KISS and MACS

KISS - Keep it simple stupid.

Its supposed to be the holy grail of advertising. Simple, concise, and easy to understand. Most campaigns are centered around this for many reasons. Information overload from competition, lack of information, and just plain easy communication are usually the reasons. Good examples of this is medicine ads. Sure you could take time to show why your asthma medication is better than the others but in reality people wouldn't know the difference, all they want to know is will it get rid of my asthma so I can dance in a field of flowers in my sundress.

But today we learned a new concept:

MACS - Make it complex stupid.

Making a concept complex and layered and heavy on information seems like the opposite of what you would want. Why would people wade through mountains of info with their free time? But brands do this all the time. Look at sports. Simple concepts. Put ball/puck/object through/over/past an object. A winner a loser. But it demands some complexity because people love sports. They are obsessed with stats, history, tradition, that make the experience richer and turns casual fans into the grandmas with the pins of 40 years of collection stapled to a jersey. Making it complex alone though isn't the answer you have to make people work for it, making people feel like they are part of a club that they belong alone.

Make tough products easy and digestable, and easy products complex and intricate.

I wish someone had put it like this 2 years ago, it probably would have helped.

Please feed the lions.

When someone comes up to you and asks: "What do you think of this?" how do you respond?

Do you give honest feedback, not sparing details hoping to make it better?
Do you dumb it down tell them its good to help save a possible argument?
Or do you say I like it, because the worse their work is the better yours looks?

Most people would be the first two, Mark Fenske thinks its number three. And as much as I hate to admit it, he might be right. We use these little lies to help justify being a good friend or to save face, but sometimes it is that simple drive to be the best.

While it might seem like the lions don't really want to eat you. They might just be waiting.

But part of me also calls bull shit. I've heard a few times now that to achieve greatness in this industry, you need to sacrifice. Sacrifice family, friends, time, and morals to reach the upper echelon. This is a flat out lie. If you can't reach the top without violating every inch of your soul. You can keep the top.

So I've decided to be open and honest about work I see, becausewhile I might not be right about the work, I refuse to compete through capitulation, and am done listening to people telling you to sacrifice me for tiny gold statues.

Want to know how to be a success in advertising?

Read this.

A great post from a succesful man hopping the pond to Europe.

Three levels of advice

Level One: Mark Roddy ECD of BBH NYC.

"I want people with big ideas. BIG ideas. Look at Droga five. Ideas like Tap Project and the phones for public school students in NYC. People at my level want those ideas and at times are a little afraid because they don't know where to get them from."



Level Two: Paul Foulkes CD of BBH NYC.

"I have alot of friends who are creative directors who hire these kids out of Miami or Crispin and their book are filled with cool ambient and OOH, but they can't make a print ad for their lives. I want people who can do cool stuff we all do. You just have to remember 85% of the time I just need a damn print ad, radio ad, coupon. Show me you can do the simple as well."


Level Three: Victoria Weeks AD at BBDO SF.

"You should put in your book what you want to be hired to do."




All good advice. Now go do it.

Note: These are not direct quotes but summations of conversations I had with these people during the summer.

A good tip on headlines.

This tip comes from one of the fine gentlemen at BBH London. He is a CD writer there and has a fantastic blog at http://scampblog.blogspot.com/. Its full of great tips and stories from advertising. Great for us up and comers.

Here's a good quote I liked regarding how a headline should be used:

"In fact, many of the world’s best headline-writers are quite open about their secret weapon – a great art director.

With a really well art-directed headline, the idea and the execution are seamless. I like ideas where the headline is written in a place where type naturally occurs. Which means that your headline can be a photographed object - a visual element in its own right, which just happens to have type on it - rather than a boring old typeset headline."

Charles hall, a professor at VCU, is adamant about this point and so am I. Headlines by themselves make it an ad instead of an interesting communication. Sometimes plopping down a headline is easy and gets it out the door, but by taking a few hours you can turn it into something people will actually read.

Do it for your mama.

Write advertisements for yourself. Its the mantra here. Do things that are cool that you like. Every teacher says it. The problem is no one does, me included.

We walk into review with our little pile of papers clutched in our arms hoping that the teachers see something that we missed or love the ideas that came out of our tired brains late last night. The 3-5 seconds of silence after a presentation are always the worst, unless you get cut off half-way through by Coz bellowing "Are you FUCKING kidding me?"

Most of the time it devolves into this:

"I see what you're trying to say but it isn't clear. This has been done before. Dig deeper. NEXT!"

It feels like the same advice every two weeks. Its frustrating. So in our desperation working on Sylvia's Soul Food my partner and I just went off on a tangent had some fun and came up with this little idea (Click for larger view):

The basic idea here: The high light of C-list celebrities lives.

I wasn't going to present it. I was afraid of it. I thought it would get ripped apart, laughed at, and discarded. I was afraid because it was just a joke that we threw around. I have to thank my partner for making me do it, since this would be lying on a notebook right now if it wasn't for him. It wasn't thrown away, instead it was approved, in a Coz/Wayne sorta way they're famous for.

The moral here was that we did something we liked and it worked. It has personality and humor that came from both of us. It was our idea. Our other ideas were manifestations of what we thought people wanted to hear.

Its so easy to forget that were here not to make things that sell stuff. We're here to make things that are funny or clever or intriguing, and hopefully people will remember that when they go out for groceries. If you make the ad for you, there is more voice passion and voice than any where else and people will like it.

Do it for your mama. She'll like it because you like it. She loves you the most.