Creativity in Japan

Two years ago I didn't know a thing about creativity in Japan. Asian advertising was something I'd watch on YouTube to be left wondering what randomness I just witnessed. This all changed on a Sunday afternoon in Stockholm when I stumbled across an online lecture from Naoki Ito in November 2009.

At that time I was studying at Hyper Island and considered myself up to date with all things interactive online. Yet I realized that I never saw the work from this video before and it struck me that there's much more to Japan than I thought. This lecture planted a seed in my head to explore Japan to get a perspective of creative advertising beyond the western part of the world. Months later Naoki Ito became the Executive Creative Director of Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo and I was lucky enough to be invited to their Tokyo office for an internship with my creative partner. During this internship and the following employment I had the chance to work daily with Naoki and learned a great deal from him. Communication wasn't always easy but he helped shaping a perspective on what makes Japanese creativity different from the rest of the world:

While Japans culture has a big desire for the always new and quirky their art in all forms is very conceptual and has many layers of meaning. Their everyday is cluttered with commercial messages and it's the toughest place on earth to stand out. That's why communication has to be as different as possible from usual advertising and at the same time it has to be meaningful and be able to become part of culture and influence it. This makes Japan a country where the bar for great creative work is higher than anywhere else.

I imagine that's one of the reasons why five of the most talented Japanese creatives joined forces to start up PARTY, a creative lab. The lineup: Naoki Ito, Morihiro Harano, Qanta Shimizu, Hiroki Nakamura and Masashi Kawamura. In just a few months they created work like the Toyota Backseat Driver and two music videos for androp: Bright Siren and Bell. It's an impressive indication for the things to come and I believe their approach to technology, collaboration and storytelling will lead to a new breed of creative work that will show the world the true potential of Japanese creativity.

The Internet is Magic

Justin Gignac is an art director – but his ideas are so much better than advertising. I've just enjoyed the talk he gave for the PSFK NY conference over my morning coffee and have to say that his work is absolutely inspiring. The best talk I've seen in a while:

John Jay on creativity

When working for W+K Tokyo we had the chance to meet John Jay. In fact it was one of the most memorable moments of our Japan time. Early on a Saturday we met him at his Hotel to talk about our Tokyo experience over breakfast. Robbin and I both agree that so far John Jay has been one of the most inspiring individual we've met in the industry. He has a very distinct point of view on things and if we'd have to sum up the two hours we had with him in three points it would be these three things:

1. Embrace culture: be conscious about your own culture but really try to immerse yourself in other cultures that are different from yours, try as many different things as possible, break out of your cultural comfort zone.

2. Be part of your community: always take an active part in the society that surrounds you, talk and meet as many interesting people as possible, go far beyond the world of advertising and mingle with artists, fashion designers and other kinds of talented people

3. Do things: stop talking about all the ideas you had, have, and will have – and do more things, bring your ideas to life.

The following video interview by Fast Company gives you a good idea about John Jay and his inspiring nature.

7 Insights from Hyper Island

Last week we finished the first part of the second Module. In eight days our team of seven members interviewed seven people (Noah Brier - the barbarian group, David Droga - Droga 5, Iain Tait - Poke, Ben Malbon - BBH labs, Richard Gatarski - weconverse.com, Carlos Bayala - Mother, Annika Lidne - Disruptive Media) and listened to three lectures (Jonathan Briggs - co founder of Hyper Island, Petter Warnsberg - Kingston University, Mans Adler - bambuser founder) while crawling the web for countless hours. Using all this information, analyzing and connecting it was a very valuable experience. In the process we identified seven insights that are relevant to the media industry and that we think are worth sharing:

#1 In order to innovate we need to cross bridges between industries and categories
We need to look beyond the obvious and keep our eyes on other categories that are disconnected with our interests. Rather than focusing too much on technology we should look for new ways for suitable applications and combinations. Mashups and APIs are great example of exciting possibilities when blurring boundaries.

#2 Screens are not enough anymore, they are mere obstacles to seamless integration
Technology is getting smaller. Augmented reality is only the beginning. Interactivity can reach a new level if we interact beyond the screen with our surroundings.

#3 Emphasis will shift towards connecting ideas rather than remembering and gathering information
Tools like twitter allow for concentrated streams of information. We have more access to information than ever before. The world doesn't need more blogs, it needs better blogs. Inspiration VS Information – It's much more valuable to inspire than just to inform.

#4 The Baby Boom is yet to hit the Internet
A new generation of users is growing up with the web. Kids will flood the web with a lot of time on their hands and change they way we approach our work. We need to rethink our way to design interactive experiences because of more segmented user groups.

#5 Brands no longer compete with brands, they compete with everyday live and all media out there
More sources than ever fight for our attention. People are able to create themselves without very little costs. Creativity is the ingredient that will make a huge difference, if used for the right reasons.

#6 It's impossible to keep track of everything, we need to establish filters
Today's information society is ever evolving, we have to accept that we cannot follow everything. Identifying filters is important, and there is great potential in this direction. What sources to trust? What's a balanced mix of filters? Who controls them? It's crucial to realise that we cannot just fill our heads with the newest stuff – we need to stop and reflect and create something new out of those findings.

#7 When telling a story, digital media gives it the possibility to evolve and never end
The future is about collaboration and influences between industries. In contrast to traditional media, where a TV spot or campaign had a beginning, a middle and an end, interactive media gives us a platform to tell the story on and on and to re-engage people more frequently by letting them participate in the process and allowing them to navigate a story at their own pace and level involvement.

Rewarding

Working all day, first caf, reading the brief, reading it again, running around in circles, surfing around, playing with the phone, changing location, changing music, rereading the brief, doubting the brief, doubting if you can deliver greatness, giving up, picking up again, thinking, chewing on everything around you, mindless sketching, joking, taking apart the problem, reassembling it again, texting, nonsense, the most random moment, almost the end of the day, the cliched spark, a line from the lips without thinking much, the tense silence, filled with oh's and ah's while a hundred and one new connections are made up there, based on this one thought.

You can't beat this stuff. That's why we're here.

D&AD Workshop – WHSmith

Ok, we didn't make any copies of the campaign we submitted to qualify for the D&AD advertising workshop, as we've been pretty busy with Nike stuff at that time. But as we went to the introduction session on Wednesday we received our work back and we thought we'll share.

The brief was: Create a campaign to encourage parents to spend more quality time with their children, by showing the range of products that WHSmith has to keep all ages entertained.

Here are the two campaigns we sent in.


Jai prefers the first one but I like this one more. We don't know yet which agency did set the brief. Maybe we'll find out and ask what they preferred.



We had a couple more starting points we've submitted as lines:

• Adult Play Time
• Invest in your assets
• You'll need them once you're old
• Playing makes you younger
• Be a TV family
• Make time before they make you to
• Keep them younger longer

Tick Tock

Crack a Bank

Abbey – Open Minded Banking. We've been tearing our hair off over this one. We think there's something in there, although we realize we're 'not there yet'. But as some asked to see more our work, here are three posters as they are now in our book, we'll see for how long.

A fabulous weekend to everyone.

Fuck Green

In june we wrote a paper for the account planning school of the web on HUMMER. The strategy we drew out of it was 'Fuck Green' which we made into a poster campaign. Here we go.

We thought about reworking it for quite some time, and found a different route on the same strategy. We're deciding which one to pick up, to refine and expand. Opinions?

makeryanaircheaper.com

The amount of feedback we got for Evian was fantastic, we really appreciated all the comments. We'll let you know how that turns out. In the mean time here's another thought for you guys to mull over when you have a spare sec. What do you think folks?

L'eau de vie

A work in progress idea for our book. We've been turning it around in our heads and on paper for the past couple of days. We'd appreciate your comments on it. What are your initial thoughts? What do you get out of it? etc…

Cheers!

More greenness

It is freezing cold outside. Just wait for January and February, it's gonna be even colder. Wait. Maybe not, climate change is on the rise, so our winter is gonna be warmer. That's the moment British Gas should start to worry. Pollution. Planet heating up. Higher temperatures. Less heating. Less money for British Gas – oh no!

Wouldn't it be logical for them to make a campaign to save the earth and stop climate change. Keep the planet cool so they can continue heating. Cause it's the best for the planet, for the people, and for their stakeholders.

D&AD workshop work

The deadline for the workshop brief was an hour ago and the work arrived with them fine, so it means waiting for a response. I don't have a clue if they (whoever the judges are) will like the stuff, but I'll share it here. The first one contains the proposition, Organic Food made easy to Organic goes mainstream.

The second campaign submitted is a rather fun one, it's targeted more narrow, towards mothers. I'm curious about this one :)

Put your hands in the air

Last week while looking around in Selfriges on Oxford street, the UK's second largest shop I came across something funky. The limited edition of Absolut Vodka packaging – Absolut Disco. A shell for the iconic vodka bottle which can be attached to the ceiling to function as a disco bottle, simple idea but oh so cool. A gift packaging which not only looks good but is very useful and full on brand, I bet the vodka drinkers will love it! I want to buy one just for the packaging, but then again I'm very seduced by this kind of design stuff.

If this isn't enough they have a digital experience to back this up, hit www.absolut.com/disco and if you have a webcam record your disco moves and funk them up with certain visual effects.

Responsible for the concept was Swedish agency Family Business, well done. although I must admit the the web experience isn't really flawless, it took eight hours until the email arrived with my blog code since they seem to check all the videos pre-release – also the webdesign, especially the html email isn't reaching the standard Absolut Vodka usually sets.

Games – the real new media

This has been on my mind for quite a time now. I am a big fan Games, all kinds of them. Chess (anyone fancies a match?), cards, board games and of course video games. I've started back with an Atari and played most of the 'important' video games systems in the last 15 years. Last evening I saw the hilarious Toyota ad for their Tacoma and tried the Yaris Video Game on Microsoft's Live, a multi player platform on the Xbox360. Here's the ad, it's running on US television and works very well as an online viral.

It made me laugh, since I used to play World of Warcraft back in the early days of the game. Nothing ground breaking though. Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam used the Grand Theft Auto look for it's brilliant Coke spot and set the first step in this direction. Games in ads – a concept to use a world familiar to the audience to tell a story. The flip side – ads in games, or adgames is also well represented – the Burger King games who've won Titanium Gran Prix at Cannes this year for example.

I preferred 7Up's game with Cool Spot from 1993, they didn't need an agency to come with the stuff back in time, the only thing they got for it was 'Best Cartridge Music of the Year'. Anyway.

I consider video games as the ultimate media, the best way to tell something and engage. Why? Let's see. If TV ads are to be considered old media, and Internet is the new revolution then movies are old hat and games are the way forward. Unlike films which tell a story to a passive beholder, games have the ability of interacting with the audience and tell the story in much more engaging way.

Wait, aren't games more about jumping from one platform to the other without falling down to be eaten by the pink giraffes? These times are long gone. There are games telling epic plots, the game series Final Fantasy had several main protagonists falling in love, experiencing adventures and dying – an emotional journey for the player – only squeezed by the pixelated faces with three expressions. Yet granted toady's technology flashing by as fast as a rabbit on speed, games can already keep up with production values of movies, the quality of sound and picture is amazing.

Take a look at Bioshock, a game experience taking part in 1960 in a fictional underwater dystopian city built on the mid-Atlantic seabed. This game is full of tension, great music score, intelligent dialogs and a story that draws you in from the first few minutes and forces you to take moral decisions later on in the game that effect the whole shebang. Watch the trailer here.

It is time that a brand makes a serious game, driving around in a pocketbike racer might be fun for a while but so much more is possible. Will we see Cadbury's 'Food Sabotage' or Apple's 'iAdventure'? Will we see a new type of creative agency emerge? One that specializes in telling the story of a brand in an epic game? Boy, I can't wait. I'd love to be a creative, responsible for making a great game for a brand. BMW could follow up its film series by asking different game developers to create a game with their brand, mmhhh…

Creative Portfolio 2.0

Okay, sorry for trying to raise the coolness factor of my topic with that number .0 thingy. It just fits and there is no other clever name for it – yet.

I'm thinking of setting up another blog dedicated to the development of a new creative portfolio. A blog that would establish a platform for an interactive online portfolio review.

It would start with the choice of brands along with the first thoughts. It would contain relevant research and links for the chosen topics. Propositions, strategies as well as first creative ideas would come next, followed by executions of the thoughts and media thinking.

During this whole process people are invited to leave comments to improve the ideas or point out weaknesses. The blog could function as documentation of the work in progress. As an application tool it shows one's thinking and what happened between the first idea and the finished campaign.

Of course there are down sides to this idea. Would people comment? This depends on the quality of thinking and the consideration of improvements.

Does this makes sense?

Feedback on the Hummer strategy

A month ago Jai and I submitted our entry for the Advertising Planning School of the Web, a strategy for Hummer. Now we've received feedback saying:

'What I find interesting in this is that just like Seb, you’ve identified a bunch of really interesting ideas and then went for the most ‘creatively pragmatic’ direction which is basically a “FUCK YOU” to people who think HUMMERS are for gas-guzzling, gun-toting wankers.

I am all for pragmatism and boldness in creativity but at the heart of your idea is an advertising concept rather than something that would achieve motivation regardless of communication - and whilst it would generate tons of PR, awards and talkability, it would not necessarily translate into sales.

Saying that, you are the only ones who really took on an ANTI-ENVIRONMENTAL approach … and while that would probably work VERY well in some countries/cities [Texas?] in alot of other markets, we felt the social-pressure to be ‘responsible’ may actually minimise sales rather than increase them...'

Very good constructive feedback, we fixed some parts of the strategy and maybe there will be a campaign for my book out of it. Thanks Rob and the judges for the thoughts and I'm waiting for the next assignment! You can read the whole feedback here on Rob's blog.

Advertising Plannng School of the Week

My friend Jai & I participated in the new Advertising Planning School of the Week. It used to be led by Russell Davies but now Rob Campbell has taken over. His brief was delightful and made us participate for the first time in a planning exercise as creatives. We very much enjoyed it. The brief was:

HOW CAN YOU ENCOURAGE MEN TO BUY A HUMMER OVER OTHER 4×4 VEHICLES - DESPITE BEING BIGGER, MORE COSTLY AND MORE EXPENSIVE TO RUN THAN THE COMPETITIVE SET.

[The Brand Essence of Hummer [for this exercise] is TOUGHER THAN TOUGH

Thank you very much for the challenge – we are curious about the results. Here is our answer.

Advertising & Art

I discussed this connection last week with my flatmate Julien. After reading this post from Christos I wanted to share my thoughts about it here. It feels like I have to go back to the beginnings of my advertising perception for this:

Since I can remember I loved to draw. When I grew up I wanted to be an artist, but after a rather early encounter with Adobe Photoshop I fell in love with digital art, and I studied to become a Graphic Designer. I very much enjoyed illustration, packaging, web design and branding. After some freelance jobs it became somewhat boring, and I recognized that I had the wrong approach – my aim was to make things beautiful, nothing further. While doing this I didn't think about the ideas behind the design, the core inside.

To explore this side of things I took ad concept courses at my college. I adored them. It was purely all about thinking and hunting for these really good ideas. I fell in love with advertising (as I knew it at that time), still my ideas were focused on simple, mostly visual executions. Making things look good – the process I still long for today – weren't compromised. After deciding on an idea I could still do the art direction and design of an ad. I just felt very right. When the possibility came up I came to the UK to study advertising further at Bucks University. There I realized that ad ideas need to be based on consumer insights, and product truths – there has to be a deeper core than a visual joke.

On this way I lost the feeling of doing art. Christos says that advertising for him is art. I have to disagree. Advertising is not art.

Why does advertising exist?
It has a clear purpose, to sell, to change behavior, to make people aware of a brand.


Why does art exist?
In my opinion the reason for art to be there – it is only the existence of it. Real art doesn't have a purpose. Some artist try to communicate a message with their work, at this point, I think, it looses the whole point of art. The art in this kind of work becomes a medium to transport the message. Art is there, to be looked at, not necessarily to be understood. Art doesn't ask anything of you, you don't need to buy anything after looking at it. Art isn't demanding, it is giving and wants only your interest in it.

Advertising cannot be art, it needs to compromise, it has to carry a message, it has to push the brand. In order to appeal to people it has to be new or/and entertaining. This is when art comes into play. Advertisers copy it, oh wait no, they get 'inspired' by it. Some examples:

Flat Eric by Levis = French puppet from Mr. Oizo music video
Honda's cog = Der Lauf der Dinge by Fischli and Weiss from 1987
Guardian Campaign Art Direction = Design exhibition poster by Olivetti

Advertising gives art a reason, it commercializes it. It fits the current trend in the industry to take a very simple proposition & strategy and execute it as creative and different as possible, like the new Cravendale adverts. The message (milk matters) is so generic and simple, it advertises the whole milk category, only the very left-field execution (the style is done by an artist again) makes it belong to the brand. That's why advertising sometimes relies on art.

The closest advertising comes to be art is when brands let artists create it. The Smirnoff ad from Michel Gondry is a good example for it. Also the adicolor videos white, pink, red, green, yellow, black.

If you want to be a good creative in advertising, confront yourself with as much art as possible. Today it's: whoever finds it first and can stick a brand at the end of it, wins.
If you want to be a brilliant creative in advertising, don't be in advertising, be an artist, they are the true creators of great work, all the directors, script writers, painters, designers,musicians and urban artists. Kudos to you.

Can anyone please change my opinion and tell me that I'm wrong? I'd love to be a creative and artist at the same time and make advertising that is art. Maybe I'd have to separate these two things?

The enchanting inspiration of the web

A lot of advertising briefs are currently on our table at JWT. Some of them are tough ones which have been in the agency around for some time now - and no one has cracked them so far - that's an ad-world-word by the way, you crack briefs, you crack a poster, everything can be cracked - well lets crack on.

We've been trying to do our best on them but got stuck with one of the products and Kristin was looking for a solution, a new approach. Eager to go beyond reality and searching for the magical idea we approached an oracle, a digital crystal ball, more known as a sloganizer.

It was fun for a couple of clicks but our definitive result: The magic ball seems not like the solution we sought for - that is unless you can sell the headline 'leaves your cornflakes minty not mediciny' to your creative director.

There are more helpful things in the world wide web. Everyone looking for inspiration, take a look at this flickr pool, it feels like a short trip away from the office to some great places. Or read Mario Pricken's interviews with creative minds around the world (some are in German though). If you prefer audio pleasure tune in to your favourite music you've never heard before or browse through a directory of wonderful things.

The web is such a great thing, it won't solve (most of) your problems but if you use it right, it's the best creative tool you can imagine, there is so much more to it than myspace and youtube. For more website check our del.icio.us links. If all this doesn't help, maybe try tarot cards?!