Woman's March 2017

My wife, Andi, and I were having dinner on the Friday night one week before the Women's March on Washington.  It was the same conversation we’d been having for a few weeks, and one that most people we knew had been having, around the fact that we didn't have the ability to pick up and go to D.C.. So we came up with this idea to bring awareness to the 271 sister marches that were happening throughout the country (this number reached 600+ by the time the event actually happened). 

Hope you enjoy!

HEY WHIPPLE, SQUEEZE THIS PT. 2

INTRODUCING Deck of Brilliance

Two of Asia's most awarded creative directors have released a website aimed at providing guidance, training tools and inspiration to ad industry creatives. The 'Deck of Brilliance' is the brainchild of Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai ECD, Juggi Ramakrishnan, and Commonwealth// McCann Regional Chief Creative Officer, Todd McCracken.

The duo came up with the idea as colleagues and friends working over their long careers Asia.

'Deck of Brilliance' is a completely free online resource comprising 52 idea-generation tools. These tools are aimed at creative professionals in the ad industry. And each comes with instructions and world-class examples. "Glorify and Celebrate", "Dramatize the Problem", "Make the Product Precious", "Make the Familiar Unfamiliar" and "Crash Someone Else's Party" are just 5 of the 52 cards in the Deck of Brilliance.

Preach! - Melanie Myers / W+K

Hire Wrong Melanie Myers By Melanie Myers

How did you get started in advertising? Like many advertising professionals at Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), by accident. After college, my versatile journalism degree and I moved from Texas to Seattle for obvious reasons. I worked at Microsoft on innovative CD-ROM packages, like the now-defunct Encarta, which led me to a job archiving historical images at the Corbis licensing agency. I later moved to Portland and stumbled into a job I was totally unqualified for at a local prepress service bureau. There, I met W+K. I loved working with them and decided they were my people—that’s where I wanted to work, regardless of the job.

My first interview with W+K was in IT, as I had an obsession with technology and a knack for figuring out computers. But I landed my first job at W+K as an assistant to the creative directors on the Microsoft account and quickly moved into recruiting and creative management, where I worked for eleven years. I left for three years to start my own company, which was an amazing experience, but was seduced back by Dan Wieden six years ago to work in a global capacity, implementing recruiting strategy across all of W+K’s eight offices.

What kinds of changes did you observe rejoining W+K? The media landscape has changed things dramatically for both W+K and the advertising industry. Information is everywhere. We communicate with people in incredibly different ways and have many more opportunities for multitasking: we eat during a work meeting while we read our emails, take photos of things to post on social media while we text our friend in the other room and answer a call from our boss who’s in China because it’s the only time she can talk. Studies show multitasking is actually bad for us because we get less productive and our ability to filter out irrelevant information declines. It’s a fire hose of information shooting at us from all angles, not to mention an often intense fear of missing out—so much so that phenomena like Pokémon GO happen overnight.

For our clients, everything has been accelerated. Today’s generation of data, production of content and social networks accelerate the flow of all this information, so it’s overwhelming for people and increasingly difficult for marketers to cut through a faster and faster moving window of opportunity to get people’s attention.

It’s also never been more difficult to get away. (continue)