The San Diego Ad Club sponsored an interesting forum on creativity and agencies. Is creativity still king?
In a short word, yes.
There’s more people producing sites and video and blog posts. More volume. More crap. It’s easier than ever for a great idea to stand out, if only people see it.
However, the days of a copywriter and art director going off to a room to concept for a week are over. This whole working in a silo has to end.
But on the other hand, someone has to steward the idea through production. Creative by committee tends to produce watered-down ideas.
Social Media Marketing World hosted by the folks at Social Media Examiner came to town for a few days. I created sketchnotes and sketch tweets during the sessions and tweeted them out. All visuals were created on the fly using the iPad and Brushes and Over apps.
One surprising theme – don’t discount your email list. It will be the most profitable.
Tonight was the kickoff reception for Social Media Marketing World at the San Diego Natural History Museum. What do you get when 1,000 social media marketers invade a collection dinosaur bones and fossils?
All of these images were created live on mobile devices.
Oh, I can’t believe I haven’t shared this yet. Truly, one of my favorite freelance copywriter projects from last year. The Fandom Marketing video. The animation was done by the very talented Todd Anderson of Switchfoot Creative.
It’s funny how every Y-Conference seems to reflect an underlying theme. This year’s was that side projects and pro-bono work can lead to other assignments.
Wayne White spoke how he played with puppets and that led to his work on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Brian Singer shared his many side projects including 1000 Journals. Eric Thoelke shared how doing work for the local opera company evolved step by step into more client work. And Josh Higgins shared how his pro bono poster work led to working with the Obama Campaign.
Below is a selection of images that I live tweeted during the conference including sketchnotes of presentations and highlighted quotes. All design done live during presentations. (Yeah, I felt weird, one of the few non-designers in an audience of designers tweeting designs but all very much of the moment.)
So do you think the Internet is an amazing thing? A depository for all of our collective knowledge. It is. But it’s not the first.
The great library at Alexandria in ancient Egypt was the first time when all the the world’s knowledge was actively collectively organized, and more importantly, organized. In this clip from the program Cosmos, Carl Sagan walks us through the great library that contained over 1,000,000 scrolls. When commercial ships can into port, they were searched for books. Agents were sent to travel the world, to borrow and copy scolls.
The library is no longer with us and Sagan ponders just how much information was lost, from a Mesopotamian historian’s account of stories from creation to the flood, to the daily musings of Egyptian priests.
What would happen if we lost the Internet? How much would you lose? (Do you have a backup?)
Nothing can bog down your blog post more than a boring, predictable visual. (Hello iStock.) So what is a blogger to do? Well, look no further than your iPhone. There are some amazing apps that make creating a visual fun and easy. Here are a few of my favorites.
Over
Over adds text to photos. You can select fonts, alignment, size and color all within the app. (No more layers in Photoshop.)
Take a picture. That’s right. Don’t be shy. Draw on notepad, a white board and post.
Vine
Vine is a new six-second video app.And it makes making stop motion animation easy! How could you use it? Pin up your products one by one?
I gave a short presentation at the Hera Hub Writers Lounge on generating ideas. Really it was an exercise in trying out the new Haiku Deck app, which lets non-designers make cool Power Point presentations. Then I took the slides and turned them into a video. Yes, all copy AND design by a freelance copywriter. If I can do it, so can you. You can see both below.
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