Being a great white shark can’t be all bad can it. Your one of the top predators in the sea, you live for a really long time and just roam the sea looking for dolphin sushi or a seal pup that just so happens to wander by – basically life is pretty good.
Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.
So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs and do so across all the channels they have.
A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches, the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.
So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.
The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breedofagency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.
So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.
The Kinetica Art Fair was on over the weekend and I wandered down to see the sights and sounds. Having been the previous year, I was well prepared for more steampunk cyber art but the talks last year were the highlight – although this year I missed the talks.
So onto the show. It was PACKED full of people which was great for everyone. I’m really hoping it was a massive success and elevated new forms of art to the masses. Here is a bref recap of caught my eye.
This was a mechanical drawing device that took plaster casts of heads and traced their contours and drew them out onto paper – A sort of 3D to 2D process. It was really interesting to watch it happen in realtime and the mechanical direct feel really made me want to watch this artwork form. The output was just as interesting – Something a bit disgusting and indefinable.
A very simple yet beautiful piece of work – If you imagine hundreds of threads of light forming ethereal bodies floating in space. I think the artist used fibre optic cables and ‘cut’ them to let the light bleed out thus creating the forms. There was no interaction or gimmickry (something common to a lot of the work) and I really liked it.
Kinetic Masters
My favourite section of the fair was the area devoted to pioneers of computer / cyber art. You can imagine at the time just how far these guys were innovating and their pieces are still of artistic value to this day. Just shows the process of creating art is irrelevant if the end result connects with you on some level.
I had heard of this ground breaking show at the I.C.A and it was brilliant to study the poster up close. A lovely piece of polish graphic design. A shame I left my camera at home as I wanted to note down all the artists present – If anyone has the poster or the programme of artists could they drop me a line. I’m sure I recalled that Xenakis was present.
So overall a very interesting experience. Some of the ‘art’ I would classify as playful interactions but then others would class it as art or even the process of creating the art. A debate I couldn’t get drawn to far into.
For another review of the fair, check Chris O’ Sheas excellent pixelsumo site.
Advertising is routinely accussed of ripping off ideas from all manner of sources with Youtube a particularly (ab)used source. The internet is so vast and easy to search that actually no such ripping off ever occured – just an unfortunate coincidence (which I’ve been on the end of). Sometimes totally true.
The point is not whats true but what the commentary around your work will be like. If you know your treading a fineline between homage and ripoff or you’ve discovered a similar piece then you have to have a ‘reaction plan’.
In a hypothetical world, it could work like this.
Creatives to Producer -> We’ve found this great video on youtube and the style and look really works well with our script.
Producer now in a dilemma -> These guys aren’t repped by any agencies, even if I did get in touch they’ll tell me to bugger off – Then we are screwed because they know what we are upto. Double bugger.
Everyone -> We are within the law here. So Ok we’ll go it alone.
So your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Creative collaboration could be your answer. Approach the original creatives with the idea that you want THEM to work with your creatives. They’ll get paid well, they’ll get the credit they deserve, you all work together with a director in a collaborative way.
The additional benefit is that you can use the influence of the creators to help share your work. If the original creators post it to Youtube and not the client or the agency, then there is a massive audience of people ready to appreciate a new piece by the same creatives. If it’s framed in a way where everyone knows it was a collaboration then you might just have a great piece of work that is warmly received.
The recent Pepsi ‘Refresh Everything’ work highlights the needs for agencies and clients to be aware of negative word of mouth around their work. All the amazing work on the main campaign around corporate social responsibility starts to be unravelled by a highly vocal fanbase and it could have possibily been avoided by embracing collaboration and not shunning it.
