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Who's in the details?

There's an old saying:  The Devil is in the details.

There's another old saying:  God is in the details.

So...which is it?

I think what I think a lot of the time when questions like this are posed to me (even if I pose them myself), and that is:  It depends.  It depends on which details we're talking about, and what those details truly contribute to the overall goal of the project.

I hate to be brash here...  Wait.  No, I don't.  If you read me or know me, you know I'm comfortable with brash.  Here's the thing:  If you're good, you're paying attention to one set of details.  If you're not, you're paying attention to another.

Understanding how the caste of a lighting style can not only change the mood of a scene, but the perception of the entire piece (and by extension the product and brand) is putting God in the details.  That's a good thing.  You're contributing to the goal of the piece by paying attention to details that actually make a contribution.

Conversely, if you're spending a week tweaking the third paragraph down in a three-paragraph FAQ entry, it's my opinion that you may have lost the plot, have invited Beelzebub into the project, and aren't really focused on the bigger, more important picture of providing a great brand experience to your user.

Sometimes tiny details are critical.  Sometimes, they're simply tiny details that have little or no actual impact.  Being good as a creative, or being able to recognize creative as good or bad, depends a lot on your ability to know the difference.

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In case you were wondering...

No, I haven't abandoned this blog.  I've been super crushed on stuff at work, and have, in fact, been posting elsewhere.  Since most of my writing on advertising and digital does get exposure in other places, and linked via Twitter, there's a good chance you've seen it already.  If not, here are a couple of recent ones:

On smarterfaster.com, "What if?"

On adotas.com, "Baking the Creative from Scratch"

I'm also going to be authoring a chapter of Age of Conversation 3.  More to come on that.  Thanks for reading.

Just Sayin'

About 5 years ago, I wrote an eBook called, "Use A Stick."  I released it just a little over 4 years ago.  You can tell it was a long time ago by the clunky site, and the fact that you can download it in Palm format.  Several things inspired me to write it.

I knew I was headed back, in some unknown capacity that had something to do with digital, toward the agency side.  Truth is, the production business roller coaster was getting to me, but more importantly, the means of distribution for moving images was beginning to change.  I have been a geek since 1984, so I was keeping up with, and participating heavily in, early forms of social media -- especially this new thing called YouTube.  Seemed like it might turn into something.  I figured agencies wouldn't figure this stuff out very quickly, because my experience with agencies (both inside them, and as a supplier to them) told me that agencies, historically, don't figure out much very quickly.  I wanted in on this new web-based way of approaching moving imagery.  (I called it moving imagery, because back then, if you were good, you were a "film" director.  I was a "film" director, so I couldn't call it "video," even though that was and is the correct, and prevailing, term on the web. It implied cheap, and low-quality.  HD, and then the Red, changed all that, but it hadn't, yet.)

I also knew, from being a director attempting to sell my services to agencies, that agencies tend to pigeon-hole everything and everyone.  I swear to you, I had one agency who considered me only an "action toy" director -- they would only hire me to shoot toys kids pick up and run around with, like Nerf guns and the like.  They would never, ever, hire me to shoot action figures.  And I had another agency who ONLY considered me an action figure director.  Yet another would only hire me for comedy aimed at adults.  And still another would only hire me for fashion.  It was downright weird.  That's a part of the roller coaster I was tired of.  But I digress....the point is, agencies pigeon hole.  So if I was to be taken seriously by agencies, and prospective clients, I had to remind people that I knew, and still know, how to create things for a broad swath of media, and more importantly, how to think strategically.

Before I was a director, I was a creative director.  A copywriter before that.  So, for the entire 15 years I directed, I understood and participated in the marketing conversations surrounding the spots I was shooting.  (Few directors can, or even care to.) Yet, ask one of my agency clients of the time, and they'd tell you I was a guy who took their boards and put it on film.  I wore the director's hat, so I was a director, and nothing else. In order to counter that pigeon-holed perception, I wrote Use A Stick.

The premise of the book was pretty loose.  Knowing strategy, and agency culture, agency-client, and agency-supplier relationships, I found myself in a pretty good cat-bird's seat.  As a director, you're not the client.  So the agency tells you all the dirt about how the spot came to be.  As a director, you're not the agency.  So if you can talk with the client, the client tells you all the dirt about how the spot came to be.  The constant disconnects were enlightening, entertaining, and at times, infuriating. 

So the premise of the book (in my head) was something along the lines of: "Here's a bunch of ways that agencies and clients have consistently messed up with each other for the last 50 or so years.  And guess what?  There's a bunch of new stuff coming along very quickly that's going to radically change the economics and structure of this agency-client relationship, and give them even more ways to mess up.  But the good news is, most of these problems actually have simple solutions.  Be mindful, though, that simple isn't always easy.  But that doesn't change the fact that it's simple."

Ok, so that was a long premise, but you get the drift.  Truth is, the book is a bit of a rant (a nice rant, but a rant, nonetheless) about stupid stuff I saw in agency-client relationships, and particularly in production, over the course of 15 years.  This stuff cost the agencies money, it cost the clients money, and it didn't contribute at all to a better product.  And with the web coming quickly to change the game, I just thought that somebody ought to think about it a little bit.

The other truth is, I think the book is pretty naive, when you read it now.  It's also not the best eBook in the world.  But it was decent for its time, and it served its purpose.  And it's still downloaded regularly, so go figure.

This blog started out as a support mechanism for the book.  Here, in many early posts, and in the book, I wrote about stuff like:  Agencies throw too many people at most projects.  The web allows for much more personal communications and experiences, and thus, narrower targeting -- so your creative product has to be designed with that in mind.  Agencies would do well to think in terms of a production company model, where specialists are hired as needed.  The economics is going to radically change.  The cost of delivery has been reduced dramatically, so the justification for a high cost of production is no longer there, especially in the face of new technologies.  Agencies have to think in terms of ideas that can be accomplished with the new tools, within the new budgets.  And finally, everything is just going to get faster and faster. Stuff like that.

So I find it interesting that today, I read and tweeted an ADWEEK article with the headline:  "Ad Biz Faces the 'New Normal'."  In that article, the author talks about pretty much all the points I just listed.  The catalyst for the change, according to the author, is the recession.  But, I don't think so.  The recession accelerated it.  But the change has been coming for a long time now. Just sayin'.

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Reach for the Stars

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember.  Like a lot of Floridians, my parents and I were in North Carolina, escaping the summer heat and marveling at the notion that, in some places, the ground didn't actually have to be wet, sandy or flat.  I was about the age my son is now, which is too young to have a real understanding of the significance of, well, anything, really.  But old enough that significant things could have a lasting impact.

Instead of staying at my cousin's vacation cabin, where we and everyone else in the family sometimes stayed for a week or two in the summer, that year my parents wanted to see some different trees and rocks.  They rented a cabin in the woods, down a long rock and dirt road, by a stream.  I have no idea where, in North Carolina, this place was or is, although I can only imagine it's been developed into something much more suburban by now.

I was pretty interested in the stream, because it had rocks that could make really big splashes.  We didn't have rocks in Florida, and we didn't have streams that moved fast.  But a stream can only be so interesting, and only for so long, when you're that young.

There was another Florida family up the rocky road a little bit -- the Dingers.  They owned a small vacation house, and spent every summer escaping the heat.  Unlike our relatively rustic vacation rental, their house had a TV.  They also had a kid, about my age (a year older, actually).  But she was a girl, and she was used to being in North Carolina all summer, so her interest in splashing rocks in the stream, and in me, was minimal, at best.  Still, I remember Sharon Dinger as being pretty nice.

What I really remember about Sharon Dinger is sitting on the couch with her way past either of our bedtimes, with both her parents and mine in the room, all of us silent, and fixated on the television.  Watching Neil Armstrong climb down that ladder and step on the moon was significant.  Significant in that way that has a lasting impact.

Disney didn't own Florida yet.  We had beaches, we had orange groves, we had swamps, and we had the Cape.  And the Cape was cool.  That's where the rockets and the astronauts were.  Just being from Florida, you felt a sort of connection to the space program.  And now, that space program had actually put some guys on the moon. 

After that night, every kid I knew wanted to be be an astronaut or a rocket scientist.  None of the kids I knew ever became one, but none of us became cowboys or Indians, either.  What changed then and there, for a lot of us, was the direction of our imaginations.  Instead of spending days fantasizing about the old west, we spent days fantasizing about the future.  And for more than just a couple of my friends, this realization that you could actually do something that had never, ever been done before translated into successful careers and major accomplishments.

Years after that night in North Carolina, I first heard the famous Leo Burnett quote:  "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud, either."  Clearly, I didn't become an astronaut.  And I'm no rocket scientist.  But I do think that throughout my career as a director, and an ad guy, I've consciously tried to push for stuff that hasn't been done before.  There's not enough of that drive in advertising, imo.  Sometimes, it's little things.  But, to me, it's important to focus forward, even if it means taking small steps. And while I can't be absolutely certain, I'm pretty sure the seed for that thinking in me was planted when I was sitting on Sharon Dinger's parents' couch on July 20, 1969. 

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A horse of a different color

When was the last time you did something different?  Never-mind the time you wore the tutu in Central Park -- I'm talking to advertising people, here, and I'm just asking, "Done anything different lately?"

Advertising and marketing, since I've been in the business, has always preached the virtues of difference, while secretly espousing a culture of sameness.  I've directed hundreds of TV spots.  Literally.  Hundreds.  And on exactly two occasions, the agency asked me to make something that they had no previous reference for.  Twice.  Every other spot I directed -- every one -- had a reference that came from the agency, and every one of those references was for another, usually competitive, spot.

Creatives, theoretically, strive for difference to make the client's brand stand apart from the competition. (And the competition doesn't just include other things in the brand category, but all competition for viewers' attention, at least when we're talking traditional advertising.)  Yet how many creatives leap onto the latest trends they find in CA?  Let's not just pick on creatives here.  How many agency owners wish their agency could be just like CP+B?  Or Goodby?  Or...it doesn't matter who.  You get the point.

Enter the web.  And on the surface, it gets worse.  Because the truth is, a lot of the structure of what we need to do on the web requires a certain amount of sameness.  It's one of the things that frustrates traditionalists most when they tiptoe into working on the web.  You don't know how many discussions I've had with designers, art directors, writers -- creatives -- about why navigation needs to be what navigation needs to be.  They want to do something different.  And to their credit, well, they want to do something different.  Navigation isn't, typically, the best place to apply that quest, though.  I know there are exceptions.  But in the world of the web, those exceptions are few.

As an aside, here's how I explain the sameness of navigation, and how it doesn't close off all avenues of creativity:  Ever live in/stay in a place where the faucets are set up wrong?  Hot on the wrong side, or maybe the valves turn different ways?  Maddening, isn't it?  Does that mean, in order to make a brilliant architectural statement, an architect should completely redesign the way the faucets work in a home?  Clearly, it doesn't.  A statement can, in fact, be made -- with faucets that work the way people are used to them working.  Once in a great while, an elegant innovation comes along, and changes functionality -- like the motion-sensitive faucets in public restrooms.  But even those get implemented over time.  And even those are simply another type of sameness.  You won't find the motion sensors on the wall behind you.

If you're questing for a difference in details like navigation, or faucets, for that matter -- it's probably a sign that your overall concept has way too much sameness going for it.  You should be looking to broader strokes to create a point of differentiation.  Much broader strokes.

Compounding the difficulty is the emergence of social media as a marketing force.  One hundred and forty characters is one hundred and forty characters, no matter how you count it.  Nonetheless, there have been numerous innovations in ways to use those characters to provide a different experience for the follower.  Ditto Facebook apps, widgets, iPhone apps, and all the other stuff we play with every day to try to improve the perception of the brands we work on.

The fabled "Horse of a Different Color" has to come earlier.  In the positioning, the big idea, and in the concept -- of the spot, the ad, or of the experience you want a prospect to have.  That's the place to apply what Seth talks about in Purple Cow (I find it amusing that the horse in the Emerald City was also purple.)  If your concept is just like everybody else's, no amount of innovative typography, photography, illustration, animation, or music composition is going to be enough to make it stand out.

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