My mother suffered a nervous breakdown. We’ve gone from the bad days, to good and bad days to finally and thankfully good days with the occasional bad moment. It’s been really hard on all of us especially my father. When this happens the natural reaction is one of remorse, fear and confusion. I found myself reaching inside in a way that I have never done. Now the my mother is making good progress and actually showing signs of a complete recovery that I myself found myself really contemplating the weight of this emotional turmoil.

I will never be the same now, a good friend of mine yesterday explained to me that “it’s only through the trials of life as awful as they may be that we truly begin to understand ourselves”

I feel I have a better understanding of my family and therefore myself, my position within my own family that I’ve created by being married. This has been one of the hardest things I think I’ve ever had to deal with. I’m not exaggerating.

It’s strange how Everything seems to snap into focus you realise that just walking down the street overhearing someone’s mobile phone conversation just how much we complain about, or are dissatisfied with is really not that important.

I’m sorry, I’ve not been around that much for my friends, I’ve been in the eye of this storm for too long.

I’m still putting the pieces together, writing this is helping. One thing I don’t want this to be is a cathartic emotional vomiting. What it is: is being thankful for small, simple and genuine things in life. The fact that my mum made me a cup of tea without me asking I guess was her way of saying thank you. A month ago she didn’t even recognise me and was convinced that I was not who I said I was.

It was just a cup of tea, but it meant the world to me.

The Peperami winners have been announced, I’m sure you’re with me in that it is no surprise that the winner and runner-up are both ex-agency creatives one of  which was a creative director.

I’m not surprised, but I am secretly pleased.

Advertising is not just an art but a practice.

I’ve read some interesting blog posts, possibly one of the best was by Amelia Torode.   I believe she asked some very interesting questions, and gathered some good responses. At the time I was tempted to leave my own. I did however decide to wait to see the final outcome. I could say I was clever in knowing that it would ultimately be won buy an agency creative ~  however I did think that possibly it would be a young team wanting to gain recognition. Over the last year so many folk in Ad land have been made redundant, and it does make me very pleased that two individuals who were made redundant have not only gained themselves recognition made themselves some money but also the process of working on a brief in this way must be very  satisfying.

The majority of the negative comments that I’ve seen or been told directly over the very use of crowdsourcing for the Peperami brief was generally based on insecurity, this may be just my take on it though…

Think of it like this, if you are a creative team and you work freelance and you go in for two weeks to an agency to work on a brief deliver the concept and work up the idea to then leave, you’d effectively make the same amount of money had you entered this competition. The big difference here is the agency effectively profiteers from crowdsourcing freelances. No doubt if you’re reading this and you’ve been a freelance gun for hire to know exactly what I’m talking about.

The one interesting point from all of this, is the original Peperami campaign created by Lowes ~ yes they were paid ~ yes they ran the account ~  more than that, had they owned or even shared the intellectual property with Peperami they could have made far more revenue…

The original Peperami campaign was a stroke of genius and had many variations that ran very successfully for many years.

This is a wee bit like new Coke which later became replaced with classic Coke was this the biggest blunder of all time or ultimately one of the most devious and successful marketing campaigns of all time. As America rejected new Coke, in turn the arrival of classic Coke sales almost doubled. Was it because the consumer is believed that Coke had listened to outcries and given them what they always wanted? Which then got known as classic Coke which was the very drink they weren’t drinking that much of prior to the arrival of new Coke…

Had Peperami not found a suitable answer to their creative brief, they could have been quite justified in rolling out a TV campaign featuring the Peperami animal taunting the viewers for not being able to crowdsourcw  an idea better than he was. Back into the fold, mad bad and just as dangerous to know is ever.

Peperami, have also gain massive exposure for free too….

I do think we can see far more crowdsourcing of creative ideas, and I do believe the one strongest area for this is charities. Who are always in need of great communications and inherently also strapped for cash….

I’m not sure that I’m alone in my feelings, potentially crowd sourcing can have a happy ending.

Where Peperami end up taking this I’m not sure.

Where others now take the crowdsaucing of creative ideas to fulfil brand communications is definitely the most interesting development in our industry quite some time.

A I worked as a creative producer, I worked my way up from being a runner in the TV department of AMV.

I had a very close working relationship with all of the directors, we spent hours working on scripts treatments proposals we won probably one job in three which is quite high….

What I found most intriguing & generally very annoying was that everybody on the set from the makeup artists, crew catering, the agency, the client to the spotty teenage runner believed they were the director. Genuinely they felt that every single time they open their mouth they were going to provide wisdom and insight into exactly how to set up the shot and effectively work the storyboard and make a great Ad.

Part of my job on the day was shielding my director from this torrent of unsolicited advice.

One day, I really was working with one of the biggest names in the industry in the Nineties. There we were up at Pinewood Studios spending about £1 million on the day, and many millions in post.

I was very keen to see how the crew would relate to this director but more importantly how the agency and the clients would treat the director.

The suggestion is almost came thicker and faster than ever. Generally dressed up with compliments about other Ads & feature films the director had been chosen by.

Over lunch, the director and I walked up to the back lot and took a sneaky peak at the set of Fifth Element. The director and I were comparing shooting commercials and shooting feature films the studio system versus the client system. What he told me was, “I am paid to be the fall guy on a TV commercial because everybody wants to be the director on the shoot, but when we get into postproduction -  nobody wants to be me,  and certainly not the editor.”

I asked him ~ you’ve got this far how did you do it?

His response was simple and to the point

“I tell them it’s a great idea, but were running short on time and money. – if we have any time at the end of the day we can work on the shot then”

My reply was, “really?”

His reply was “least said easiest to mend”

Three days later we were in the edit suite and not one of the suggested shots had worked their way in and nobody had any interest in the first assembly or rough cut

By the end of week two

Everybody was back with their opinions

So the moral of the story is:

At a point of Genesis with an idea everybody believes they should have their own input

At the point of creation ~ there should only be one voice

At the point of assembly  ~ there should only be one voice

At the point of delivery ~ there should only be one voice

This is just a little bit too ideal, and maybe only Stanley Kubrick achieve this

It’s very easy to have an opinion when actually it’s not going to be counted or realised

It’s even easier to make suggestions comments and have opinions when effectively looking at what is almost the finished article

when you act like this, your not the Auteur ~ your the critique….

~ and you know all too well what they say about opinions

Opinions are like assholes

Everybody’s got one

So BMW have the M-series, regarded as the pinnacle of race bred engineering. It has a cachet, based on motorsport. Similarly Ford have both Cosworth and RS, again these badges of distinction come from the unruly and experimental world of rallying motocross. Proving a Sierra on the RAC world Championships ensured sales of regular every day Sierras.

So why does an advertising agency need the “M” factor?

I do strongly believe that every agency out there right now needs to have and experimental division which effectively creates works that compete on a global stage and are designed to be competitive and challenge both technology and the expression of creativity. These works then go on to filter into the every day running of the creative accounts. What is today unimaginable, tomorrow becomes inevitable. Today we need to be creating the unimaginable, so tomorrow the competition copy, to become the inevitable…

This department or offshoot, needs to be run in a maverick and at times antiestablishment way so as to ensure the originality and premium productivity of its output. But simply work for work stake or just another idea that we can bash out and glue that’s quite funny and it’s not the cost is too much to do. This really isn’t the attitude.

More importantly, it’s a way of cock waving with credibility and placing flags on the grounds of we got there first, can do attitude

To some degree it does exist, but they truly feel like BMWs M division, or AMG to Mercedes.? You pay more you get more, but more than that you get a level of attention, aggression and composure to the product.

I recently went for a nice beer with some old colleagues of mine, and was quite shocked by that naive question one of the very senior creatives asked me which was. “Who are Poke?”  in a lot of ways poke is the “digital think tank” of Mother.  Their billings are really quite small in comparison with say AKQA, but in terms of influence they are definitely top five.

Is this or is this not the working practice of the “M” factor?

What agencies don’t need is the X-factor.  By this I mean the hiring of individual talents that has achieved greatness elsewhere to then be brought into the fold to produce ultimately quite respectable work over the two year contract. But never really shine the way they’d done before. You can’t simply just hirer in talent believing them to have the X-factor ~ because no one person is truly responsible for their creativity. Especially not an advertising. Which is by the very nature collaborative. Great teams produce great work

Great racing teams produce great racing cars

Turn that, into an off shoot department of an automotive company

And you have the BMW M3

create a separate division of your own agency, filling up with the very people you need. They also will work across the accounts that you have as when you need them but most of all they will be pioneering and spearheading forward creative direction. In the words of one of my favourite ECGs of all time, “ if your looking for a safe pair of hands the bash at a few ads, look elsewhere. If you looking for somebody to shake up your entire department and get ideas you would get from anywhere else, then this is who you hire”

so at my prediction for the future, it’s not about hiring in the talent with say the X-factor. It’s about developing the team that have “M” power.

Turn that, into a department of an Advertising agency

And you’ll always have, “the new agency model” way of doing things that others simply copy

Don’t start with a brief

Do start and finish with a dream
Create the unimaginable & the “you can’t do that”…..
oh yes you can…