Here Be Monsters|blog

A little more on ideas

Just wanted to add this from The Before and After blog to the debate on ideas.

Quoting Voltaire, Good is the enemy of great.

Oh so true.

rejection

Had an interesting conversation with a client this morning, all about being a creative. And he was surprised to hear me say that being a creative is mostly about rejection. Well, if you care about what you do it is.

You reject your ideas. If you're still working in a team, your partner rejects your ideas. Your boss rejects your ideas. Planners, account people, research groups and clients reject your ideas.

So, if you're going to work as a creative, and you should it's brilliant fun at times, then you should grow a thick skin, quickly and embrace rejection.

Reminds me of something someone said to me about sportsmen and women. The best lose more than the rest.

A WISE LESSON FROM AN OLD AD

This is a bit like finding a fiver in the pocket of the pair of trousers you've just put on, or discovering an old jumper in the back of the cupboard whose style has just come back in fashion.

An old much loved ad from the past that I had completely forgotten about until I bumped into it on Youtube.

A lesson in life in 30seconds and yet it still does remembers who's paid for it for the brand. Can anyone think of anyother ad that occupies this space. Possibly Adidas, impossible is nothing. Any others? I wonder if you could put a self-help book together made up of only ads?

Shaming the pros?

Some very smart, very stupid or just plain lazy creatives working on the Chevy account over the water came up with the idea of letting the general public come up with an ad to be played out during the superbowl.

As if it's not tough enough convincing people that being a creative in an ad agency isn't one long lunch and/or coke binge but a very demanding and difficult job that requires considerable skill and talent rarely found in mortal form.

All a bit like Faking It. Can you spot the commercial from someone who until two weeks ago didn't even know ads are in 30sec segments?

So, have we creatives been exposed as charlatans, or can we sleep better tonight safe in the knowledge we have been vindicated?  Well you decide.

IN Praise of Hard work

Okay, so you work long hours, but does that mean you're working hard? Because, "long" and "hard" are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn't lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that's really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It's about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

It's hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It's hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable. It's hard work to tell your boss that he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It's easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It's hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It's hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Jobs or Alan Sugar or Julian Richer.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're succeeding by doing hard work.

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We're going to work for a big company, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We're going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day.

The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker's hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It's the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

Author Seth Godin.

I share it because it sums up perfectly what we're forever banging on about alot at Here Be Monsters, the constant need to be smart in what we do.

WELL IT MADE ME SMILE

I can't help but be impressed, perhaps not so much by the execution as by the fact someone bothered to take a pride in what they was doing and put a little more effort into it.

If your interested, the copy reads

And  in case you can't remember this is where Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned

 

what I learnt at school yesterday

The thing that stuck me the most about yesterday was the way that logic and creativity really are one and the same thing to children - hardly the most insightful lesson perhaps but it was a real joy to be able to see how naturally creative, confident and resourceful we are in our early years.  As Picasso said,“ Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up".

My favourite moment was chatting with 3 kids about who lives in the sky. It started off with clouds, planes, helicopters and spacemen, went onto birds, butterflies, dragons and ended up with Santa, the wind, snowmen and water.  100% correct answers and all delivered with utter confidence and self-assurance.

I also learnt that, robots are never pink, monsters can have 3 ankles and that Lexi Bo likes to lay on the ground and pretend to be dead all breaktime, although I didnt find out why.

More on the dadhood vibe Russell has pointed out this as worth listening to, I just have and once again he's on the money and I urge you to do the same, it's half an hour long. I warn you though it's as much a tearjerker as the Dick and Rick Hoyt story

 

why don't creatives blog | 2

Over at Beeker's fine blog she's taken it upon herself to find some creatives who do blog, well she picked the brains of someone else (fine planner behaviour of course), a mate and a rather glam headhunter, who came back with the following (some of you, of course, I already know, but the others I would like to).

• http://creativeinlondon.blogspot.com/
• http://whatiftheydid.blogspot.com/
• http://www.adsareboring.blogspot.com/
• http://www.niazipan.com/
• http://branddna.blogspot.com/
• http://www.scampblog.blogspot.com/
• http://gwenyip.blogspot.com/

If anymore of you are out there then I'll be glad to list you.

I seem to have started something here, and oh, big thank you, Beeker.

welcome 07

Welcome back, hope you had a lovely break and are suitably fortified to face the new year.  Already I'm loving 07, much is happening at Here Be Monsters, more of which I hope to share in the coming weeks.

Naturally, I used my time to improve myself and did a lot of reading and learnt some really useful stuff  Real important stuff too. Stuff like, sex workers in Roman times charged the equivalent price of eight glasses of red wine (not that different from your average Essex girl then). And that Just 20 words make up a third of teenagers' everyday speech.

Both facts and another 98 more like them can be found here and here

Wii with built-in viral appeal 2

Following on from my earlier post on Wii and it's build-in viralability, I have been pointed in the direction of this flickr set, by Russell. As, the man says, create something great and the marketing will be done for you.