Meme Huffer

Friday ffffound

Probably not the most plannerly argument on earth, but, hey, it's Friday...

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Great Quotes for Planners #66 -Plutarch on briefing creatives

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." -Plutarch 

Don't bombard your creative teams with dense piles of facts and large uncut logs of research reports, especially at the initial brief.

Rather, give them some highly flammable insights and then work with them to gently fan the flames.

See also

image credit: notoriousJEN

Great Quotes for Planners #60 -keep your eyes open

"You can observe a lot just by watching" -Yogi Berra

For me, this quote nails one of the joys of planning -figuring out what people really think, need and want.

All too often, the lens of the focus group will distort the subject of your enquiry and the statistics can obscure rather than reveal the truth (it is true that the average person has one breast and one testicle, but that doesn't help us much).

So get out there in the real world. Don't just sit behind glass. Talk to people about what makes them tick. Be curious. Notice stuff.

Great Quotes for Planners #59 -On talented assholes

I've just discovered (literally, on my suit's bookcase) a book called "Kiss & Sell". It is not only full of great crit of real-world press and poster work, but its also peppered with useful quotes from everyone from Lao Tzu to Bill Bernbach. I was about to strip-mine it for GQFP, but got stopped dead in my tracks by this paragraph from Steve Hayden's foreword:

"David Ogilvy said that we should hire gentlemen with brains. Of course, that was when you had ten employees for every million dollars in billing. These days, thanks to the agglomerations that have taken most of the profit out of the business, we can afford less than a quarter of a person for every million in dollars. So I suggested that we change our policy to hiring assholes with talent. They're harder to live with, but they do deliver a better ROI than gentlemen and gentlewomen."

Now, I've worked in agencies run by gentlemen, and also in agencies dominated by talented assholes. And I'll take the latter everytime.

Yes, intelligence and politeness will allow an agency to deliver a consistently 'good' standard of  work. But this same culture can also inhibit the leap from 'good' to 'great'.

Better a culture that accepts the need for challenges and questions, a culture which believes in for tempering strategies and creative work in the fires of argument and review. A culture that refuses to settle for 'good'.

image of Hunter S. Thompson via ffffound.com

Baudrillard has "disappeared"

Last Tuesday, "slippery Postmodernist" Jean Baudrillard left this mortal coil (or did he? -after all, he once said "death is pointless. You have to know how to disappear").

Perusing a few of the online obituaries, I was directed to this mash-up of GTA and 'Simulacra and Simulation': (the sound quality is a bit crap -plug your cans in and crank the volume)

Also, pop over to Truth competently told for a Postmodern joke.