I was reminded by reading Quincy Jones’ (very revealing) article in Vulture about the importance of embracing two things if one wants to be great at their creative craft: the emotion and the technique. Emotion should come somewhat naturally to those that can do well at a creative craft. Technique, however, does not. And truly brilliant technique is achieved through studying the history of a craft.
Quincy says this well when commenting on the pop music today.
"Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?"
Our industry’s history has seen some greatness. Take Mary Wells. After getting her start at DDB, she started Wells Rich Greene in 1966 and in three years (three years!) took her billings to $59 million.
How? They had a defined message about knowing how to position the number two brand in a category. In the 1960s this was especially unique. And it was that focus, combined with a public relations push on building a place of supreme creativity, which created one of the biggest rising star successes our industry ever saw. Read all about it in her book, A Big Life In Advertising.
On Thursday I’m presenting to AIGA and will probably touch on Mary Wells. It’s a lunch thing and I’ll try to make it somewhat interesting.
From John’s Pinboard
- Favorite ad of the week has to be Nike returning to what it does best. This long form ad is beautifully shot, uses as hashtag that is actually good, and acknowledges the challenges people in London have to do sport.
- I bang on about brand purpose all the time. One reason is because it meshes so we’ll with Mission and Vision in a way that brand positioning doesn’t. (Purpose is the why, Vision is the what, and Mission is the how.) This is a great write up on Purpose.
- A big welcome to Jeremy’s bio up on the website.
- I’ve noticed a difference on Twitter recently. Maybe these changes have been good because Twitter finally turned a profit.
- Across the web, Snapchat also turned their numbers around.
- Some digital thinkers who don’t think much of advertising sent this around because it states that ads will drop by 30%; but they apparently didn’t follow it to the end because it’s really a prediction about brands taking back the customer relationship and selling directly.
- Shannon dropped a good share in the Watercooler: a CAPTCHA that takes out the humans. Think of where that could go...
- Tesla had an amazing week of PR with their rocket launch and live feed of Starman sitting in his Tesla now orbiting the Earth. I think Elon’s just f-ing with us at this point—making it all look too easy.
- My good friend oversees Duracell’s creative at Wieden/NY. The latest is fun and true and creates a nice conversation online.
- Vina ran machine learning over some Super Bowl ads and the results are very cool to read about. Check it out on the DC blog.
- About 10 years ago BBH—one my personally favorite agencies—launched BBH Labs, a blog and became one of the leading voices of the developing web. That has since become less of a thing but now they have a new podcast starting. Could be one to check out.
- Amazon made headlines with their announcement about starting a logistics delivery service. News outlets said shares of UPS and FedEx “tumbled.” Not true, and global shipping isn’t something a new company just starts doing.
And yet...
- Wow. Nearly half of all US households are Prime Members now. Keep that in mind years down the road.
- Music producers are some of the most intriguing people to me. Here’s that Quincy Jones piece. He reveals a ton about a range of shit.