John Drake

On Advice For A Creative Career

I met Colleen DeCourcy at a conference in New York. She gave one of the best presentations about how to think about digital and I had to talk with her afterwards. It was 2009, I think, so everyone was really trying to figure things out. She had some great thoughts and I've always tried to keep up with her thinking as much as one can.

Here's a great Q&A that's chalked full of great advice for people working in the industry, or wanting to one day.

What is the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome, as it relates to your industry?
Creative people really love comfort and repetition. We have this conceit that we don't, that we’re free spirits. But most truly creative people have managed to find a way to push everything else away, to make space for their own ideas. It’s a process of elimination and discipline. Creative people are really very set in their ways.  It’s called “being sure.”  It’s necessary. 

This whole idea of perpetual change and discomfort, which Wieden has always embraced, is at it’s core a kind of creative trauma.  So, the chaotic, changing world shouldn’t be taking us off our game, but it really makes things hard. 

What motivates you?
Fear. A Fear that I would be invisible and that I would start and finish my life and no one would ever know. It's not ego. It's not that I have to be important. It's that I have to matter. When you combine that with a lot of curiosity and the curse of being easily distracted, it’s a bit of a shit show really. Still, it keeps me going. It makes me work hard.

What advice would you give to your daughter at the start of her career?
Get up everyday and commit yourself to something that doesn’t feel like it’s taking more than it gives.

There's lots more here.

On Stopping While You're Good

It was sad to see Grantland close. There are about ten blogs and smaller sites that I bookmark to read during spare time and that was one. There was a wonderful range, and yet it still always seemed to land in sports and pop culture. The writing was excellent.

It's a bummer to see it go, but it's a nice feeling that it stopped while it was still good. Seinfeld is always admired because it never got bad. I think Jon Stewart did the same.

But my favorite example is Gary Larsen and The Far Side. He stopped doing those long before they got bad. So they'll always be good.

He has asked that fans not re-post his work on the web. So I won't. But if you've never seen the cartoon, search around. I think you'll laugh.

 

On Being Exact

“It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

 

The Five Life Stages of Happy

Once you hear about the five life stages of happiness, they make sense. Sometimes it's the way things are said that finally makes it connect; the choice of words and just packaging something up as one complete thought. Which is what happened nicely in this piece.

It's even better to take away the ages. Most people are in one stage and it may not line up with the ages in the video. And that's okay, isn't it?

The helpful thing is that someone has packaged it all up in a very nice, and logical, way.

Art Isn't Sending A Few Tweets

There's a great interview with Moby which has been nicely summarized here. It's about creativity with digital tools. There's a part when he talks about depth, and how easy it is to sidestep doing the work to get there.

"We’re sacrificing rare creativity that has depth for ubiquitous creativity that is very shallow. Like letters vs emails. A letter was rare, but people would tend to write quite a lot. Emails are ubiquitous and they tend to be twenty words. It’s the same sort of thing with music thirty years ago, someone might work on it for six months, and really struggle and it was rare and perhaps had depth, whereas now, you can make an okay sounding piece of music in 30 minutes but it might not have has much depth. [The danger is] because if you can make something look pretty good with not that much effort it’s hard to push yourself to make something great."

I suppose this has always been true, regardless of digital tools. Just really liked the way he said it. 

Analytics and Strategy and Planning

In general, this is a great piece. When looking at pure strategy you need data and analytics to get you, and the room, to where things need to go. The Netflix quote is from here and it's a wonderful articulation of how to think about the importance of data every day.

But again in this piece, just like Always and Never, things aren't black and white, they are shades of gray.

The piece talks about Got Milk? and how the insight that led to that effort, using a focus group, is now something 'of the past.'

I wonder how analyzing milk data would get to Got Milk?'s taste appeal pairing insight with peanut butter sandwiches and cookies as quickly or as decisively as talking with milk drinkers did?

I also wonder if the Got Milk? campaign launched today for the first time, if it wouldn't have many of the similar successes that it had years ago?

Just because we can now do a new thing doesn't mean we should stop doing the other thing. It means we must think more critically and thoughtfully at the onset. Choosing our tools and approaches with care, versus defaulting to one. Ironically, that's what we did in the past. And with the way so many people talk now, it's what we're at risk of still doing today. Just with the new thing, so that makes it okay.  

Talking Programmatic

I enjoy talking about programmatic media. Thanks to the team at Thalamus for the good conversation.

Always and Never

I'm going to start keeping a list. It's going to be a collection of marketing posts where authors choose to say that brands should never do something, or always do something.

One of the things the world has taught us, particularly over the last 20 years, is that nearly everything isn't black or white: it's shades of gray. Part of learning and empathy is that things are, mostly, situational. 

The latest in my feed: A brand should never use a hashtag. Right, it makes no sense for the World Wildlife Fund to hashtag campaigns in an attempt to connect people around the world with animals or issues. Nope, WWF is a brand, and they should NEVER use them.

What about #LikeAGirl? Nope, never.

Examples of "never" are everywhere. Like how a brand should NEVER use a brand extension. Because Disney had no business creating Disneyland.

You can find the same for "always".

Never and Always constrict thinking. They're most prevalent in presidential election politics, of course. Which is such a lovely topic to follow.

Sometimes I wonder if authors and publishers choose Always or Never thinking because our industry can sometimes lack confidence so we take dramatic stances in response...

One of the things that's nagged me about advertising--the industry I love--throughout my career is that there is no official certification that agencies or practitioners need to get before doing the job. Lawyers and architects show the confidence of their extended education. Advertising professionals, on the other hand, don't have anything.

But I'm quickly coming to one positive outcome of this: there's no ordained and proper way to do things. Channeled correctly, that openness is a blessing for clients because it means that a (good) agency must deeply study the brand, the business problem, the audience needs, the marketing opportunities and create a tailored solution from both proven theories and new ideas.

Always and Never have cautious roles here for once they're gone we increase our odds to make things distinctive. Approach solutions with 'yes and.' Embrace 'perhaps' and 'what if.' Get rid of the devil's advocate. Create ambitious things like this, this and this.

Of course, it is incumbent on good practitioners to know and understand the well-proven theories for only then can we use them, or know how to break from them. They help us think. But there are no shortcuts. And that's what Always and Never are... shortcuts.

It's good to understand the foundational reasons that someone might say Always or Never. Then, adorn yourself the ability to agree and use the theory sometimes, while at other times, break the shit out of either when the problems and opportunities are pointing you to do so.

Temperament

Munger: We’ve learned how to outsmart people who are clearly smarter than we are.

Buffett: Temperament is more important than IQ. You need reasonable intelligence, but you absolutely have to have the right temperament. Otherwise, something will snap you.

Munger: The other big secret is that we’re good at lifelong learning. Warren is better in his 70s and 80s, in many ways, than he was when he was younger. If you keep learning all the time, you have a wonderful advantage.

Buffett: And we have a wonderful group of friends, from whom we can learn a lot.

A weekend treat of advice, courtesy of Farnam St.

Workin' On Our Night Moves

This is a short piece but ever since reading it I must have listened to "Night Moves" a dozen times again.

It's a song that immediately puts you into a scene from days gone by. At least it does for me.

It took Seger 6 months to write it and he took influence from a range of people for this one song.

Sometimes great ideas happen in an instant. And sometimes it takes good ol' grit to get where you want to go.