Monday, November 5, 2007

Awards Show Dilemma

“If you had a moratorium on awards for ten years, if you said there will be no awards for the next ten years, and said that after those ten years there will be awards for the most new and original things that had emerged, then you might find that within those years all the new ways of expressing ourselves will just come out, because there would no longer be any compulsion to impress juries who are steeped in the old, conventional ways.” – Indra Sinha


Indra's got a point here. And it would be a great experiment. If only you could get every creative in the industry to comply.

But consider the position you're in. As students, you don't really have award shows to enter. Sure, you've got CMYK, the One Show college competition, and a few regional things. But your real show is going to be your book. That's your chance to do some incredible work. If a creative director opens it to find a bunch of mimicked ads, it won't make much of an impression.

I also think it's incredibly important for you to study the annuals. Especially early in your career. I think studying the annuals is the best way for you to really understand what makes great advertising.

So here's the dilemma: You need to read the annuals to be familiar with what really great advertising is. You also don't want to simply copy the kind of great advertising that's in the annuals. How do you reconcile the two?
Posted by Greg Christensen

4 comments:

  1. Look through the award books after a class critique rather than before.

    Greg, is The Book of Gossage worth reading?

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  2. The Book of Gossage is definitely worth reading. But it won't help you do better ads. It's basically ad philosophy, like Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message."

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  3. Pink air! Pink air!

    To answer your question, Greg, I think the way to look at the annuals, and what I encourage my students to do, is more of an active reading. It's like a writer reading Dickens not just for the story, but to study the construction of sentences, plot, and character development.

    Look at the annuals and try to figure out how the creatives got to where they ended up. What was their strategy? What questions did they ask? What about an ad makes it great? Is it a turn of phrase, the look on a person's face? The design? The choice of a certain word?

    It's always obvious when someone rips something off, either in idea or execution. You can't just copy somone's answers. The real thing to learn from the annuals is the questions that were asked.

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  4. Labrot, maybe you should read Gossage just so you can appreciate Jim's pink air comment. Pink air was genius. Gossage was doing alternative media decades ahead of his time. He definitely respected the consumer more than modern marketers do.

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