If you work at DC then great advertising is important to you. You enjoy great ads in whatever form or media they take and you want to be part of creating great work that works. Surprisingly, not all agencies feel that way. The first one I worked at in LA didn't.
What I've come to appreciate is that agencies who truly believe in the power of great creativity have something in common: they all embrace some degree of chaos as a good thing. We have a value for that: it’s called breaking trail.
Breaking trail doesn’t exist to make something easier, or to get around something that we don’t want to do. Breaking trail is meant to remind us that if we need to do something different because we believe doing so will make the creative thing in front of us better, then we have the freedom to do it.
What I've come to appreciate is that agencies who truly believe in the power of great creativity have something in common: they all embrace some degree of chaos as a good thing. We have a value for that: it’s called breaking trail.
Breaking trail doesn’t exist to make something easier, or to get around something that we don’t want to do. Breaking trail is meant to remind us that if we need to do something different because we believe doing so will make the creative thing in front of us better, then we have the freedom to do it.
This is an amazingly important value to a culture that fosters creativity because we cannot invent processes that anticipate the best thing for each client in every situation. Process is incredibly important for many reasons. But getting to amazing creativity often needs freedom to seek its full potential.
If you’d like to see more on a case for chaos check out the recent presentation by Martin Weigel, head of Planning at WK/Amsterdam, during DMX/Dublin.
From John’s Pinboard:
- Facebook is overhauling its settings: making privacy controls easier to find, as well as shutting down its Partner Categories tool for marketers. This is good.
- Here’s a beautiful website for an airport. JFK Terminal 4 created something amazing in both design and usability.
- I recently found some amazing data support about how strong brands increase the value of an organization. File this away.
- Two Pentagram partners share their most inspirational books from their teen years. A cool collection but mostly I just like the idea of going through the exercise on the most influential books people had when they were young.
- Let’s dip back in time little over a year ago for some inspiration and revisit Bacardi’s super cool Instagram idea that allowed you to be the D.J.
- Someone used Machine Learning to organize and curate photographs from all the years of LIFE magazine. Enjoy getting lost for a few minutes.
- Sportcenter has re-invigorated its fabulous "This Is Sportcenter" campaign with its in-house creative agency. They did a nice job their first time out with this new ad featuring Aaron Judge.
- Audi had one of their design agencies design the brand for 2025. The result is something that works in the technology and the driving-culture we'll most likely have then. They also opened the end result to anyone with the code being available on GitHub.