Report 103
A weekly newsletter on creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
Issue 13
Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your weekly newsletter on Creativity, ideas, innovation and invention.
As always, if you have news about creativity, please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103.
CREATIVITY NEEDED IN THE AD BIZ
One of the industries most desperately in need of a good innovative shot in the arm is advertising; which is rather ironic as it is a business which hails itself as creative, hires “creative” people and bestows upon its members lots of awards for creativity. Sadly, the ad industry has become overly self-confident of its creativity and, as a result, is behaving distinctly less than creatively these days.
There are two profound problems facing the industry today. Firstly, media are changing faster than ad agencies can adapt to them. Only one advertising company has really been successful with the Internet. Most have focused on banner advertisements and subsequent, ever more irritating variations such as pop-ups. Banner advertisements are becoming less effective all the time. They distract from the content of the web site so much, that people barely notice, let alone click on them. Banner adverts also ignore the fact that if someone has come to a web site with a purpose (such as to read an article), they are unlikely to click on an advert at the top of the article. In any event, banner adverts, pop-ups and the like follow the paradigm of magazine adverts: a flashy, eye-catching visual designed to distract attention. Mind you, there have been some successes, mostly be new media companies, such as viral marketing (creating something so inviting or funny or useful that people pass it on to their friends via e-mail or word of mouth). But, overall, the traditional advertising business has done badly from the Internet.
The exception and one successful advertising company is a new one: Google. (I know, Google may be a search engine, but their business is selling advertising.) Google has succeeded by selling small, unobtrusive, but highly focused advertisements on their search results and on other web sites. In short, on the web, they have done the exact opposite of almost every traditional advertising company. And, they have succeeded wonderfully. They are making stacks of money and, critically, Google's advertisements generally get much higher response rates than banners, pop-ups and the like.
Digital video recorders (DVRs) are even worse news for the advertising industry. DVRs allow people to record TV programmes onto a hard drive to view at their convenience. Crucially, DVRs make it absurdly easy to skip the commercials when watching recorded programmes. A study by TiVO (an American producer of DVRs) found that DVR owners recorded about 75% of their TV watching and skipped about 60% of the adverts. Since much of the TV in the world is paid for by advertising, this is bad news. It means ad agencies need to rethink their most lucrative activity: producing and running TV commercials.
To deal with this, ad agencies are going to have to behave in a way they have been claiming to do for decades: creatively. They will need to find new ways to advertise on TV; ways that TV viewers will not readily recognise as advertising or which viewers will want to watch as much as TV shows. Advertisements that might not be recognised as such include product placements in TV shows and advertisements integrated into TV shows, such as actors incorporating a sales pitch into their lines or text adverts running at the bottom of the screen.
The fact that DVR users skip adverts, like regular viewers visit the toilet, make snacks or channel hop with their remote controls during commercials, points to the second profound problem the advertising industry is facing: advertising is boring at best and irritating at worst. After all, if the advertisements were good, people would not go out of their way to avoid them. For all of its talk of being creative, the advertising business is not making advertisements that people actually want to see.
The solution is clear: advertising's creative people need to be more creative. They need to design TV commercials (and other kinds of advertising) that so entices people they do not want to skip the adverts. It can be done. After all, we have all seen those rare advertisements that give us a laugh or which compel us to think.
To sum up: the advertising business needs to get creative all over again – in new, creative ways. It needs to discover new methods of advertising on new media such as the Internet and old media, such as television. And, the industry needs to take a more creative approach to advertising. What a wonderful opportunity!
CAPTURING THE IMAGINATION
Do you not love it when something captures your imagination; when a new concept, idea, or image makes your mind run away with all kinds of related thoughts and, especially, ideas? When the imagination is captured, it is highly active, drumming out ideas, thinking, enjoying itself. (Only the phrase: “capturing the imagination” is perhaps not quite right. Should it not be “freeing the imagination?” But that's not the point of this article.)
What captures your imagination? It is important to be aware of the things and actions that inspire your mind to act creatively – so you can come back to those sources again and again for recharges.
Many things capture my imagination regularly: the Business and Science sections of the Economist magazine; the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the works of many of the surrealists, research in cosmology, new business ideas and driving through the Alps are among a few things that capture my imagination.
What captures your imagination? Could you make a list without having to think hard? If not, you should make a real effort to list the resources and activities that inspire your creative thinking. Once you have the list, ask yourself how long it has been since you have done something to encourage inspiration. You can seldom force inspiration or order your imagination to be captured; but you can certainly encourage the capture. Do so.
BIRTH OF HUMAN CREATIVITY PUSHED BACK
Pierced (Nassarius kroussianus) sea-shells found in cave in South Africa appear to represent the human race's earliest known example of creativity. The shells, which are believed to have been threaded into a necklace or bracelet, were found in a layer of cave floor that has been dated to be some 75,000 years old. This substantially pre-dates the earliest European cave paintings which are a relatively modern 35,000 years old. If Homo sapiens have been producing art work for 75 millennia, it suggests that creativity may well be one of our most basic traits.
Jeffrey Baumgartner
