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Chapter 1 A Brief Historyof Why EverybodyHates Advertising: And why you should try to get a job there. --<br/>The 1950S: When Even X-Acto Blades Were Dull. --<br/>“What?! We Don’t Have to Suck?!” --<br/> The Empire Strikes Back. --<br/> Portrait of The Artist as A Young Hack. --<br/>Chapter 2 The Creative Process: or, Why It’s Impossible to Explain What We Do to Our Parents. --<br/>Why Nobody Ever Chooses Brand X. --<br/>Staring at Your Partner’s Shoes. --<br/>Why The Creative Process is Exactly Like Washing a Pig. --<br/> “The Sudden Cessation of Stupidity.” --<br/>It’s All About The Benjamins. --<br/>Brand = Adjective. --<br/>Simple = Good. --<br/>Chapter 3 Tell the Truth and Run: Saying the Right Thing the Right Way. --<br/>Authority Gets Replaced with Fake. --<br/>To Thine Own Brand, Be True. --<br/> “Embracing the Suck.” --<br/>Some Thoughts on Messaging. --<br/>Start with a central human truth. --<br/>What is the emotion at the center of the brand? --<br/>Research your Brand, its Customers, and its Competition. --<br/>Get to know the client’s customers as well as you can. --<br/>Listen to customers talk. --<br/>Imagine a day in the life of your customer. --<br/>Develop a deep understanding of the client’s business. --<br/>Examine the current positioning of the product or brand. --<br/>Study your client’s previous work. --<br/>Ask yourself what would make you want the product. --<br/>Whenever you can, go for an absolute. --<br/>Try to make your message incontestable. --<br/>Try the competitor’s product. --<br/>Look at the competitors’ advertising. --<br/>Three Final Notes on Strategy. --<br/>Insist on a simple strategy. --<br/>Insist on a precise strategy. --<br/>Insist on a relevant strategy. --<br/>Remember: You have two problems to solve: the client’s and yours. --<br/>Two Models for Strategy and Messaging. --<br/>Chapter 4 A Controlled Daydream: Concepting: Coming up with Ideas. --<br/>Get Something, Anything, on Paper. --<br/>Just start. --<br/>First, say it straight. Then say it great. --<br/>Create a word and image list. --<br/>Dig shallow holes everywhere. --<br/>Allow yourself to come up with really terrible ideas that are no good at all. --<br/>Work fast. Fail faster. --<br/>Interpret the problem using different mental processes. --<br/>Think it through before you settle for the ol’ exaggeration thing. --<br/>Go in the opposite direction. --<br/>Spend some time away from your partner, thinking on your own. --<br/>Share your ideas with your partner, especially the kinda dumb ones. --<br/>Allow your partner to come up with terrible ideas. Don’t play devil’s advocate. --<br/>Let your subconscious mind do it. --<br/>Low-hanging fruit, the barren wasteland, and eureka. --<br/>A Few Words About Pictures. --<br/>Can the solution be entirely visual? --<br/>Can your brand own something visual? --<br/>Coax an interesting visual out of your product or its benefit. --<br/>Get the visual clichés out of your system right away. --<br/>Metaphors must’ve been invented for advertising. --<br/>Remember, something has to dominate the page. --<br/>“Do I want to write a letter or send a postcard?” --<br/>Can you use the physical environment as your visual? --<br/>Show, don’t tell. --<br/>Avoid style. Focus on substance. --<br/>Chasing a Campaign Idea. --<br/>Pick a small customer contact point and then think big. --<br/>Once you get on a streak, ride it. --<br/>Make sure every piece in the campaign makes sense all by itself. --<br/>Work. Don’t talk. Work. --<br/>Come up with a lot of ideas. Cover the wall. --<br/>Write hot. Edit cold. --<br/>Review all the ideas so far and look for patterns. --<br/>Patterns are campaigns trying to come to life. --<br/>Be objective. --<br/>Big ideas transcend strategy. --<br/>Don’t keep runnin’ after you catch the bus. --<br/>Remember: Always show babies or puppies. --<br/>Chapter 5 Brevity Is The Soul of Wit: The Art of Copywriting. --<br/>Have a Writing Process. --<br/>Stay off the stinkin’ computer. Use a pencil and a pad of paper. --<br/>Create a word and idiom list. --<br/>Get puns out of your system right away. --<br/>Draw a square on the page and fill it with something interesting. --<br/>First say it straight, then say it great. --<br/>If your ad, billboard, or banner is just a headline, make it a great headline. --<br/>Try being half-rational, half-random. --<br/>Don’t just start writing headlines willy-nilly. Break it down: Do willy first, then move on to nilly. --<br/>If the idea needs a headline, write 100. --<br/>Show Level The Architecture of Ideas. --<br/>“A smile in the mind.” --<br/>The paraprosdokian and the parallelism: Tension and release in a sentence. --<br/>Tension and release in an idea. --<br/>The clever-headline, straight-visual “rule.” --<br/>Show Level Voice and Tone. --<br/>Write like you’d talk if you were the brand. --<br/>Or pretend you’re writing a letter. --<br/>At the same time, remember to write like people talk. --<br/>On writing brand manifestos. --<br/>Listen to stand-up comedians talk about your product, brand, or its category. --<br/>Don’t set out to be funny. Set out to be interesting. --<br/>Before we break for coffee, a short master course in writing with emotion. --<br/>Flow and Readability. --<br/>Write hot. Edit cold. --<br/>Pretend your brand is arriving at a party. --<br/>Don’t have a “pre-ramble.” --<br/>Never, ever, not even once, or even just a little bit, ever use exclamation points anywhere, ever. --<br/>Never use fake names in a headline (or anywhere else, for that matter). --<br/>Vary your sentence length and pacing. --<br/>Once you lay your sentences down, spackle between the joints. --<br/>Break your copy into short paragraphs. --<br/>When you’re done writing the copy, read it aloud. --<br/>When you’ve finished writing something, go back and cut it by a third. --<br/>An idea isn’t finished until it leads the customer somewhere. --<br/>Proofread your own work. --<br/>If you have to have one, make your tagline an anthem. --<br/>Chapter 6 The Virtues of Simplicity: or, Why it’s Hard to Pound in a Nail Sideways. --<br/>Make sure the fuse on your idea isn’t too long or too short. --<br/>Simple has stopping power. --<br/>Simple is bigger. --<br/>Simple breaks through clutter. --<br/>Keep paring away until you have the essence of your idea. --<br/>A Few Words About Outdoor. (Few Being the Key Word.) --<br/>Billboards and posters force you to be simple. --<br/>Outdoor’s super-power: Size. --<br/>Digital technology is also changing outdoor. --<br/>As long as we’re talking about OOH, WTF is “new media”? --<br/>In this medium, your ideas must delight people. --<br/>Chapter 7 Why is The Bad Guy Always More Interesting?: Storytelling, Conflict, and Brand Platforms. --<br/>Brand Platforms: The Mother of Stories. --<br/>Campaigns versus platforms. --<br/>Platforms are ideas that create ideas. --<br/>Think of a campaign as a movie and a platform as a Hollywood franchise. --<br/>Two signs you have a platform: It fits on a sticky note and it starts talking and won’t shut up. --<br/>Truth + conflicts = platform. --<br/>Nonlinear Storytelling. --<br/>Chapter 8 Rewiring your Brain: Chasing Ideas and Making Big Creative Leaps. --<br/>Why solve problems when finding problems is way cooler? --<br/>How might we? --<br/>Tom Monahan’s wonderful exercise: Ask a better question. --<br/>Try rewriting the brief’s key message as a key question. --<br/>Monahan’s Intergalactic Thinking. --<br/>Getting to big ideas by creating hashtags. --<br/>Chapter 9 Viral, Naughty, and Rong®: Getting Noticed, Getting Talked About. --<br/>The Art of Being Rong. --<br/>Start by questioning everything. --<br/>Rong means going 180 against common sense. --<br/>“Will people talk about this idea?” --<br/>“Are you sure they’ll even let us do this idea?” --<br/>What is the “press release” of your idea? --<br/>What makes an idea contagious? --<br/>Try doing something Rong with the medium. --<br/>Try changing the product or make a new one. --<br/>Advice on working way out past the edge. --<br/> “Love, Honor, and Obey Your Hunches.” --<br/>Build a Small, Cozy Fire with The Rule Books. Start with This One. --<br/>Chapter 10 Advertising 2.0: Moving from Analog Into Digital. --<br/>Where Advertising is Going. --<br/>It’s less about messaging and more about content. --<br/>It’s less about what brands say and more about what they do. --<br/>It’s less about messaging and more about experiences. --<br/>It’s less about trying to make people want stuff and more about making stuff people want. --<br/>It’s less about keeping up with a marketing schedule and more about keeping up with culture. --<br/>It’s less about talking at customers and more about talking with them. --<br/>The new ideas don’t just fill media spaces. They create them, even hijack them. --<br/>The new ideas are shareable and participatory. --<br/>The new ideas combine art, copy, and technology. --<br/>Almost everything in advertising is changing. That includes the creative briefs. --<br/>Everything is media. --<br/>Chapter 11 Make the Idea Bigger, Not the Logo: or, Why Branded Content is More Interesting than Advertising. --<br/>Show Level The hard part: Come up with something that works from both an entertainment and a marketing perspective. --<br/>Think like a publisher. --<br/>Done beats perfection. Lean toward action. --<br/>Tell stories with data. --<br/>Use “do-invite-capture-share” to get customers to create branded content for you. --<br/>Create Brand Experiences. --<br/>Chapter 12 Concepting for the Hive Mind: Creating Buzz with Social Marketing. --<br/>Mastering Good Social Media Practices. --<br/>The prime directive: Be interesting, entertaining, or useful. --<br/>Knowing who your customer is one thing. Understanding communities is another. --<br/>Start by listening. --<br/>Map out a conversation strategy. --<br/>Post stuff that helps boost a follower’s “social currency.” --<br/>Clearly establish what the user/viewer is getting out of the interaction. What is the payoff? --<br/>Speak to the community’s influencers. --<br/>Connect people to one another. --<br/>Experiment constantly and build on what works. --<br/>Leverage the different technologies available in each social platform. --<br/>Understand how to use hashtags. --<br/>Involve users and let people cocreate. --<br/>Be a person, not a corporate bot. --<br/>Advice from Two Experts. --<br/>“Mobile first. Behavior driven.” --<br/>Create a content ecosystem. --<br/>Examples of Great Social Campaigns and Some General Advice. --<br/>Arby’s on TikTok. --<br/>Two Instagram examples. --<br/>Two Facebook examples. --<br/>Some final thoughts. --<br/>Chapter 13 Everything that Can be Digital, Will be: Creative Techs, Developers, and the Mobile Future. --<br/>Creative Techs and Digital Developers. --<br/>Like everything else in advertising, creative tech starts with the customer. --<br/>Creative technologists design user experiences. --<br/>Brand experiences can be immersive. --<br/>Build things out of connected devices. --<br/>Always be inventing. --<br/>If Desktop Internet is Diving, Mobile is Snorkeling. --<br/>Leverage mobile functions to create cool ideas. --<br/>Web-based and native apps. --<br/>Mobile ads. --<br/>Chapter 14 Stopping People from Going to the Bathroom: Some Advice on Television and Video. --<br/>If your idea isn’t great, no amount of production will save it. --<br/>Can you make the imagery do all the work? --<br/>Find one great image and build story into or out of it. --<br/>Think simple. --<br/>Think in terms of story. --<br/>A good video should entertain throughout its entire length. --<br/>Solve the last five seconds. --<br/>Concept for one screen, design for big screens, and optimize for small. --<br/>Don’t show what you’re saying, or say what you’re showing. --<br/>Write sparely. --<br/>For videos under 15 seconds, do you have to write anything? --<br/>Chapter 15 Creative Mind Versus Monkey Mind: Or, Managing Time, Energy, Panic, and your Creative Mind. --<br/>What to Do When you’re Stuck. --<br/>First of all, being stuck is a good sign. --<br/> “Start from where you are.” --<br/>If you’re stuck, relax. --<br/>Leave the office and work somewhere else. --<br/>Change something. Anything. --<br/>Blow up everything. Start over. --<br/>Stay off the stinkin’ computer. --<br/>What does the ad want to say? --<br/>Go to the store where they sell the stuff. --<br/>Go to a bookstore and study books on your subject. --<br/>Ask your creative director for help. --<br/>Get more product information. --<br/>It helps to work on several projects at once. --<br/>Don’t burn up energy trying to force something to work. --<br/>Be patient. --<br/>Learn to enjoy the process, not just the finished work. --<br/>Remember, you aren’t saving lives. --<br/>Chapter 16 Pecked to Death by Ducks: Presenting and Protecting your Work. --<br/>Presenting the Work. --<br/>Learn the client’s corporate culture. --<br/>Present your own work. --<br/>Practice selling your campaign before you go in to present. --<br/>Don’t try to memorize a speech. --<br/>Don’t be slick. Clients hate slick. --<br/>Keep your “pre-ramble” to an absolute minimum. Dive right in. --<br/>Talk slowly. --<br/>Don’t hand out materials before you present. --<br/>Don’t present your campaign as “risk-taking work.” --<br/>Before you unveil your stuff, don’t assure the client “you’re going to love this.” --<br/>Never show a client work you don’t want them to buy. --<br/>Conversely, don’t leave your best work on the agency floor. --<br/>At the presentation, don’t just sit there. --<br/> “They may be right.” --<br/>Listening doesn’t mean saying “yes.” --<br/>Choose your battles carefully. --<br/>Show Level Creative Testing: be Afraid. be Very Afraid. --<br/>In advertising, research isn’t science. --<br/>Testing sketches of ideas doesn’t work. --<br/>Science cannot breathe life into something. Dr. Frankenstein already tried this. --<br/>Show Level Protecting your Work. --<br/>Base your defense on strategy. --<br/>Do not try to solve the problem in the meeting. --<br/>Somebody asks to cram more stuff into the idea. --<br/>Somebody says, “Negative approaches are wrong.” --<br/>Somebody asks, “Why are we wasting 25 seconds of our TV spot entertaining people?” --<br/>The best defense: Educate clients with examples of great advertising. --<br/>Outlast the objections. --<br/>Show Level Picking up the Pieces. --<br/>There’s always another idea. --<br/>Once work is approved, don’t lose vigilance. --<br/>Don’t get depressed when work is killed. --<br/>After you’ve totaled a car, you can still salvage stuff out of the trunk. --<br/>If you’re not producing agency work, do freelance. --<br/>Keep a file of great dead ideas. --<br/>Chapter 17 Just Start World War Iii: What it Takes to Get Into the Business.<br/>The Work. --<br/>Come up with monstrous ideas, not just monstrous ads. --<br/>Do not show just ads. Show mind-roasting campaign ideas executed in a variety of media. --<br/> “Show me an original voice.” --<br/>Now is not the time to play it safe. --<br/>Nor is this the time to be clueless and naive. --<br/>Round out your portfolio with a variety of goods and services. --<br/>Your portfolio should show a variety of styles. --<br/>Whatever you make, make it way better than it has to be made. --<br/>Your portfolio has to have strong digital or interactive ideas. --<br/>Don’t do an app, unless... --<br/>Client work that’s been produced isn’t a good enough reason to have it in your book. --<br/>Nobody expects your first book to include TV commercials. --<br/>If you’re looking to land a copywriter’s position, show some writing, for Pete’s sake. --<br/>Just before you put the final book together, cut everything that isn’t great. --<br/>Show Level Putting your Website Together. --<br/>The two prime directives: Speed and clarity. --<br/>Put name and your job title at the top somewhere. --<br/>Give special love and attention to your “About Me” section. --<br/>Think about the order in which you want your work to appear. --<br/>Put a one-sentence setup in front of each campaign. --<br/>Use videos sparingly and only if they’re the fastest way to show an idea. --<br/>Show Level Taking your Show on the Road. --<br/>Do a clean, simple resumé. --<br/>Learn how to use LinkedIn. --<br/>Prepare your search strategy. --<br/>“Networking.” --<br/>Attend industry events. --<br/>Establish a phone or an email relationship with someone working at the agency. --<br/>Study the people and the agency before every interview. --<br/>Deciding between big and small agencies. --<br/>Show Level The Interview. --<br/>Okay, first thing. It’s probably a pretty good idea to show up for your interview on time. --<br/>In the interview, don’t just sit there. --<br/>Before you start, ask if they’d like running commentary from you or not. --<br/>Be ready to speak with precision about every piece in your portfolio. --<br/>Show your ability to think strategically. --<br/>Trust your instincts. --<br/>Relax. Ask some questions. --<br/>Have an opinion. --<br/>Offer to do the grunt work, the jobs nobody wants. --<br/>Let your readiness to work like crazy come off you in waves. --<br/>If you’re willing to freelance, let ’em know. --<br/>A few days after the interview, send a thank-you note. On paper. --<br/>If you can’t get into the creative department, get into the agency. --<br/>How to talk about money. --<br/>Waiting for the phone to ring. --<br/>Don’t choose an agency based on the salary they offer. --<br/>Take a job wherever you can and work hard. --<br/> “Interns? Cleanup in aisle three, please.” --<br/>Show Level Use your Creativity for Good. --<br/>Don’t check your morals at the door. --<br/>You have a choice on the brands you will work for. --<br/>Some Final Thoughts. --<br/>Once you land a job, stick with it a while. --<br/>Don’t let advertising mess up your life. --<br/>Don’t underestimate yourself. --<br/>Don’t overestimate yourself. --<br/>Chapter 18 Advertising: The Most Fun you Can Have with your Clothes on: is This a Great Business or What? --<br/>Stay Humble. --<br/>suggested Reading --<br/>Bibliography --<br/>Notes --<br/>Chapter 1: A Brief History of Why Everybody Hates Advertising --<br/>Chapter 2: The Creative Process --<br/>Chapter 3: Tell the Truth and Run --<br/>Chapter 4: A Controlled Daydream --<br/>Chapter 5: Brevity is the Soul of Wit --<br/>Chapter 6: The Virtues of Simplicity --<br/>Chapter 7: Why is the Bad Guy Always More Interesting? --<br/>Chapter 8: Rewiring your Brain --<br/>Chapter 9: Viral, Naughty, and Rong® --<br/>Chapter 10: Advertising 2.0 --<br/>Chapter 11: Make the Idea Bigger, Not the Logo --<br/>Chapter 12: Concepting for the Hive Mind --<br/>Chapter 13: Everything than Can Be Digital, Will Be --<br/>Chapter 14: Stopping People from Going to the Bathroom --<br/>Chapter 15: Creative Mind Versus Monkey Mind --<br/>Chapter 16: Pecked to Death by Ducks --<br/>Chapter 17: A Good Portfolio, or A Crowbar --<br/>Chapter 18: Advertising: The Most Fun you Can Have with your Clothes On --<br/>Acknowledgments --<br/>About the Author --<br/>Look for Online Hey Whipple Advertising Courses. --<br/>Also by Luke Sullivan --<br/>“The Shining... but Funnier.” --<br/>Index --<br/>EULA --<br/> |