Your advertising doesn't have to be shocking or disruptive, it can just be likeable or interesting

Creatives should see themselves as salespeople

The art of getting to a good idea: start with lots and lots, and then you’ll find the one

If you have to use formulas, use trust

Strong brands earn the right to charge more and tend to grow more valuable over time; or as Warren Buffett observed, a good business can raise prices without losing customers, while a bad business cannot

Being prolific leads to greatness

Some ways to write propositions in creative briefs

Print ads are the fastest test of an idea: if it can’t grab a driver at 70 km/h, it’s not there, which is why print is to advertising what figure drawing is to art, the foundation

If you’re not failing roughly one in every six times, you’re probably not pursuing anything new enough

'Do not waste your love on the business. It cannot meet you where an artist deserves to be met. Love the process. The process of creation is worthy of love and will return to you what you seek'

This me-me-me culture of obsessive self-importance is so pervasive it’s corrupted everything, including advertising, which endlessly tells you to just be yourself

Art vs. Advertising

You need to get past some 15 ideas before getting to the good ones

Medieval art is weird because much of it was made by monks and tradespeople, unburdened by artistic convention or self-consciousness

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An ad agency is among the last places for weird people and their dumb questions, which is often the path to interesting answers

The assumption that 3 words or fewer work best has no real evidence

The most recalled and liked slogans sit closer to 4–5 words

You’re often better off going a little longer

Principles of optimum budget split

14 'anti-laws' of advertising

Don’t confuse what makes sense with what works

House ad extraordinaire

We've turned advertising awards into participation trophies that mean nothing

Beware of the 'we' word; it’s often conformity disguised as consensus

There's nothing logical about meerkats selling you insurance, but it works because power of fur

Don't jump at calling any new work ‘iconic’ until it’s taken a few years to truly earn that level of praise

Technician priorities

It is okay to not know what you are doing

Still Life with Remorse

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Ours is a trivial career for serious people. We treat all trivial things seriously and all serious things with a sincere and studied triviality

Things don't always need to make sense in advertising because people don't demand logic as much as we do

Typical story arc:

This happened,
and then this happened,
and then this happened,
and then this happened

Interesting story arc:

Replace ‘ands’ with
‘buts’ and ‘therefores’

The essence of creativity lies in the subjective and elusive nature of artistic expression rather than rigid quantification

The ability to think with the eye is essential; the thinking eye must always ask: How do I know that?

A brand’s customer base typically looks like a banana, with a few heavy buyers and lots of light buyers. So to grow, focus on recruiting light buyers

No need to commit yourself, especially if you haven't yet formed a point of view

The art of interesting

The art of maintaining steady progress in writing

An Orwellian sentence

The idea of ‘client services’ killed advertising

Happiness is probably the best advertising strategy because it reaches the parts other emotions cannot reach

The problem with porpiose is it feels good in the boardroom but ridiculous to the public

Things you could appreciate more

We hear you

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Creative and strategy are indivisible; if it's not creative, it's not strategic

20 writing truths in advertising that are more useful than not

Brand value isn't created by efficiency

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth

188 cognitive biases…

Idiocy is virtue

Modern blanding

Revolutions in living standards:

Inner circle—by 1970s, the basic elements of modern standard of living were already achieved along the dimensions identified (Robert Gordon)

Outer circle—future scenarios or paths to improve or diminish wellbeing across dimensions (Frank Diana)

Leo Burnett values:
The soul of a citizen
The heart of a champion
The hands of a craftsman
The eyes of a child

You see more when you draw

A copywriter is a…

Art and physics, though worlds apart in method, meet on common ground: both are organised perception

And then the dog and goat drive home in a convertible

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The ad agency lifecycle

Strong planners find the interesting in everything, while stitching the unrelated in unusual ways

Whatever it is you're doing dramatise whatever it is you're doing

The source of M&C Saatchi’s philosophy, Bertrand Russell

Strategy is a way of doing, and there’s no one way

Advertising ought to be for the masses, not festivals and galleries

The Mischief philosophy

One perpetual truth in advertising: people prefer more entertainment less preach

Middle classness = groundedness and certainty

Power of finding the right tone of voice…

Slides craft: write headlines instead of headings

‘No one you love is ever dead’— Hemingway

Grandma holding the weight of the world on her shoulders, with tree trunk legs

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How to judge an ad..

Ad agency creatives ought to see themselves as salespeople first

It's okay to aim high, just don't shoot yourself into the twatosphere

Creative laws don't make sense until they do

No need to be precious

Exceptional creative people are just intellectual brokers

Four concepts explaining human oddities

10 traits of a planner

Adam Gopnik on Darwin's Englishness

The campaign that put Manchester on the map, depositioning Yorkshire bitters

We’re staring in, not looking out

Thoughts are waves

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Aston Martin knew that only a tiny proportion of individuals could afford their cars. But they went against pinpoint targeting and eliminating waste to captivate a 14-year old Len, securing a sale 30 years later

Moral: advertising is never a cost

Juxtaposition of opposites as a creative philosophy for Saatchi & Saatchi

Direct planners use the same skills as planners (research, business strategy, insight), but apply them to different contexts: loyalty schemes, emails, direct mail, CRM programmes, service design, digital acquisition etc.

If you're a planner, it is your job to be useful

Ad agency creatives ought to see themselves as salespeople first

Different types of agency fee models

Brands = alternative CEOs

The humour comes from what you’re trying to communicate, not just the joke

Thankfully, we're going back forwards to rebel from modern sameness

Sad it’s come to a point where this is a headline, but thanks Greg

Philosophy relies on pure thought, and that's why it's striking; it's powered intuition

John Ruskin always travelled with pencils and sketchbooks, observing points of interest and the slightest of variations in the material that caught his attention

His biggest learning: the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless

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Blah blah blah

Insights are acrobatic observations

As BMP planning legend Paul Feldwick rightly argues, the ad industry should be talking about ads (assets/devices: slogans, formats etc) not ideas (abstract inventions)

Or as Lee Clow puts, 'The Apple Store was probably the best ad we did.. Everything a brand does is advertising'

Principles of Mother

Strong writing feels like a conversation

Jay Chiat on advertising standards

Funny is virtue

Prose today is devoid of intricacy, originality, artistry and expressive power, but with elegance it can make writing more than worthwhile

Priorities: Wieden+Kennedy NY keeping awards—big and small—in the mailroom but ideas front and center

Ads are means, not ends; so don't worry about getting the ad too right

Focus on the outcome — i.e., on what people need to take away from the communication

A philosophy for idleness

Blunder is the norm

Unconditional love

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If you're a planner, it is your job to be useful

Turn up with a blank slate

The ad industry's creativity and effectiveness crisis is partly because we've forgotten how to make people laugh

Fight for greatness

Insights aren’t just observations; they’re created

Lighten up, it’s only advertising

In advertising, you can dramatise what's right or interesting about your product or service to infinity

Brand advertising is insurance

Power of aesthetics

Surrounding yourself with unread books propels intellectual humility

Improvise for advertising excellence

Choose to look; it’s what artists do

Whet your wit to diffuse the drab

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Creative people make things simple enough to squeeze into the most important piece of real estate: people's minds

Creative brief ingredients from Steve Harrison

Humour / comedy / advertising isn't about efficiency

Plight of the modern ad worker

Great ad agency brand names may die, but their ideas live on..

And as the old saying goes, 'It's the second wave of settlers that make the money, the pioneers just get scalped'

Mischief is a virtue worth fighting for not just because it's a way to deal with life, but because it’s the foundation for the development of philosophy, science and art

Thinking is living

We pave our paths with intentions, but life surprises us with the view

It's refreshing to feel depleted in the pursuit of ideas because it reveals a sense of absolute commitment

Artists capture complexity by transcending logic

The way to complain is to create

Happiness is a commercial

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Stop obsessing over customers, and obsess over your brand instead

Copywriting in the wild

Creative brief craft

Creativity in advertising

Stuff to measure

What strategy is supposed to do

Life is essentially suffering (Stoics to Buddha) and you can't eliminate it, but you can see to it that no kind of suffering goes on for too long; in which case, a 'semi-satisfied' life is the best one can hope for

Be a flâneur

Ruth Ansel's four points on magazine design:
1 Look/go for that which is off-putting, against our first human instinct to reject
2 Put your wider cultural observations to work
3 Play with unexpected juxtapositions
4 Get out of your own way to let a natural sense of direction

Intuitive is also intellectual

Art is our secular religion

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It's not about how much you know, but what you do with the stuff you know

Art lets us feel for things we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly — so much so that we seek out corners of the world only once they've been painted by artists

Wellness is an overlord

Strong planners are weird

Mischief is a virtue worth fighting for not just because it's a way to deal with life, but it’s the foundation for much of philosophy, science and art

How to draw from the well of character..

Remember, we're all interesting enough to make speeches

Emotions happen between people (as acts), rather than inside them

The costlier the medium / ad, the greater the brand's fame, credibility and appeal because it signals strength

Christianity, like advertising, forgets that beauty is the most direct and potent form of communication

Hope abounds

One thing to learn from a child: the boundless imagination that everything that is possible is real

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The basic mechanics of account planning

Art of creative endeavour

Strategy is a craft
(Like advertising is a craft)

Elon Musk on meetings craft

The difference is craft

Principles for stronger advertising

The five strategic options for agency models:

Consolidate (merge agencies)
Simplify (improve efficiency)
Diversify (add muscles)
Specialise (do one thing well)
Vertically integrate (get upstream into consultancy or downstream into media/entertainment)

True love, like true art, is a meeting of the improbable and the inevitable

Creating Fame, Feeling, Fluency → market share growth across categories with an average correlation of +0.9

Tone is tangible

250 things a person of taste should know

The distance of a whisper
The need for freaks
The pleasures of suburbs
The idea of too close
Perspective by hand
Aristotle
Where to eat
Why
Vitruvius
Sentence structure
Golden ratio
Geography
Who pays
Who profits
How to sit
How to get lost
How to listen closely
How to ride a bicycle..

One thing leads to another

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Advertising is as trivial as washing milk bottles before putting them out at night — so don't be too serious or lofty about it

Some four reasons planners can draw from poetry aspects of what we do in the advertising business

Inventors vs. Engineers

Philosophy progresses not by producing better theories, but by eliminating confusion through the clarification of what we — in some sense — knew all along

Enthusiasm is common; endurance is rare (and what matters)

Get off the train of logic to get onto greatness

So you go home wondering many things, mostly why you spent the day washing a pig

Journey map = a visual depiction of how one goes about accomplishing a goal

Four types:
1 Empathy map (user)
2 Customer journey (users)
3 Experience map (mindsets)
4 Service blueprint (employees, products, processes)

Decision-making for risk ≠ Decision-making for uncertainty

Risk = you know all the alternatives, outcomes, odds (eg. poker, medical work)

Uncertainty = you don’t know all the alternatives, outcomes, odds (eg. marketing, marriage, jobs)

The misery quotient

Intuitive sensing is your greatest tool — to take you places where other vehicles can't

Our greatest challenge isn't imagination, which soars readily, but perspective, which is easily clouded by the present

Surprise or impress with consideration and craft

It’s nothing special for a dog

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Philosophies on getting things done

Revolution is t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ behavioural

Rebranding

If you're struggling to write, you don't have the facts at hand

Interesting > Right

If brands want more long term effectiveness from advertising, they must create campaigns for the right brain — ads that are funny, use binding values, human quirks, fluency devices (mascots like 'Kevin the Carrot' to lines like 'Should've gone to Specsavers')

Cassandre's 1934 poster for Dubonnet is one of the greatest ads of all time, inspiring decades of agency work, including the 70s Heineken posters from CDP

Some three ways to reveal things

Having more time ≠ greater subjective well-being

Philosophical conundrums:

Representation is not reality, although it may look like it

Everything is, in the end, a question of representation

Being is appearing

High culture is the new counterculture; a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream

Aestheticism = the belief that art and beauty are the highest values in life
Pessimism = the belief that the world is a fundamentally flawed place
Embrace of difficulty = the belief that the best things are worth working hard for

All of these values are at odds with the values of the mainstream, which emphasizes comfort, convenience, and instant gratification

When you walk, you move more than the body — you move the mind, the spirit, the entire system of being

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How to judge an ad..

Planning isn't necessary, but it can be useful

Market share > Absolute sales

The highs and lows you go through before getting somewhere

Comedy and advertising work alike: they leave enough space for the audience to be involved in the interpretation; i.e., they're implicit, rather than explicit

Lee Clow on the creative curse

Be a charming guest, not an aggressive tout

Another expression of the funnel to clarify the idea that building mental availability isn't just an awareness thing, it's the fundamental role of advertising

Funny doesn’t just soften the punch, it relieves

Writing is a means to tell you the things you never knew; so secrets are waiting to be written

Lead with intuition, seal with reason

The wisdom of age

You are free to imagine so long as you retreat into your heads, and the freedom ceases to exist the moment you're required to share that, which is the dilemma of VR

'Be profoundly grateful. For the earth and the sea. The sun and the stars. The people, the dogs, the trees, the fish, the buses, the paintings, the coffee, the music and the unstoppable energy of all of those who are alive'

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There's no such thing as the right answer in strategy

The right 3 degrees > 360 degrees

Types of filmmaking

'A technically perfect photograph can be the world’s most boring picture'

Effectiveness ≠ Efficiency
Effectiveness > Efficiency

Rajeev’s book is one of the most interesting books out there

Another how to happy

Seven types of stupidity

Life of a̶r̶t̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ content creators

Power of truth

Ps. #3 applies to the client, not the copywriter

Three ways people make decisions

You can’t spreadsheet your way to memorability

Dogs are us

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It's all about the work, work, work

Humour = the most underutilised superpower in advertising

Start with the premise (concept), then tell the jokes (ads)

Ps. A concept is - or an articulation of - the consumer takeout (proposition)

Start with: people don't care

Exaggeration is the basis of great art / philosophy / advertising

Fallon McElligott Rice house ad extraordinaire

Don't be ashamed of post-rationalisation, which is a fundamental skill of our game

(It brings coherence to intuitive leaps, and you can only know what's good about an idea after you've had one)

Your campaign doesn't always need a line, but a good one can encapsulate the strategy and bring consistency to executions

Gut gets you there if you can use it

Brands shouldn't be ashamed to be popular

(Or indeed, popular > cool)

Planning brings coherence to intuitive leaps, i.e., it's a creative licence

Life is a gamble with a great deal of variables

Art reveals

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Aston Martin knew that only a tiny proportion of individuals could afford their cars; but they went against pinpoint targeting and eliminating waste to captivate a 14 year old Len, securing a sale 30 years later

Moral: advertising is never a cost

A handy tip for running a planning dept: build it on a theme

BBH Los Angeles: Flavours
BBH London: Feels

Be unreasonable to get somewhere

'That's funny' > 'Eureka!'

Discarding logic is a means to greatness

The more ideas you think of, the more good ones you'll think of

Also, as Chuck Jones notes: 'All worthwhile endeavours are 90% effort and 10% love and only the love should show'

Happiness = state of mind
Intelligence = scope of mind

Trends take you to places where you can end up like everyone else

One way to inspire greatness

Writers see, painters look

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Casting > Hiring

Nut + Moron + Stylist + Critic = Great Writer

Art lets us feel for things we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly — so much so that we seek out corners of the world only once they've been painted by artists 

Advertising 101: Show the product; show it in action; show it performing well

There's a shortage of good planners for a number of reasons including the undermining of its core skill, which is to derive at the what with clarity and conviction

Some four buckets by which clients tend to sort agencies

On the divinity of instinctive process:

Michelangelo simply freed figures from stone — because they were already there, from his point of view

A strong first sentence is that which finds the right reader; it's a step in an ongoing series of steps

Ingredients that evoke curiosity: weirdness, conflict, tragedy, mystery, the supernatural, struggle, something being slightly off, etc.

Interestingness = that which is worth thinking about, to the intended audience

Perhaps collaboration is better as a tool, rather than as a rule

Ludwig Wittgenstein's — arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century — theory on language probably came from his love for cricket; for cricket, with its extraordinary quilt of gorgeous words and phrases, is a game of language

Re: advertising is dead

Bauhaus was the most distinctive building school because they originally neither taught nor had an architecture department

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