We’ve all seen our share of creative directors who believe that critiques should be based on finding out what’s wrong with a piece of work. But in a chapter on giving creative feedback, Belsky has this marvelous little section I wanted to share with you.

In the lead-up to this excerpt, the author talks about a creative retreat he went to, one on the art of storytelling, led by a man named Jay O’Callahan. He wrote about his first try at telling a story to the group after which….

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I was grateful for the positive response from the group, but I was eager (and somewhat anxious) for critical feedback. I wanted to know what went wrong. Then I remembered that the workshop operated with a very nontraditional approach to sharing feedback. Specifically, constructive criticism was not allowed. Rather than bracing myself for the onslaught of critical comments, I would have to refine my story by listening to the group’s “appreciations.”

Appreciations is a technique O’Callahan and other storytellers use to improve students’ skills without any demoralizing consequences. It’s a unique form of feedback that helps creative professionals focus on developing their strengths. Here’s the concept behind appreciations: having just shared a story (or, in other contexts, a presentation or an idea), you go around the room and ask people to comment on the elements they most appreciated.

In my case, many people appreciated the pace at which I told the story. I also received a lot of unexpected comments about the character descriptions I’d provided. After hearing the aspects of the story that people appreciated most, I got a sense for what strengths I should emphasize even more in future stories.

The exchange of appreciations is meant to help you build upon your strengths, with the underlying assumption that a creative craft is made extraordinary through developing your strengths rather than obsessing over your weaknesses. And I noticed that a natural recalibration happens when you commend someone’s strengths: their weaknesses are lessened as their strengths are emphasized. As my storytelling compatriots recounted their stories a second and third time, the points of weakness withered away naturally as the most beautiful parts became stronger.

“It is strange that, in our culture, we are trained to look for weaknesses,” O’Callahan explained to me. “When I work with people, they are often surprised when I point out the wonderful crucial details – the parts that are alive.” O’Callahan went on to suggest that “if our eyes are always looking for weakness, we begin to lose the intuition to notice beauty.”

Of course, the contrarian’s view to this approach is that more direct feedback and criticism might help one cut to the chase. O’Callahan would argue that appreciation-based feedback helps us access a deeper creativity.

People need to relax to be able to discover. Our unconscious won’t come forward and help us see things when we are too logical and focused on criticism. Sometimes someone will say, “I just want to know how to improve, not what is good.” People think that pointing out faults is the only way to improve. Appreciations are not about being polite. They are about pointing out what is alive.

As O’Callahan explains, “Everyone thinks they can tell you what is good. But, no, it takes years to be able to say, ‘That phrase is fresh, that was a lovely image about sheets on the bed like snow-covered mountains, it was just lovely.’ It is hard to get people to pay attention to that skill.”

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Thought people might enjoy that. I sure did.

A fellow professor, Tom Laughlon from the Advertising Department at FSU, agreed that washing a pig might make for a good lab experience in chaos and creativity. I extend my thanks to him and his students for this literalization of my metaphor.

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CREATIVE BRIEF: Wash a pig.

SARAH, JUNIOR ACCOUNT PERSON: Well, this seems obvious … I’ll just say, “Hey Porky, hit the suds.”

ASHLEY, ACCOUNT PERSON: Mmmmm, he’s not going in. Are you sure a pool is the right approach?

CHAD, ART DIRECTOR: Yeah, my friend at Goodby did something like this. He said you just gotta … muscle it in.

ASHLEY: (sarcastically) Oh, perfect. See? I told you the pool idea sucked.

CHAD: No, we just gotta figure out how to keep the pig in the pool long enough to… COPYWRITER IN GREEN SHORTS SAYS: Dudes, seriously, what about my idea of feeding him Doritos? NICOLE (ACCOUNT PLANNER): Hey, I know! What if we used the hose …

ASHLEY: Nicole, the hose idea is brill! COPYWRITER: Yeah, but if he gets out of the pool, my Doritos idea might….. JOHN (THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, ARRIVING LATE, COMES IN FROM THE RIGHT): Hey, I see you guys love my hose idea.

TEAM: Yay, the pig is clean and…. No wait. CREATIVE DIRECTOR: I TOLD you Chad’s idea wouldn’t work.

THE REST OF THE PITCH TEAM ARRIVES. (MEDIA TEAM CONFERENCES IN FROM UPPER PORCH, ON MUTE.) AGENCY PRESIDENT: Client’s in the elevators. Where the hell’s my clean pig?

CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TO COPYWRITER: Dude. You were right about the Doritos. They distract him. COPYWRITER: Let me just massage some of this copy here and….

JUNIOR ACCOUNT PERSON: I just love this -- a clean pig. It’s so counter-intuitive.

CUT TO THE PRESENTATION ROOM. AGENCY PRESIDENT: And there you have it, gentlemen. A clean pig. CLIENT: Did I say “pig”? Seriously? I meant to say warthog. Can you guys wash a warthog?

CREATIVE TEAM REACTS WITH THEIR USUAL PROFESSIONALISM.

Oh, metaphors, I love you so much.

“3 A.M. CALL TO THE PLUMBER.”

(Curtain rises)

WE OPEN ON A CLOCK ON THE WALL. IT’S 3 IN THE MORNING. WE PULL BACK TO REVEAL SLEEPY PLUMBER ENTERING A BATHROOM AS THE CLIENT HOLDS OPEN THE DOOR.

CLIENT: It’s in here. The sink is just totally clogged.

PLUMBER: No problem. Sounds like a hairball. It’s almost always the U-trap.

CLIENT: I’m pretty sure it’s a problem with the toilet.

PLUMBER: I thought you said the sink is clogged.

CLIENT: Oh yes, that is the problem. But I think you reeealllly oughta work on the toilet.

PLUMBER: ______

CLIENT: See, most of the guys in the office say the same thing. The toilet.

PLUMBER: Ummmmmm, okay. But …. okay…. but in order for me to work on the toilet, I’mmmmm… gonna have to go in through the sink’s U-trap.

CLIENT: Ooookay, you’re the “expert.” But I’m pretty sure the hairball is in the toilet and that’s  the problem with the sink.

THE PLUMBER GOES UNDER THE SINK, UNDOES THE U-TRAP AND COMES OUT HOLDING A BIG UGLY HAIRBALL.

PLUMBER: Heeeeere’s your problem. Like I said, it was a hair…

CLIENT: Fine, whatever, now if you will please put that hairball back in the U-trap and check the toilet like I asked.

PLUMBER PUTS HAIRBALL BACK INTO SINK, THEN DECONSRUCTS THE TOILET, WHERE IT’S CLEAR THAT THE TOILET IS IN PERFECT WORKING ORDER.

PLUMBER: Well, it’s like I said. Listen, it’s a little late, and so if you want that hairball out, I can do it now or just leave.

CLIENT: I hate it when you plumbers act like you know alllllll about plumbing.

PLUMBER: Sir, I’m sorry but… I’ve been doing this stuff for goin’ on 25 years and I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a hairball in the U-trap.

CLIENT: Fine. …. Fine…. Just get it out.

PLUMBER GOES BACK UNDER, UNSCREWS U-TRAP, BRINGS OUT THE SAME BIG UGLY HAIRBALL.

PLUMBER: See? This is your hairball. From the U-trap.

CLIENT: (Appraising the hairball, looking at it from 3 different views) Good effort….but that just isn’t quite the hairball I was looking for. I was seeing something more in a spherical shape or more like a capsule shape, you know, sort of like a big pill.

PLUMBER LEAVES

CLIENT: Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE your hairball, it’s a great start. But if you could just show me three other hairballs, I’m pretty sure I’ll know it when I see it.

PLUMBER DRIVES AWAY

CLIENT: (Calling out the front door to the departing plumber) And did your hairball have to have a wedding ring all tangled up in the middle? I mean, what’s that about? Is your hairball married?  Wait’ll Mrs. Hairball hears about this!

"Spock! Your ads are boring."

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I read about a cool new title called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

In a review titled Why Won’t They Listen?, the writer got into some territory that has direct bearing on our craft in advertising. Which is this: a proposal is more persuasive when it is pitched to a listener’s emotions versus their intellect.

Yes, I know this sounds a little obvious, but once you get into the business and start reading the briefs you’ll be handed in meetings, you may start to see this insight is lost on 90% of the ad industry and its clientele. Most of the briefs I was handed outlined logical reasons to believe the ad.

There are probably many reasons for this, but the first that come to mind are these:

Most clients live with their products and believe in them so whole-heartedly they begin to think, “Heck, if I could just get people to listen to all the cool things about this product, they’d buy it. It’s just a better product.”

The other reason is probably that emotional responses and consumer behavior are pretty dang hard to quantify and predict. And corporate America loves to quantify and predict.

In The Righteous Mind, the author puts it this way:

“Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? [It's because] we were never designed to listen to reason. [People] reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later, only to justify what they’ve decided. … Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.”

All of this kinda lines up with something VCU ad prof Mark Fenske told me a long time ago: “You cannot logic your way to an audience’s heart.”

People are not rational. We like to think we are, but we’re not. If you look unflinchingly at your own behavior, you may agree that few of the things you do, you do for purely rational reasons. Consumers, being people, are no different. Only a very few purchases are made for purely logical reasons. Most people buy things for emotional reasons and then, after the fact, figure out a logical explanation for their purchase decision.

So here’s today’s advice: Trust your intuitions. Trust your feelings, padewan. As you try to figure out what would sell your product to somebody else, consider what would make you buy it. Yes, there are plenty of rational reasons your product is better, but get to the emotion first. Dig inside. If you have to, write the damn strategy after you do the ad. Forget about the stinkin’ focus groups and explore the feelings you have about the product, about the category. That’s where it all happens.

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What 50 pounds of clay can teach you about design.

A 3rd-year graphic design teacher, Alison Woods, once told a parable from “Art and Fear” that’s still stuck in my brain all these years later.

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and something curious emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than a pile of grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Even today, I find myself sometimes in the “quality” group, trying to get it perfect on the first try. I have to remind myself of the two lessons this parable teaches:

1. Don’t drown in the details.

Designers seem prone to obsessive-compulsion. We fight over details like kerning, pixel dimensions, and PMS colors. While being meticulous should be every designer’s trait, diving into the details too quickly can drown you. To use a common metaphor, it’s like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Designers, especially juniors, need to be especially aware of this tendency.

2. Quality improves with each iteration.

Like writing, designing is also a process of generating good and bad prototypes, along with editing and revisions. With each revision, quality increases. I suspect it would work well for all types of design and creativity.

(A small excerpt from the new fourth edition of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This.)

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“Dudes! Come in here! Look at my computer screen!”

That’s me in the year 1990 and the amazing “Flying Toasters” (Figure 5.6a) are making their first appearance on my 128k MacIntosh computer and its butt-kicking 8 MHz microprocessor. At the time, this soon-to-be-ubiquitous screen saver was pretty much all it took to amaze knuckleheads such as myself.

Hey, no laughing. Beyond a few word-document retrieval sites, in 1990 the Flying Toasters were “content.” At least they were better than that grainy-ass picture of Felix The Cat which comprised the first “show” on television. (Figure 5.6b) You’re not missing anything with this still photograph either; that’s all it was – a shot of a stupid cat.

It has been interesting, my career, straddling as it has the years before and after the web. Interesting too has been the evolution of all the content available in the media.

In 1994, TBWA\ChiatDay’s Lee Clow was our speaker guest at Fallon’s creative retreat. We met at an old hunting lodge on a lake in northern Wisconsin and to this day I remember Lee leaning against the fireplace as he talked about Apple, examining the changes wrought by this amazing company and what it all meant for traditional creatives like us.

“Throughout history, the technology always comes first. It’s just technology for awhile,” said Lee, “until the day we artists inherit it.”

Lee was right. When television first came along, pretty much all the content and commercials sucked – (“I’m head over heels in Dove!”) — but people loved it because it was cool new technology. (“Honey, look. It’s Felix!”) No one knew what we were missing until artists began to inherit the medium in the ‘60s and realize its larger potential. Same thing happened in years previous with radio. Today we find ourselves in a digital era when the artists are beginning to fully inherit the technology first wrought by Tim Berners-Lee.

Consumers are also inheriting technology and theirs is giving them more control over all this same media. What started with a TV’s on-off button changed to a mute button and then to time-shifting devices like VCRs, then DVRs, and now that consumers have complete control over everything they view on- and offline, it’s fair to ask, “How can a brand get any attention at all?”

The answer: Have better content than everyone else.

Quit interrupting the interesting things people want to look at and start being the interesting thing to look at.

Quality content trumps all.

This content can be anything; well, anything that’s useful, entertaining or beautiful, to borrow R/GA’s terms again. Content can be a how-to video, a Q&A chat room, blogs, apps, or downloadable video games. Content can be a white paper, a non-PG video, or a ringtone.  It can be almost anything as long as it has either entertainment value or is something a customer will find useful.

We’re entering an era when all brands, big and small, will have to be in the content business. This means agencies will have to be in the content business, too. Interbrand’s CEO Andy Bateman agrees: “Content and functionality are the new creativity.”¹¹

As with any commercial creativity, there’s a discipline here and as you sit down to think content, you must have an objective. Why are you making this content? What purpose does it serve?

When ABC Entertainment created content for their show Lost, there was a clear objective: keep the fans involved in the show off-season. In The On-Demand Brand, ABC’s Mike Beson described how they “actually started to bury web addresses in the final episodes of Lost after Season One, that took people to [fake websites like] Oceanic-Airlines.com. It was … content as marketing.” ¹²

Even insane content like the Skittles “Touch The Rainbow” YouTube series needed to report to a strategy. TBWA\ChiatDay’s Gerry Graf told me that Skittles’ ’90’s-era TV campaigns had helped Skittles “own” magic, but it was a PG-rated Disneyesque magic that needed some modernizing.  “To bring it up to date we referenced things like Spike Jonze videos with Christopher Walken flying… our own version of magic. A big difference was that, in our world, the magic wasn’t amazing. It was just part of life. Rabbits sing, beards are an appendage, all the magic was a given.”

“Switch Singing Bunny” and “Beard” were in fact two of their most talked-about television spots and these only whet their customers’ online appetites for more magical weirdness. What’s even cooler is that in bringing the campaign to YouTube, BBDO Toronto took advantage of the laptop medium by inviting viewers to place a finger on the screen. A voiceover said: “Touch the rainbow! No, seriously, put your index finger on the screen where the Skittle is. A video is going to start and your finger is going to be soooo delicious.” The videos were built to interact with the presence of a finger “in the scene” and in the most disturbing execution, a cat appears to be licking the viewer’s finger and is pushed aside by a creepy man-cat who does the same thing. (Figure 5.7)

As of this writing, there are a couple thousand delighted responses posted under this Skittles video; from “oohhhhhmyyyygod that was so weird” and “had to wash my finger!” to “favorite video ever!!!”

This particular execution hits on almost all the guidelines out there for creating good content. It should meet a brand’s customers where they are, it should talk to them in their language, it should be extremely useful or entertaining, and if it can require participation from the viewer, all the better. (Check, check, check and check.)

There are thousands of great examples of content online for you to study, content best seen in situ than the pages of a book. You might start with a quick look at Fallon’s BMW Films. This work is credited as being the very first online-only content-driven brand campaign – a series of cool mini-movies called The Hire, shot by A-list directors, starring A-list celebs and the latest BMWs. The breakthrough Fallon made with this idea wasn’t so much the action or plot of the movies but the whole notion that a brand could come up with something so interesting that their marketing ceased to be an interruption and become a destination; a place customers actually wanted to go.

New and better examples of incredible content appear online almost daily now and anything I commit to paper here will date. Yet for the purposes of a short intro course in “content studies,” I’ll direct your attention to these early efforts which are – at this writing – still viewable online:

• Arcade Fire’s music video The Wilderness Downtown: Viewers participated by providing their address. This allowed images from the viewers’ own streets and neighborhoods (pulled from Google Map’s Street View) into the story of the music video.

• The launch of the game Halo 3: Instead of the typical commercial showing the clips of actual game-play, McCann San Francisco and AKQA posted a long video titled “Museum” where viewers could see the game’s epic battles told as back-story and meticulously executed in the style of a museum diorama.

• For the JFK Museum, The Martin Agency created a site called We Choose The Moon which “rebroadcast” the entire flight of Apollo 11 in real time from take-off to splash down.

From these few examples, I see a few house rules to keep in mind as we begin our own work.

The first comes from Skittles’ Creepy Man-Cat. One of his YouTube viewers posted a note saying, “Doesn’t work very well with a touch screen. It pauses the video.” I’m guessing the creative team was aware these videos wouldn’t work as well on touch-screens, didn’t care, and went ahead anyway. (I would have.) Still, it’s a good reminder that as you come up with ideas there’ll be technical realities to keep in mind, such as making sure your idea is viewable from all the devices your customers use. The fancy-pants term for this is being vendor agnostic.

In addition to paying attention to technical differences like Apple vs Android and Flash vs HTML, you’ll also need to design your content for the type of screen it’ll likely be viewed on. Generally, people watch lengthier pieces on the big living room TV screen and “snack” on media elsewhere. For instance, I’m not likely to watch epic movies on my iPhone nor to use a FourSquare app on my living room TV. Given these viewing habits, the rule of thumb is to concept for one overall screen, design for the big screen, and then optimize for the smaller ones.

Technical realities aside, having incredible content is what it’s all about. We conclude here with Doc Searles simple message from The Cluetrain Manifesto: “There is no market for messages.”

In a screenwriting book I read years ago I stumbled on this basic Hollywood trick that seems to apply to what we do here in advertising. To create a story, the author said, “Create one world and then look at it through the eyes of another.”

Long before the term was popular, this author was talking about mash-ups. For instance, isn’t Bladerunner basically an old-fashioned gumshoe detective story seen from the future?  More recently we’ve had Cowboys and Aliens. I don’t mean to go all-sci-fi-geek on you, so how about Brokeback Mountain … which one could argue is sort of a Cowboys and Gay Guys. One world, seen through the eyes of another.

My point is this: thinking in terms of mash-ups may be a good mental exercise to add to your regular creative process; a doorknob you’ll want to rattle as you search up and down the hallways of your brain for ideas.

One of my very favorite mash-ups was a piece used to create talk for Mingle2, a dating site. It was called Zombie Harmony, a dating site for the undead. It’s worth a visit.

For an Aussie beer named Tooheys, they mixed the worlds of money and beer. In this world, doing a favor like helping a buddy move was worth a bottle of Tooheys, while helping him move in with your ex-girlfriend would cost him a case.

Another way to start the mash-up engine is with a meme. Take a popular cultural image or saying and shoot it through the world of your client’s brand. Kit-Kat candy bars started a nationwide buzz by taking the whole silly Shroud-of-Turin, Jesus-on-toast thing and mixing it with the world of candy. (Figure 6.4) Voila, you have Jesus on a Kit-Kat, a “story” that was planted in Facebook and eventually picked up by the news media (on what I can only hope was a very slow news day).

FIG 6.4 JESUS ON A KIT KAT BAR

Memes are in great supply on YouTube, as are mash-ups. With a few edits, The Shining + comedy became a trailer for a happy family movie. You can also mash up media. Foursquare is Google Maps + social. And Google Maps + Twitter = Twittervision, a site displaying the location of tweets and tweeters in real time.  And TiVO + lots of marijuana = the Domino’s/TiVO ordering service that lets furniture vegetables order pizza without having to stop watching The Princess Bride for the 800^th time.

Download flyer. Click on red link, right.

Thanks to all the folks who helped me research it (in particular, Sam Bennett of GSD&M). It features new and updated work throughout. And in particular has large new sections on digital, social and interactive. Special thanks to art director Keli Linehan who did the cover.

It’s available now on amazon.com and will soon be available as an iBook for your iPad. (Coolest part about the iPad version is that all the examples cited in the book have links right to the work.)

FLYER/SUMMARY OF HEY WHIPPLE_al