you know this is the future of computing. It’s the very first baby step into a new threshold that leaves clunky peripherals behind and replaces them with fast, intuitive gestures. Every kid I’ve seen so far loves to watch videos, play board games, read books, draw, write, and just about anything else on this… pad. And they can do it independently without reading a 200 page manual.

So us adults can argue about specs while the children play with the gear.

Here are a few other examples of kids playing with the iPad:

This is the first ad to really get my attention in a long time. It came via a re-tweet by Cory Doctorow, an author and frequent contributor to BoingBoing.net.

RT @_gower: @doctorow The Digital Economy Act takes its first victims! http://bit.ly/bRt7

It completely disrupted my attention (and my tangental web flow), and got me to ask a lot of questions. What might happen to the future of the internet if we don’t keep it open and protect it? Is it a real possibility that some of my favourite sites might get blocked by my government? The Pirate Party UK, the purveyors of this creative ‘interstitial’, believe that England’s Digital Economy Act might try to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle to control it again. They are staunch proponents for copyright reform, and launched this viral campaign to spread their message. Anyone can “block” a website and send the link to a friend, jarring them out of their complacent clickery. For instance, if you want to access JasonTheodor.com, you might just butt heads with the Canadian government. This is a great example of how interruptive advertising is effective when used to suit the media AND the audience.