Serendipity Book

Bill Bernbach on Insights

“At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man [and] what instincts dominate his action”

Bill Bernbach published as Bill Bernbach Said... (pdf)

John Hegarty: "More and more brands are in the fashion business"

Chairman and Worldwide Creative Director of BBH, John Hegarty, on the tricky business of evaluating creative work in the IPA guide to judging creative ideas (IPA members only):

Advertising traditionally looked to a point of difference and then articulated it in a memorable, lasting way. Repetition was at the heart of the process. The media department’s task was

to ensure as many ‘opportunities to see’ as possible. This was a formula devised for a landscape dominated by media brands that delivered mass audiences.

Today, however, as brands and media fragment, reaching your audience has to rely less on ‘push’ and more on ‘pull’. The consumer is in control and the advertiser has to seek permission to engage. But as brands proliferate, their reason to appeal can be based on not just functional performance, but how they look and feel.

More and more brands are in the ‘fashion’ business. Understanding how to operate in this market involves judgements of taste. And the problem is, taste can’t be taught.

Ballard on Consumerism

Thom Yorke of Radiohead quotes from Kingdom Come by J G Ballard ...

"The economy is rolling along an endless plateau, and consumers are bored with the view. Something strange is needed to get them to sit up."

"The consumerist society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have a choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens."

"The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing."

"We're like bored children. We've been on holiday for too long, and we've been given too many presents."

 

Via: Ed @ Influx Insights

There are no facts, only interpretations

I'm still reading Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' . Marr is a British TV presenter and has previously been the political editor of the BBC and before that was the editor of The Independent newspaper. 'My Trade' is a fantastic warts and all autobiographical take on the world of journalism.

Early on in the book, Marr spends some time reflecting on the anatomy of news and discusses why news bears so little relationship to fact ...

"What is a news story? This question confronts most hacks most days of their working life. Of course there are human events which interest almost everyone. We are perpectually intrigued by the extreme, the gruesome, the outlandish. But there is not a reliable supply of these events.

So journalists learn to take less extraordinary things and fashion them into words that will make them seem like news instead. Journalists reshape real life, cutting away details, simplifying events, 'improving' ordinary speech, sometimes inventing quotes, to create a narrative which will work.

It isn't only journalists. Everyone does it, most of the time, mostly unconsciously. We hear a piece of gossip and as we retell it, we improve it, smoothing away irrelevance and sharpening the point; we turn experiences of friends and relatives into bolder, more heroic or tragic episodes than they really are. Above all, we turn our own daily life into a chain of 'stories', always looking for shape and meaning in the cascade of experience. Journalism is the industrialisation of gossip.

He concludes that "news is not facts" and the job of a journalist is "not, I repeat not, to give a blandly  accurate account of an unremarkable moment, but to have found 'the story' or failing that 'a story'."

As Nietzsche said: "There are no facts, only interpretations".

Benjamin Franklin on Persuasion

"If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect."

Benjamin Franklin - US author, diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician, & printer (1706 - 1790)

Via: The Week who in turn saw it on Japan Today

Dr Seuss on the importance of fantasy and nonsense

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.”

Dr. Seuss

Ella got her first taste of Dr. Seuss on Christmas Day ...

In The Public Interest

"An interested public is not the same as the public interest."

Judge James Kleinberg presiding in the case of Apple vs. Think Secret in 2005.

Never underestimate the importance of laughter

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people."

Victor Borge

Heralding a Discovery

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."

-- Isaac Asimov

There is nothing so horrible in nature as to see a beautiful theory murdered by an ugly gang of facts

-- Benjamin Franklin

Via: The Daily Kos Top 25 Things Ever Said by Anyone

Digging up Gold

A fabulous find. This is the splendid summation by Spencer Tracy that takes place at the end of the  classic 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?". Tracy plays the father of a white girl from an upper middle class liberal family in San Francisco who falls in love with a young black doctor.

If you haven't got 10 minutes to watch the clip then at least read the closing lines ...

"Anybody could make a hell of a good case against your getting married. The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them.

But you're two wonderfuI people who happened to fall in love and happen to have a pigmentation problem.

And l think that now no matter what kind of a case some bastard could make against your getting married there would be only one thing worse ...

And that wouId be if, knowing what you two are, knowing what you two have and knowing what you two feel ... you didn't get married."

Sadly, Spencer Tracy died two weeks after filming ended. The film won an Academy Award for best screenplay.