Category Archives: Commentary/Opinion

Quotes for May, Graduation and Enlightenment

Tis that time of year again when graduation ceremonies and insightful speeches are given to enlighten the crowd. Other notables are included here for their wisdom and foresight within the advertising industry and beyond. So, take note; it’s time for May quotes!

 

Attract attention, maintain interest, create desire and get action. — E. Elmo St. Lewis, member, Advertising Hall of Fame

That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live — lives. — Theodore Francis MacManus, member, Advertising Hall of Fame

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. – Isaac Asimov

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. – Steve Jobs

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Click on the image to get a better view of the quote

Commencement Address/ Ithaca College May 1972

The place to start in advertising is the basic selling appeal. An appeal that fulfills some existing need in the prospect’s mind, an appeal that can be readily understood and believed. — Morris Hite, member, Advertising Hall of Fame

I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. — Leo Burnett, member, Advertising Hall of Fame

Art is not just our expression of life and of ourselves. It is not just our internal cry: Art is the lie we need about the world and ourselves. When we write or paint or act or compose, we are imposing an order, yes, but we are also crafting a world we can control, and usually it is one we can admire–or at the very least recognize. Art is not elite; art is not on a high shelf for a chosen few. Art is, like religion, a primary narcotic. — Marlon Brando

We have a need for an enlightened, watchful articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions that must be held sacrosanct. — Rod Serling

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

And, check out creative selections from my website.

Jolan tru!

Can AI and Creativity Coexist? An AI Followup

Recently we have been hearing a great deal about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on society. Last week this blog posted some of that information and this week shares with you a followup of sorts. Below is part of an interview with two professors from UCLA, Jacob Foster and Danny Snelson, and their take on AI’s influence on us. Thanks to Jonathan Riggs for spearheading the effort.

 

One of the Writers Guild of America’s demands in its current strike is for studios to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for creating, writing and rewriting TV and movie scripts and other material.

That might have sounded like a far-fetched concern just a few years ago. But with increasingly sophisticated, easily accessed AI tools already making inroads in other creative fields — literary magazines and fine arts competitions have lately had to contend with a glut of AI-generated submissions — there is a very real concern that expensive, time-intensive human creative labor could soon be outsourced to machines.

Higher education has reached an inflection point, too, now that AI tools can pass graduate-level exams and write serviceable essays at the touch of a button. Already, UCLA has posted a faculty guide and held a virtual town hall on the subject.

“We in the humanities have long thought about these kinds of questions, especially at the experimental limits of what constitutes creativity,” said Danny Snelson, a UCLA assistant professor of English and a writer, editor and archivist. “Lately I’ve been thinking about this artwork by Robert Rauschenberg from 1961 in which he sent a one-line telegram: ‘This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I Say So.’ It’s a perfect rejoinder to where some of the debates about creativity and AI are right now.”

Jacob Foster is a UCLA associate professor of sociology, computational social scientist and co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which unites scholars to explore cognition in all forms. He also has pondered the revolution that appears to be unfolding.

“Something terrible and amazing is about to happen, but no one has a full idea what these systems are capable of — or an entirely clear picture of how they do the things that they do,” he said.

In a joint interview, Foster and Snelson spoke about how chatbots could be used in teaching, offered historic analogs for the current AI explosion and opined about whether technology is actually capable of creativity. Answers have been edited slightly for length and clarity.

 

Are you excited or concerned about where AI is headed — or both?

Jacob Foster: I’m excited, given my broad interest in how complex wholes become smarter than their parts. I agree with the school of thought that says AI creates opportunities to get at a more fundamental understanding of — and clarity about — things like intelligence and creativity.

Danny Snelson                                                        David Esquivel/UCLA

Danny Snelson: I’m tremendously excited watching these developments unfold, but in a physiological sense — an excited state of fight or flight. Things are moving faster than we can understand them. These developments change things in ways that matter. The effects of algorithmic bias are real and the harms of technological development are never equally distributed.

Foster: To that point, I recently asked ChatGPT to write short plays about the nature of creativity. Until I explicitly told it that the expert on creativity had to be a woman, it always came up with a story about a singular male genius interacting with a female muse or with a female petitioner seeking his advice.

When you read the technical report for GPT, they have worked very hard to tamp down on problematic responses — for example, using reinforcement learning with human feedback — but even this neutral prompt resulted in a gender-biased response. AI is a mirror of the things we’ve written and the stories we’ve told, and that becomes a much bigger deal when it’s potentially determining who gets jobs or certain insurance rates.

I’m helping to organize a program at our Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics on the mathematics of intelligences, and trying to develop the theoretical foundations of AI is obviously a big motivation. I don’t think we have the resources within social theory to think about the possible rearrangements of society that such technologies could enable. We don’t know how to deal with social change that’s happening so quickly and pervasively.

 

Is AI capable of creativity?

Foster: We often reserve the notion of creativity for the capacity to generate interesting, novel things. But the contrarian part of me wants to argue when people say, “Large language models aren’t creative; they’re just putting things together.” Humans do that, too — look at many of the papers produced by students or academics!

Snelson: These systems reveal just how formally consistent most writing is. The more generic the formats that these predictive models simulate, the more successful they are. These developments push us to recognize the normative functions of our forms and potentially transform them.

Jacob Foster                                                           David Esquivel/UCLA

Foster: I think of the short film “Sunspring,” directed by my friend Oscar Sharp, which came out in 2016 and was the first movie written by AI. The script itself is only borderline coherent — this was a much earlier iteration of the technology — but it becomes something much more elevated when interpreted by the human actors, director and viewers.

Snelson: William S. Burroughs would cut up different texts and smash them together to produce a kind of surrealist energy. And he said this beautiful thing, which is that by using this cut-up method, you’re cutting into the present for the future to leak out. Right now, we have an opportunity to think about these new forms of fluid, coherent, algorithmic writing and how we might cut into them to see what they might reveal.

 

Can ChatGPT actually be an asset in teaching at the university level?

Snelson: In my Intro to Comics course, my students collectively wrote a full book in the first week, before they knew anything about the subject, using ChatGPT. I think it’s useful for them to experiment with the essay, and then for the rest of the course we instead use comics formats to produce new knowledge about comics.

We want our students to use modes of critical thinking to navigate the world around them, which now includes these AI tools. Experimenting and playing with them will prepare students, hopefully, to think critically in a technological environment that’s always changing and shifting.

Foster: That’s a very helpful tonic for the prejudice that the essay is a necessary gym to build the skills we want students to have. It’s of a type with my faintly ludicrous “old person” attitude that me learning how to use card catalogs made me uniquely capable to deal with the internet age.

Snelson: Right now, for example, there’s a moral panic in academe about essays. Having taught the fundamentals of argumentation, evidence and rhetoric for over a decade, I can tell you essay writing is not a mysterious formula. The essay has stood strong for a while now; it has limitations that other modes — some of which are still to be invented — may yet be better at when it comes to inspiring students to develop the kind of critical thought needed to address generative algorithms.

Foster and Snelson chatting in the UCLA Court of Sciences                                                                            David Esquivel/UCLA

 

How will we look back on this moment in time?

Snelson: If the history of major technological inventions is any indicator — I’m thinking here of the printing press and the internet — we’ll look back at this time as a moment of confusion and flux with a huge amount of widespread misunderstanding, and, hopefully, with unexpected avenues toward a better future.

It makes me think of this great anecdote by Rudy Rucker, who helped invent the genre of cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s. At some point, he woke up with this universal computing device in his hand that could access all of human knowledge while still living in the extreme disparities of contemporary America and he realized that a cyberpunk future was already well underway.

Foster: In some sense, this is a generalization and acceleration of the experience humans have always had negotiating a world of vast forces far beyond themselves.

As folks like the computer scientist Danny Hillis and mathematician Norbert Wiener have remarked, we’ve been dealing with artificial intelligence for centuries, in the form of corporations and bureaucracies that take human beings as their parts and turn them into vast, impersonal collective machines. Will we be able to tame or resist these new machines? I hope so.

 

On a side note: The Houston Area Apple Users Group will meet on May 20, 2023, with the main meeting topic being AI Chatbots. We will be comparing Google Bard, Microsoft Bing, and OpenAI ChatGPT. This meeting will be held via Zoom. 

Artificial Intelligence: A Blessing or Curse?

Artificial Intelligence or AI should have creative people concerned for their jobs, right? Umm, not so fast or at least not yet. Alex Collmer, CEO and Founder of VidMob believes that, without humans, AI could not be creatively effective. But, by embracing AI, humans’ creativity could increase. Thanks to Alex’s input, we explore this topic in this post.

When attending a recent tech conference, an investor expressed the opinion that, in five years’ time, all creative jobs will have vanished. Seriously!?

They predicted that advances in AI and machine learning would lead to the invention of tools that could do creative jobs better than any human. This is not a limited viewpoint. In fact, it’s increasingly prevalent throughout the advertising industry and beyond, according to Mr Collmer. 

In December 2022, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote an article entitled Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI; arguing that with AI already capable of certain cognitive tasks, there was potential that, in the near future, it could “master the art of generating high-quality advertising concepts”. 

It’s an interesting perspective, but there is an equally engaging counterargument — that AI and creativity are not fundamentally at odds and, in fact, AI can actually enhance human creativity. However, that statement should have a caveat with a word or two of warning.

While AI itself isn’t what marketers and creators need to fear, it’s other companies employing staff with the ability to leverage AI-generated data and use it cleverly that they should be worried about. Brands who fail to embrace the technology should be looking over their shoulders, as businesses that do leverage AI will achieve stand-out content and establish their competitive advantage. Hmmmm.

Responding to increasing content consumption

In an age where we spend more and more of our time looking at a screen, our digital content consumption has risen dramatically, especially when it comes to video. It’s little wonder, given the growing number of devices and platforms we have to choose from, and with each platform having its own creative nuances, marketers are under pressure to create more content to meet this demand. 

AI can be extremely helpful to under-pressure marketers tasked to create an increasing amount of content. But it is a misguided belief that algorithms can be deployed to simply solve all challenges faced by brands looking to scale their content production. When considering the ultimate goal of marketing success, volume should not be judged as the pinnacle. Rather, creative effectiveness is what matters and brands should be aiming to foster genuine, unique emotional connections with audiences — and AI can’t do this on its own. 

While AI can accurately measure the impact of multiple creative elements in a video ad — emotions portrayed by a model, the audio accompanying imagery, the logo placement, and so on — it’s not until humans analyze this data that meaningful strategic insights are derived to help fully understand audience reactions and the context around them. Once a deeper level of understanding is established, these insights can help optimize current campaign creative for success and assist with efficient planning. Without a human eye, the data itself carries limited value.

Augmenting creative with AI

Before AI-driven creative data, the production conversation has been primarily a conversation about building faster and cheaper creative. Sigh! The first step towards scaling meaningful creative content must be to understand it. 

Once marketers grasp which creative elements work well and why, and on which platforms, they can ramp up their content production while continuing to make the appropriate adjustments for each unique audience in every channel where they will be met. Every frame of an ad contains a myriad of creative decisions. AI-powered tools have the capacity to capture all of these data points in real-time – not just of a single ad, or whole campaign, but from all of the video content a brand has ever created. And while marketers may have a reasonable understanding of which of their ads worked and to what extent, AI provides an answer to the million-dollar question: Why? Good point.

By tracking all the behavioral signals from audience reaction to each creative element, AI collates the data that marketers require to build learning models to fully inform and enhance their future creative decisions.

Why AI needs creatives

The AI-powered creative platforms used in the business world all require an element of human input. When applied to marketing, human intervention can help ensure brand safety when using AI. For example, AI was used to draw insights from a luxury cruise liner’s campaign which revealed that under-30s responded positively to waterfalls, horses and beards.

If we assume all creativity is going to be replaced by AI systems, we could simply input all of this data into a generative AI tool and expect it to produce an effective ad. However, based on data alone, the output could end up ticking all the boxes – waterfalls, horses and beards on paper; however, in reality, the ad wouldn’t make sense. Bottom line, the outputs are only going to be as good as the prompts that an educated human can provide. 

Combining a human perspective and the context in mind, it enables the analyst to understand that the cruise line is viewed by under-30s as a mode of transportation to explore the world. They are more interested in getting off the boat. Waterfalls and horseback riding are merely examples of adventures that can be experienced when they are off the ship. When this strategic insight was applied to the campaign, the resultant creative was able to nearly triple the creative effectiveness. Insights are valuable to creative teams producing new ads, but without human interpretation the data alone fails to achieve this strategic impact and often leads to little sustainable performance improvement.

According to Collmer, AI tools open up a host of creative teaching to marketers and brands who have the ability and expertise to use the data. These teams will still need to maintain control of design oversight and ensure findings are considered in context with AI capabilities guiding their decisions. Where AI really shines and supports the human team beyond their own capacity is in efficiently generating a higher volume and variety of content to meet audience needs and platform requirements. The time saved by AI solutions affords creators space to indulge their creativity further and apply their expertise in different ways. 

Fears that AI is here to replace creators are ill-founded: the real threat posed by AI is to those who fail to embrace a human and AI partnership. Rather than reducing the creative roles available to humans, brands that embrace data and technology will require an expertly-trained workforce to interpret findings and apply insights creatively, eliminating guesswork and optimizing creative content. 

As a result, the next generation of marketers will evolve alongside AI capabilities and will require data analytics skills to enable a new level of creative efficiency based on data-driven decisions. Brands that embrace this new reality will find that they have a significant competitive advantage over those that continue operating the same way they have been for decades.

Thanks to Mr. Collmer for his AI insights and its influence on creativity. In my view AI is a tool, a tool that can enhance our creative efforts, not replace them. From a creative’s perspective, it’s always nice to have extra tools in one’s creative toolkit.

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

And, check out creative selections from my website.

Jolan tru!

Creativity + Constraints = A Good Pairing?

When one adds any sort of constraint to the creative process, one gets bogged down, right? Um, not necessarily. In fact, it could be just the opposite. From a variety of perspectives, constraints can open up dialogue and creative opportunities not originally thought or considered.

Portions of this blog post, originated by one, Lee Duncan, got me to thinking about just that. In the early stages of writing a short story, I jotted down some thoughts on my iPhone, knowing they would be automatically “copied” to another application (Notes) on my laptop so I could continue at some later date. When that later date came and I went to access them on my laptop, the additions I had made were nowhere to be found.

Oh, the horror!

I discovered a major constraint! Now, I had to rely on memory to reconstruct the few paragraphs I had previously written. I realized I couldn’t remember everything word for word so I revised my thinking a bit to write new dialogue based around what I did remember. All in all, it turned out okay (so far).

In his post, Duncan cites that designers, artists, writers, and creatives of all kinds are often told to “think outside the box” and let their imagination run wild. He asserts that creativity loves constraints. That limitations can actually enhance our creativity rather than hinder it? I tend to agree.

Both he and I agree that the idea that constraints can fuel creativity is not new. In fact, it has been embraced by some of the world’s most innovative thinkers, including Dr. Seuss, who famously wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” using only 50 different words. Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Thinking Differently

Constraints force us to think differently. Or “newly” as in my case. They force us to look at a problem from a different angle and approach it in a new way. When we’re faced with limitations, we’re forced to be more resourceful, more innovative, and more creative.

Duncan cites an Instagram example: In the early days, the platform’s co-founders were faced with a constraint: they had to build a photo-sharing app for the iPhone using only the phone’s built-in camera. Rather than seeing this as a limitation, they embraced it and created a platform that revolutionized the way we share and consume visual content.

The Brain on Constraints

Research has shown that constraints can actually stimulate the brain and enhance our problem-solving abilities. When faced with a difficult problem, our brains tend to default to familiar solutions. But when we’re presented with constraints, we’re forced to explore new solutions and think outside the box.

One study conducted by the University of Amsterdam found that participants who were given a set of constraints to work within were more creative in their problem-solving than those who were given no constraints at all. Another study found that imposing a deadline on a creative project actually increased creativity, as it forced participants to make decisions and move forward with their work.

In my view, this wouldn’t necessarily increase creativity but it would increase the possibility of failure or at the very least, some new ideas. Creativity would then evolve.

Ideas and Constraints

Constraints can therefore help us generate better ideas. When we’re given a blank slate and no direction, it can be overwhelming and difficult to know where to start. You’re sort of blindly throwing the dart at the board and seeing where it lands. But when we’re given a set of constraints, we’re forced to work within certain parameters, which can actually help us come up with more focused and relevant ideas.

When a group of designers was tasked with creating a new line of office furniture, they were given a set of constraints to work within, including a specific budget and a requirement that the furniture be modular and easy to assemble. Rather than hindering their creativity, these constraints helped them generate a range of innovative ideas that met the client’s needs and exceeded their expectations.

Applying Constraints to Facilitation

Constraints can also be applied to facilitation, or the process of leading a group through a creative problem-solving process. By imposing constraints on the group, the facilitator can help guide them toward more creative solutions.

For example, a facilitator might ask a group to brainstorm ideas for a new product, but impose a constraint that the product must be made entirely from recycled materials. This constraint forces the group to think about sustainability and environmental impact, which can lead to more innovative ideas.

If no constraints were added, the group might generate hundreds of new ideas but would have to undergo a due diligence exercise to decide which ideas were better and then further decide how to proceed. That’s another exercise entirely but well worth the time invested.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, constraints can actually be a powerful tool for fueling creativity. They force us to think differently, stimulate our brains, help us generate better ideas, and can be applied to facilitation to guide groups toward more innovative solutions.

When constraints happen, and they will, gather your thoughts and let your imagination roam, exploring new opportunities and possibilities. I think you’ll find that paired together, creativity and constraints make for a viable coupling.

 

This blog post is based upon an article by Lee Duncan, an IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Leader.

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

And, check out creative selections from my website.

Jolan tru!

 

The Season of Creativity

As each of our seasons progress, my good friend Felix Scardino passes on a seasonal message meant to inspire and provoke thoughtfulness in each of us. As Spring has arisen, so, too, has the Season of Creativity. Felix’s message for this Spring is as follows . . .

In our winter message, The Season of Inwardness, Thomas Merton urged us to Trust the winter when the plant says nothing. He was reminding us that, although things appear dead, hidden within them are resources that lead to new life. With its burst of color and growth, spring validates that concept. Let this season be your teacher. Spring can remind you not to jump to dire conclusions when all seems lost, when you can’t see much in your future, or when you feel that your reserves have dried up.

Take a lesson from nature. Our resources for new ideas and insights are often so hidden that our lives look like dead branches. If you find yourself in a personal winter of doubt, confusion and fear (what Shakespeare calls the Winter of our Discontent), rest assured that there is a creative source within you. You will begin to see shoots of life and hope, which usher you into your spring. But be prepared to work for it!

In spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. ~ Margaret Atwood

‘Smell like dirt’ means be willing to do the work, take a chance, experiment, risk disapproval, fall on your face, start over! New biomedical research suggests that you will thereby activate your healing system. We feel most alive when, acting from our deepest nature, we allow what lives inside of us to come out.

Don’t wait for the big bang of colossal insights before you roll up your sleeves. Trust the “still, small voice” of your quiet inkling and hunches–not by thinking about them, but by acting on them.

Honor them, work with them, shape them as you would clay. Speak them, write them and teach them in your office and at school. Stir them, mix them and chop them in your kitchen. Hammer them, sand them and paint them in your workshop. Make bold strokes. Make a mess. You can always clean it up and start over.

Welcome spring and your new creative self!

Felix Scardino, LCSW

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

And, check out creative selections from my website.

Jolan tru!

Einstein on Free Will and Imagination’s Power

This week’s post highlights a very intriguing article by one Maria Popova who features an interview of Albert Einstein from the early 20th Century and gives us some background into his thinking and feelings of free will and its impact on our imagination. Since imagination and creativity go hand in hand, I felt it appropriate to include this blog post in my creativity series.

 

“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.” — Albert Einstein

We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.

In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence.

It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding.

Albert Einstein by Lotte Jacobi. (University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.)

Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence:

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.

For Einstein, the most alive part of the mystery we live with — the mystery we are — is the imagination, that supreme redemption of human life from the prison of determinism. With an eye to his discovery of relativity, he reflects:

I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, funded by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would totally tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Complement this article with the thoughts of neuroscientist Sam Harris on our primary misconception about free will, and then revisit Einstein on the interconnectedness of our fates.

 

Many thanks to Maria Popova, Editor and Publisher of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) for her due diligence in publishing this interview so folks like me can further share it with our creative brethren.

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

Feel free to review various creative selections from my website.

Jolan tru!

The Day the Monster Visited Martian Colony

{Author’s Note: This is a special blog post featuring my 12th short story. This Thursday will also feature the story on my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for those different audience members. Hope you enjoy it and Happy Mardi Gras!}

 

It was an unassuming place by all accounts. It stood there off the beaten path but welcoming to those wanting of a beverage or two. Or so it seemed. John and Terry were on their way home after a series of meetings during the day when they drove by in their hovercraft and decided to stop. As soon as the pair walked up to the entrance, they were met by the Bouncer who unemotionally proclaimed that only Terry was really welcomed here.

When the two inquired as to why, they were told that no one of blue skin was allowed inside. When the two pressed the issue, saying it was ridiculous in this day and age, they came nose to barrel with an old fashion, but still lethal, shotgun. The Bouncer simply stated that should they try to enter, they would be blown to bits. Both of them. When Terry asked why both of them, he was told, “Because you brought Blueskin with you!”

Feeling rightly discriminated upon, the two attempted to gain entrance. John immediately grabbed for the shotgun when it went off right in John’s face. As his head rolled down the steps, the gun went off again in Terry’s direction and in seconds only his torso remained standing. The bouncer just stood there, unemotional, and called for “cleanup at the entrance.” Soon, the bodies were quickly carried off and all was back to “normal.”

The Monster was alive and well.

Continue reading →

Creative Trends for 2023

This being the first part of the year, I’ve come across several articles that portend various trends and forecasts for 2023. Below is the most recent one I’ve read from someone within the creative industry. Please note this is an edited version of her original contribution. Emily Cohen is an avid reader, speaker, author and brutally honest operational and organizational consultant to creative teams.

Based on Emily’s consultations with clients and conversations with industry colleagues the past few years, she’s identified five trends that we need to learn from and adapt to now.

Trend 1: A new, employee-forward approach to “culture”.

The state of the world has had a real and tangible impact on many employers as they continue to evolve their understanding of the importance of addressing employees’ escalating — and more openly expressed and talked about — cultural demands and mental health challenges as well as shifting priorities. As a result, building a healthy, flexible workplace culture has become priority number one for our industry and has moved well beyond having a written mission statement, organizing “team-building” activities, and having a dedicated people operations person (a must-have for any team).

What these new cultural changes look like is something that we really need to rethink industry-wide. We need to be more transparent with our peers and colleagues so that we can learn from both our collective successes as well as failures. We need to get creative, involving our entire team to explore and build the type of culture that best fits their needs and the vision we have for our firm. We need to realize that the nature of work is shifting and take bold steps to shift with it. Beyond caring about our team’s happiness, health, and welfare — which, above all, is most important — changes to how we think about our culture are also critical to improving retention, recruiting, and even productivity/profitability.

Trend 2: Paying ourselves and our employees what we’re worth.

In order to attract new candidates, increase morale, and retain staff, many creative firms are realizing the hard way that what they’ve been paying their staff and themselves isn’t competitive or sustainable. And, given the pressing challenge of a competitive talent pool, candidates and employees have the power to demand what they deserve more than ever.

Thus, many firms have updated — and increased — their pay scales, often making them transparent to their team and, as needed, have raised salaries for their existing team to reflect industry standards. This is long overdue. In the past, we were expected to love what we do and prioritize this love over profit or money. This simply is no longer the case and rightly so. We should pay everyone — including ourselves — a fair, equitable, and livable wage.

Trend 3: Pricing based on our worth and value.

With a much-needed increase in salaries across our industry and a rise in our overhead costs because of inflation, we must increase our rates. Yet, instead, because we are working in a saturated and highly competitive industry — along with our desperation to win, often at any cost, and the misconceived “lack of work out there” mentality — our rates continue to plummet instead of rise.

We have to stand our ground and remember that the more clients pay us, the more they are going to value what we do and this changes how they engage with us — i.e. shifting from a “we need this” or “do this” relationship to a “what do you think we need” and “how can you help us?” mentality. Raising our rates industry-wide will move us from being perceived as an on-demand service to a more consultative, advisory business.

And, yes — this does mean we will lose some projects but it also means we will win more valuable, desirable ones, and, ultimately, our focus should be on the quality over the quantity of those wins. Everyone in the industry should raise their prices across the board. (Rates) that are fair and realistically reflect the true cost of running a business as well as the value of our experience, expertise, insight, time, and how our work directly translates to and positively impacts our clients’ businesses (think: return on investment).

Trend 4: Evolving and shifting partnership relationships.

Previous unresolved tensions — as well as new ones — have bubbled to the surface and forced many partners re-think how they work together and, in some cases, partnerships have crumbled. In some cases, partners have moved away physically and are therefore no longer working together in person, putting a strain on interpersonal relationships. And, in other cases, partners re-think their own personal career path and choose to leave the industry entirely or move to another, less “risky”, full-time role in-house or elsewhere.

While partnership-based relationships have always been notoriously difficult to manage (like many marriages), these challenges have escalated even more due to the current global pressures. If you are in a partnership, take the time to have honest, open conversations and resolve any challenges you do have, before they continue to escalate. And, if you’re thinking about entering into a new partnership, be very thoughtful — ensure you’re being honest with yourself and your partner(s) on personal and professional priorities, goals, expectations, challenges, etc.

Trend 5: Nervousness about inflation.

There is rising nervousness among firm owners and their teams about 2023 and the impact of inflation on their firms. We are all worried and have seen a slight slowdown of new work, but that’s because all our clients are also nervous and are in a wait-and-see mode and are therefore taking a bit longer to reach out and make decisions.

So, what can you do? What you should always be doing: having at least 3 months of overhead saved (as cash in the bank), 3–4 months of committed revenue, and signed contracts with all clients. Ultimately, those that struggle with maintaining this level of financial security have bigger problems than just inflation.

On the other hand, when our clients and companies implement hiring freezes and, in some cases, layoffs, there often is the opportunity to do the work that their reduced in-house teams can no longer handle. There is work out there but it may not be coming to you as quickly and easily as it once did. That is why firms should always be reaching out and shifting their business development strategies from being reliant only on inbound opportunities to a relationship-building mindset focused on outbound opportunities and “building the love” with potential prospects, existing and past clients, contacts, etc.

Emily concludes by saying . . .

Our industry is at a critical crossroads as we encounter new challenges, shifting priorities, and a complete rethinking of our personal and professional priorities. Change will take gumption, fortitude, and some degree of risk but, as a result, our firms will be more financially stable, our employees will be happier, and our industry will thrive.

So what do you think? Do you agree with Emily’s take? Do we alter our plans for 2023 or stand pat?

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for personal insights on life and its detours.

 

Creativity Predictions for 2023

Well, a new year is upon us, for better or worse. What will happen, nobody knows for sure. I came upon a recent article that provides some insight as to what may occur. These predictions come from a variety of sources, all tied into the world of creativity in some form or fashion.

I concur with the author of this article when he indicates that the beginning of this new year doesn’t feel so exciting or filled with promise. We’ve had three especially tough years, dominated by the pandemic, collapsing supply chains, a war in Europe, an energy crisis, political chaos, and recession. What fun!

Tom May of the UK publication Creative Boom has gathered the best predictions for what will happen to the creative industry in 2023 from some leading voices. While this is UK focused, it no doubt has resonance with US counterparts. This may be considered a lengthy read but well worth it.

1. The economy will contract

There’s no way of sugar-coating it: we are in for hard economic times. Jesse Reed, co-founder of Order is among those predicting that 2023 will see a continuing contraction in marketing spend globally, as spending power is sucked out of the economy. And unfortunately, that means that creatives will have to work even harder to secure business. But it’s not all bad news, he believes.

“Smarter brands don’t see marketing spend as discretionary and will know that in a downturn, their creative marketing can help them to take up a bigger spot in the shop window,” says Jesse. “So in many ways, it’s a positive opportunity for creatives to maximize the impact of their work in grabbing a bigger market share for their clients’ brands.”

And it’s not like there isn’t room for improvement. “The last few years have been characterized by brands throwing spend at digital advertising, which has become less effective every year as platforms become saturated, customers wise up or simply struggle to differentiate,” says Jesse. “Good creatives with an empathic understanding of their audience and a talent for taking ideas where their client’s competitors fear to tread should have no fear of 2023. They’ll be in high demand.”

Above all, then, it’s about being flexible and ready to react to a fast-changing world: not just now, but for the foreseeable future. “2022 will be defined as the year everyone realized 2020 wasn’t a blip,” says Jesse. “We’re now in the epoch of the perma-crisis. For brands and the creative industries that serve them, it’s highlighted the importance of continuously being agile in calibrating tone and messaging in their creative campaigns and advertising. Brands need to understand what’s prominent in their customers’ minds and what’s leading their decision-making – something that is in constant flux at the moment.”

2. Prompt invoicing will prove crucial

While there may be opportunities in a spiraling economy, that doesn’t mean there won’t be multiple dangers lurking. And Geoff Bretherick, creative director at Fablr, offers a cautionary tale from the last 12 months.

“2022 was a year of witnessing major shifts within our clients’ industries,” he says. “A lot of ups, but a few downs. Everyone’s been reshaping from the pandemic, and from what we’ve seen, taking more risks with bigger opportunities. In theory… great! That said, we had an unfortunate experience with a couple of partners that started as major contracts, and then suddenly, the organization lost their CEO, CMO, and over 50% of staff. Where does this leave graphic designers? Not in a great spot!”

The lesson Fablr has learned is the importance of keeping your output in sync with invoices. “In one case, we had let three months of invoicing go unpaid because we thought there was mutual trust in our partnership,” Geoff explains. “Indeed, maybe it began as so. But when C-suite personnel start dropping, their ‘word’ means very little. To that end, we still highly recommend, if you don’t already, billing at a consistent monthly rate, as opposed to the percentage of work done to date. Because right now, ‘We’re good for it’ means peanuts.”

3. There’ll be a tight focus on costs

John Ramskill, executive creative director at BrandOpus, echoes many agency leaders in thinking that the bottom line will be all-important in 2023, both for studios and the clients they serve.

“Increased costs have resulted in our clients wanting more for less – even more so than previous years,” he points out. “This has meant that we are getting better at focusing our thinking sooner and aligning our teams so as not to waste time and money.

“Fast and fluid lines of communication have been made easier by being back in the studio and having quick conversations on the fly, rather than having to schedule calls over teams. Being more efficient AND effective allows us to meet the needs of our clients while still delivering the high quality of work that BrandOpus has always produced.”

Jo Barnard, founder and creative director at industrial design consultancy Morrama, has also been feeling the strain. “The brief feeling of relief seeing the back of Covid at the beginning of the year was short-lived,” she recalls. “2022 has been another challenging year with cuts in creative spending as businesses look hesitantly towards an unpredictable 2023.

“This pressure can quickly translate into exhaustion and burn-out as we fight to keep the pipeline of work flowing and hit our own growth targets,” she continues. “So in 2023, we will instead be seeing creatives focus on growth in other ways: working on internal projects, deepening their education and building a culture of support and well-being both within their teams and their network.”

4. Retaining talent will be a real challenge

On that last point, studio heads must strike a careful balance: motivating creatives to do more and better without driving them away. Because as Abb-d Taiyo, co-founder of design and impact agency Driftime, says: “The great resignation is real! It has become increasingly harder to find great talent, let alone keep them fulfilled in the team and company dynamic.

“In the UK, a fifth of workers are expected to leave their roles according to a study by accountancy firm PwC,” he adds. “Although there are many reasons, two of the primary ones are purpose and balance. When we look to invest in our people, it’s going beyond the obvious of ‘increased pay’ and starting an open conversation with your team on what they want.”

For Driftime, this investment has been actioned in the form of complete autonomy, four-day work weeks, unlimited paid holidays, well-being perks, and incentives for each employee towards the cost of living crisis.

5. Employees will get more power

Is one way to retain talent giving it more power and influence within the agency? Rachel Cook, managing director at Thompson, believes so. “This year, tired of everyone agreeing with each other, we disbanded our non-executive board, binned off our leadership forum, and introduced an employee board,” she says. “The aim was to introduce a healthy challenge, diversify the voices in the room, and give the whole team a chance to decide how we do things. And it’s been a roller coaster, with learnings at every turn.

“2022 taught me if you ask for honesty, you’ll get it, and you need to be ready for that,” she continues. “The first meeting was about employee benefits, and the team turned up with a ten-page printed, stapled document of feedback, asking for loads more holiday, flexible working and heaps of other great ideas. I admit I wasn’t quite ready for it, but the feedback was great, and I’m so glad they took it seriously. We needed to hear it.”

Rachel has also learned that it pays to act fast. “We’ve stayed true to our promise to action something from every Employee Board within six weeks of the meeting; within a couple of weeks, we rolled out an extra three days of holiday per year. The positive repercussions weren’t just because of the free days off, but because it helped build the trust and confidence of the team that we weren’t just smiling and nodding, but actually acting.

“Finally, I’ve learned that the benefits of doing good stuff are bigger than you might imagine. The Employee Board told us that they thought the forum would be good for them to get insight into how business works, give them confidence, look good on their CV, and be a great recruitment message, too. And I love hearing the team telling potential recruits or clients about the employee board: they took a small idea I had in the shower and made it much more awesome.”

6. The creative profession will redefine itself

Typically, in a recession, big companies see design and other creative services as an easy cost to cut, to help balance their budgets. So Max Ottignon, co-founder of Ragged Edge, believes the industry must counter this by reframing itself. “We need to change the perception of creativity from a luxury to a necessity,” he argues.

“In 2022, we’ve all had to get pretty good at thriving in adversity,” he continues. “2023 doesn’t look like it’s going to offer much respite, so the onus is on us all to demonstrate that creativity can give businesses a vital edge when times are tough. It’s time to prove how valuable our skills are. That starts with asking the right questions in the first place. It means digging deep into the underlying business challenges and genuinely solving those issues in ways that feel tangible and devoid of marketing bullshit.”

Max believes this is in our power to do so, as long as we strike the right attitude. “This is a time for clarity, rigor and a healthy dose of pragmatism,” he says. “But it’s also a time when creativity can be the difference between success and failure. And if we can prove we’re irreplaceable when times are tight, just imagine the possibilities when things pick up.”

All that, of course, is easy to say, difficult to do. But Kirsty Minns, executive creative director at Mother Design, offers some advice on a personal level. “We entered 2022 with such uncertainty after the pandemic and have since navigated even more global challenges, from economic unrest to the climate crisis,” she explains. “And a lesson I used this year is to adopt a beginner’s mind.

“A client of mine was obsessed with this idea called shoshin, which originates from Japanese Zen Buddhism,” she explains. “It refers to the idea that the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to close your mind to further learning. My interpretation of this was to challenge how things were done before, embrace unorthodox ideas and test new ways of working. New working models in the office were tested, new methods of coming up with ideas were embraced, and new ways of inspiring the team were implemented.”

Continue reading →

Quotes for the Soul and Wherever!

It’s that time of the month again! Time for assorted quotes from a variety of folks. Take them to heart and add them to your diet as food for your soul. Enjoy.

It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one. — Alex Osborne, Advertising Hall of Fame

The heart of creativity is discipline. — William Bernbach, Advertising Hall of Fame

Consumers are statistics. Customers are people. — Stanley Marcus, Advertising Hall of Fame

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing. — Benjamin Franklin, Advertising Hall of Fame

Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake. ― Rod Serling

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.  – John Steinbeck

Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack. – Dr. Seuss

You can’t be a creative thinker if you’re not stimulating your mind, just as you can’t be an Olympic athlete if you don’t train regularly. – Sir Ken Robinson

Success or failure in business is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacities. — Walter Dill Scott, Advertising Hall of Fame

Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message. — William Bernbach, Advertising Hall of Fame

 

Hopefully making a ruckus, one blog post at a time!

Be sure to check out my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for a different kind of playground for creativity, innovation and inspiring stuff.