From the Xoogler....
I enjoy reading Xoogler - a blog about what it was like for a few people who used to work at Google. In addition to very interesting tales about a very interesting company during a very interesting time, you get good business advice:
I’ve met a lot of advertising “creative” people who believe they can solve problems before they’ve done the research to grasp them fully. A little word play in the headline, a snazzy visual, maybe a starburst, a twist at the end of the body copy and boom, you got yourself an ad. For a long time, I was one of those guys. It was partly a competitive need to prove how linguistically limber I could be with just a skeletal set of facts and partly a fervent hope I’d get lucky and come up with something the client would love without having to put in a lot of effort. You never know.
Over time, I learned this approach rarely paid off. So instead of spouting every lame idea that came into my head, I’d first try to purge my system of every pun headline, hokey visual or obvious metaphor I could think of, usually dumping ideation sludge across six or seven sheets of yellow legal paper, so I could move on to create something that was more useful. My initial ideas for Google never oozed off the pad and evolved into an actual presentation.
I’ve met a lot of advertising “creative” people who believe they can solve problems before they’ve done the research to grasp them fully. A little word play in the headline, a snazzy visual, maybe a starburst, a twist at the end of the body copy and boom, you got yourself an ad. For a long time, I was one of those guys. It was partly a competitive need to prove how linguistically limber I could be with just a skeletal set of facts and partly a fervent hope I’d get lucky and come up with something the client would love without having to put in a lot of effort. You never know.
Over time, I learned this approach rarely paid off. So instead of spouting every lame idea that came into my head, I’d first try to purge my system of every pun headline, hokey visual or obvious metaphor I could think of, usually dumping ideation sludge across six or seven sheets of yellow legal paper, so I could move on to create something that was more useful. My initial ideas for Google never oozed off the pad and evolved into an actual presentation.
Comments
Post a Comment