Meme Huffer

Great Quotes for Planners #40 -The Art of Lighting a Creative Brief

"There are two kinds of light -the glow that illuminates and the glare which obscures" -James Thurber

A fundamental task of any planner is to take a complex problem (or client brief) and turn into something which the creative teams can work with.

Generally, there is an 'expansionist' phase to this, where the planner shines a bright light into every dark crevice in order to understand the issue in its totality. This may mean interrogating the product, deconstructing the brand architecture, mining the data, wading through the trend reports, talking to the customer, etc.

While this is a necessary stage, it is critical that we don't get blinded with information. And it is even more important that we take the time to do the 'reductionist' phase and light the creative brief in an artful manner.

(photo credit: peteer01 on flickr)

Secret Nazi weapons revealed

From here (via ffffound)

"Daddy, what's a meme?"

(I'm spending waaay too much time on ffffound.com)

Meme Huffer is 1!

Warning: obligatory & slightly self-congratulatory post for making it to one year of blogging (well, a year and a few days).

My first year of blogging: 180-odd posts, 219 comments, a little bit of spam and a Technorati ranking of 112,625. But as regular readers will know, the volume of posts has slumped dramatically in the past months, coinciding non-coincidentally with the new job.

But birthdays are a time for contemplation of the year behind and a chance to make plans for the one ahead, so a resolution has been made and Meme Huffer will continue with renewed vigour.

(photo credit: princessrica on flickr)

Great Quotes for Planners #39 -Bertrand Russell on getting work sold through your clients organisation

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." -Bertrand Russell

I'm sure many of us are familiar with this scenario: the agency team present new creative work to the brand manager, the marketing manager and maybe even the marketing director. They love the work -great news, think the agency team.

The clients leave the agency armed with scripts, an artbag full of boards and maybe even a DVD of some reference and they head back to their offices and show the work to their superiors.

Shortly thereafter the account director receives a call from the brand manager, who explains that, after some 'coaching' from the aforementioned superiors, he now realises that the work (which he earlier described as "spot-on" and "brilliant") is actually somehow wrong and so could you go again please?

The moral of the story is that the agency team (suits, planners and, yes, creatives) should always present the work every time, right up to taking the client's board through it.

Always.

(photo credit: Yousenovski on flickr)

The map for smug West Londoners

Found at, er,  ffffound.com

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

UPDATE: apparently Mr Collins doesn't like this clip, so its been taken off YouTube. Shame. (If anyone knows a secret hosting site, let me know. I won't tell a soul, honest)

Instead, let's have another seminal Phil Collins moment.

You can't move on YouTube for Cadbury's Gorilla spoofs nowadays, but the prize goes to this film from Wonderbra:

(found over at the ever-wonderful Cherryflava)

Great Quotes for Planners #39 -on Capitalism

For those weeks when you wonder why you work in advertising:

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff"  -Frank Zappa

Seperated at Birth corner

First up, this effort from Coors Light (anyone know the agency?):

and then this for McDonald's from my old chums at Leo Burnett:

A complete coincidence, I'm sure.