Hypodermic model still sucks

Being always slightly behind the zeitgeist, I've only just gotten around to picking up Freakonomics.

So far there's one passage that delights me particularly. The authors give a list of ten words often used in real estate ads and ask the reader to pick which correlate with higher sale prices and which with lower:

Fantastic
Granite
Spacious
State-of-the-art
!
Corian
Charming
Maple
Great neighbourhood
Gourmet

Unsurprisingly, the list breaks down as follows:

Terms correlated to higher sale price
Granite
State-of-the-art
Corian
Maple
Gourmet


Terms correlated to a lower sale price
Fantastic
Spacious
!
Charming
Great neighbourhood

Admittedly, the authors have a much more sophisticated explanation, but what's important to me is that those terms that convey concrete information (granite, corian, maple) sell, while those that simply assert virtue (fantastic, charming, the dreaded screamer) either do nothing or actively work against the sale, because consumers assume that if you actually had something persuasive to say, you'd be saying it.

Copywriting may not be poetry, but its nice to see the two needn't be entirely antithetical.

Remarkable new planning model

Planners? Beg the question? Never!

Vale Kurt

The conceit that gave birth to at least a dozen TVCs, scores of music videos and very probably Martin Amis's magnificent "Time's Arrow":

"The formation then flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks.

"The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new.

"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel containers were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mostly women who did this work.

"The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

Arguably, it's still at its most potent in the original.

Together Everyone Achieves More?

My AD's been away a bit recently, so I've ended up working with a few freelancers.

Although I couldn't say I've really "clicked" with any of them, it's been an interesting experience and it's got me thinking about exactly what the role of the creative department is.

My partner and I, and most of the other teams here, are very "clean" thinkers. If (and it's a big if) we agree that the SMP is right, we'll rarely present work that deviates from it. We constantly ask ourselves "is this persuasive?", "is it compelling?" as well as "is this novel?" and "is this interesting?"

A couple of the guys I've been working with are much looser/ less precise in their thinking. Their only yardstick is whether it's creative and/or interesting. It doesn't really matter to them whether the work makes a convincing case.

And maybe that's alright. Maybe it's a good thing.

Although they come up with a lot of ideas I would consider irrelevant, they also come up with a couple I wouldn't have thought of.

Yes, on the face of it it seems to make sense that everybody on a job ought to be pulling in the same direction. But there are perils in that approach. It's how you get group think, how dodgy reasoning becomes dogma.

It's how you end up internalising the client's rules and a priori assumptions.

So maybe it makes more sense if we concieve of different departments as working adversarially, or at least as working to achieve different goals.

So our job is to make things interesting, planning checks if they're effective, account service makes sure they're practical. The tension between those different concerns produces the best result.

I'm not sure what I think.

On one hand, my gut feeling is that anything that stops self censorship and removes creative fetters must be good.

On the other, I quite enjoy the "strategic" side of the job. The thought of abdicating it makes me feel a little more like the "monkey at a typewriter" - a random idea generator.

I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.