John Drake

The Two Roles Of Planning

Going to a Google Firestarters one day would be great. Neil gives a nice recap of the latest. This bit really stood out.

There are two main ways in which planners can bring value:-

1. Constant optimisation: focusing on the little things that make the big differences. To optimise approaches or work to maximise performance or effectiveness. The daily work of creative development, building communications strategies, evaluating and understanding performance, improving, monitoring, briefing. The analogy here was a sheepdog herding a flock of sheep, where the course of the brand has been set and the planners job is to keep it on course. This, said Richard, is when we need to be right.
2. Periodic disruption: where planners are genuinely charting a new future for a brand, a future that changes a direction, creates new value. This is all about imagination and audacity, and the analogy is Thomas Heatherwick's Olympic cauldron. You don't iterate to get there - this is a creative, intellectually or inspirationally-driven leap. But this is where planners need far more to be interesting than right.

Be Someone Who Sees The Future

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.

Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

That's from this Warren Ellis piece.

How To Make Parents Drive Slower

 "They don't have control of the speed that you drive, but they do have control of your heart."

Pixel Track

In just 3:49 we're shown a problem, presented with a solution, have the technology fully explained, and see nice uses of the final product. Things aren't rushed, nor are they drawn out. it's very concise.

Seeing some of these signs in use would be a delight. I kind of liked the sound of the changing messages, too.

Re-Imagining Twitter

He's right about this. Nearly one billion users have tried Twitter and not stuck around. One billion. Lots of interest, hard to understand. These changes, or ones like them, could help turn the platform into a place of more global conversation and reaction. Which doesn't really exist today on a wide scale. Thanks Nick.

How Ads Really Work

'They laughed when I sat down at the piano'.

Bernbach remarked "What if this ad had been written in a different language? Would it have been as effective? What if it had said, 'they admired my piano playing'. Would that have been enough? Or was it the talented, imaginative expression of the thought that did the job? That wonderful feeling of revenge.

Suppose" Bernbach continued, "Winston Churchill had said 'we owe a lot to the RAF' instead of 'never was so much owed by so many to so few', do you think the impact would have been the same?" He also said "logic and over-analysis can immobilise and sterilize and idea. It's like love. The more you analyse it, the more it disappears." And I think the reason for that in Watzlawick's language is that you cannot translate analogue communication into digital.

Let me leave you with seven propositions. And I believe that if you put these into practice you would achieve more effective brand building advertising and avoid a great deal of the agony that is often involved in producing it.

• Define the advertising goal as building saleability.
• Stop talking. Mostly about messages.
• Start talking about associations and about relationships.
• Recognise the power of analogue communication.
• Shift your focus away from the abstract message or idea to the advertisement as a whole.
• Resist the urge to over-analyse and over control.
• And if all that fails, just concentrate on being a 'charming guest'.

This is important.

The Blend At Drake Cooper

Having some fun with The Blend.