BlueFrog Creative

Making a meal of it

As I begin to write this, my second Bluefrog Creative post, lunchtime is fast approaching. Searching for a suitable analogy for the long copy ad, I am inexorably drawn towards food.

The long copy ad is, I think, the advertising equivalent of a three-course meal. A succinct headline to whet the appetite. Meaty, filling body copy. All rounded off with a satisfying flourish.

Just as three-course meals seem like an antiquated extravagance, so too do long copy ads. With a profusion of brands and charities competing for attention, much of today’s advertising offers immediate impact and saccharine gratification.

Here at Bluefrog, though, we believe that if good ingredients are prepared in an interesting way, the end result will be consumed – even if it takes a while. 

David Ogilvy, whose Rolls Royce ad is a long copy tour de force, pithily proclaimed: “The more you tell, the more you sell”.  

(Click the images to enlarge)

 

Many of my favourite ads take their time to communicate their message, whether it’s putting the spotlight on human rights or extolling the virtues of eating doughnuts.  

 

(You can read more about this ad on SOFII)

 

 

So it was with a sense of excitement, and some trepidation, that we started work on our entry to the CBS Outdoor London Long Copy Challenge.

We had entered a previous CBS Outdoor competition, putting a urinal on the side of a London bus to raise awareness for The Prostate Cancer Charity. This time, our task was to create a Cross Track Tube poster.

It seemed like the ideal place to advertise lendwithcare.org, the new microfinance website from CARE International.

lendwithcare.org lets you lend money to entrepreneurs in developing countries, so they can expand their businesses and transform their lives (this post from Mark describes in more detail how the site works). 

A poster on the Tube would be a fantastic way of launching lendwithcare.org to a younger audience, who are familiar with entrepreneur-championing programmes such as Dragon’s Den and bionically attached to their iPhones. 

Our entry addressed these commuters directly, describing the benefits of lending with an example familiar to anyone who works in an office. Here it is:

 

 

Much to our surprise, and delight, our poster was on the competition longlist and put up at Oxford Circus. For a couple of weeks, commuters and Christmas shoppers on platform 3 could read all about why it’s good to lend.

 

 

On the London Long Copy Challenge website, you can see the longlisted, shortlisted and garlanded entries.

These posters show that the combination of long, compelling copy and clever, striking design remains very relevant.

Our desire to be entertained, surprised, or at least occupied, is as great as it has ever been. Perhaps even greater – we now expect to be doing something all the time (it’s rare to see anyone on the Tube who isn’t reading a book or paper, listening to music or playing with a phone).

If well-done and well-placed, long copy ads can sate this desire. And so, at the risk of overindulging myself on the food analogy, they should still be an important part of the advertising diet.

That’s it for now. I’m off to tuck into a three-course, three-Martini lunch.

Cheers!

Felix

“You Can Find Inspiration In Everything*

*(and if you can’t look again)” – Paul Smith

My eloquent colleagues at Bluefrog have been writing blogs on a variety of interesting subjects lately, from the direct marketing of the recent general election to World Malaria Day.

As an Art Director I’m naturally a very visual person. When I read a newspaper, my eye always goes straight to the pictures first, then any graphics and, finally, when my eyes settle down I will start to read the headlines. If for some strange reason you happened to ask me about the cafe around the corner from the Bluefrog office, I could tell you the colour of the door, the font used for their signage, the paper size of their menu... but not for the life of me could I tell you the name the street that it’s on. Funny isn’t it? 

So you can imagine my joy when Aline asked if I would like to write a post... Uh oh...  words! Lots of them.

My favourite blogs are almost all very visual, photography, design, creative based. So for those of you who are like me, I took my trusty Canon Ixus and photographed a few inspiring things on my walk to work. We are very lucky to work in an area that is overflowing with inspiring stuff.

   

A. 128–130 Shoreditch High St Please note the architectural eyesore of a small pvc window cut through the beautiful sign ‘Wells & Company Commercial Iron Works’. Honestly!

  
B. Mark Quinn A dramatic flower sculpture in Hoxton Square by the controversial artist, Mark Quinn.

C. Big brother ...is watching you, our local cctv camera. I like the threatening, but decorative guard.

 

D. Graffiti over graffiti The walls of East London are forever changing – sometimes for the better sometimes not, in this case a tagger has defaced the original piece. 

 

E. Noma Bar An exhibiton at KK Outlet. Noma is a fantastic illustrator whose simple designs use negative space to great effect.Click here to take a look.

F. Mosaic A wall designed and made by the children of the wonderfully named Keen Students School in Whitechapel.

G. Recycling bin Old Street. Someone has simply added some spray painted teeth and a sticker for a nose. Simple yet effective.

I spotted these things because they appealed to me. The way we take in information from the world around us is different for each of us. Some people like myself are very visual, others are not. In education, teachers often break down types of learning into the following general groups. 

 Visual Learners

• They use words and phrases that evoke visual images.

• They learn by seeing and visualizing.

 Auditory Learners

• They speak slowly and tend to be natural listeners.

• They think in a linear manner.

 Read-Write Learners

• They prefer for information to be displayed in writing

• They enjoy reading and writing in all forms.

 Kinesthetic Learners

• They learn by doing.

• They like hands-on approaches to things.

Ok... so why am I telling you about local graffiti and education? Well when we leave school or university, we (hopefully) don’t stop learning and when we receive communications from a charity asking us to support their work, we don’t stop being visual, auditory, read-write or kinetic people either. At Bluefrog, how do we appeal to these very different groups?

Visual Donors 

In a mail pack, to appeal to visual donors we might include images of where the money goes. In a recent Y Care International pack, we were able to show photos of Cambodian child called Nary, who was struggling with life on the streets. We showed the slum where she lived, the tiny house she lives in and now, thanks to the donors' support, the classes she attends and the meals and school equipment she receives. For visual donors, this is great... “I can see where my money will go and why it is needed”.

Auditory Donors...Not so easy in a mail pack 

This is where our digital team come in. Donors to Care International now have the opportunity at www.mycarezone.org to not only read about the people they are helping, but also watch videos and hear first hand accounts from the field.

Read-Write Donors

Copywriters at Bluefrog connect the donor directly to the individual they are helping. We recently went to meet a young family who have a wonderful little boy called Noah who was born deaf-blind. My colleague, copywriter Felix spent time talking to Noah's mum and grandparents finding out how the charity Sense had helped and supported them as a family. From this personal contact, we were able to share with donors why their ongoing support is so desperately needed. 

Kinesthetic Donors

...This is where it gets clever - how do we appeal to hands-on donors with a mail pack??? 

We add in an action to get the donor involved. In a recent Barnardo's pack, we included a blank card, donors could, if they wished write a message to a child who had been abused. Barnardos received an incredible response with 40% of respondents choosing to write a message. I was moved by some of the wonderful supportive words sent in by people who obviously cared deeply.

Thanks for reading my first Bluefrog blog or just looking at the pictures. 

My next blog instalment will be about visual inspiration in the Bluefrog office... I’ve already found lots of images, now I just have to write about them *sigh*...

Bex

PS For more inspiration, try Paul Smith's book.

Audi’s new green advert – “misguided” or misunderstood?

Every writer has a Muse. Oscar Wilde was visited by the Green Fairy – “a glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge turned to opium to “bring forth Thoughts, hidden before”.

Sadly, the only bottled Green Fairy I could find in Bluefrog’s kitchens was, well, green Fairy Liquid. And no sign of any opium either. So when seeking inspiration for my first ‘Creative Blog’ post, I turned to a more prosaic but similarly moreish Muse – YouTube.

My attention was caught by a participant in the recent Corporate Strongman Competition (entry fee – $3 million), the Superbowl Ad Break. Amongst the adverts flexing and posing in front of millions of Americans was this one, for a new ‘Clean Diesel’ Audi:

At first glance, I was amused. Then baffled. Deploying a pernickety Green Police is a strange way of selling a green car – both mocking the environmental movement and inviting the viewer to join it.

Audi’s Green Police State just seems to reinforce the worrying but widely held view that climate change is a Convenient Excuse for governments to impinge on people’s freedoms and meddle with every aspect of their lives.

The New York Times went along with this interpretation, calling the advert “misguided” and saying that it put “the mental in environmental”. Frenzied YouTube commenters, like Mr or Ms Hornet, see it as a glimpse of the Orwellian future and a vindication of their green scepticism: 

 

How could Audi, with a history of groundbreaking advertising about their understated style and innate innovation, get it so wrong?

On closer inspection, I’m not sure if Audi have scored an own goal. I think they’ve just approached advertising about environmental issues in a typically groundbreaking way.

Groundbreaking in tone – with its power-chord soundtrack and hyperbolic surrealism (the sniffer anteater), ‘Green Police’ is funny. Which is a rare quality in adverts that tackle the subject of climate change (compare the worthy tone of the latest Prius campaign).

 

And groundbreaking in target – Audi are aiming at people who are neither environmental militants nor climate change sceptics, who don’t have a problem with being green but do object to being told how they should live their life.

“Sell a ‘Clean Diesel’ Audi to climate change apathetics”. Quite a brief for the creative team. After a heavy session of absinthe, opium or YouTube, I’m sure they pondered the dependably illuminating question:

“What is going to stop our target from doing what we want them to do?”

And I imagine the answers would have been:

“Because they think an environmentally-friendly car might compromise their driving experience.” 

“Because they do not identify or want to be associated with stereotypical green-car owners (as seen in South Park).”

Rather than shying away from these challenging answers, ‘Green Police’ addresses them in the tone most appropriate to the target – as all effective advertising should do.

Instead of scaring or preaching, the advert deploys humour – something that Superbowl watchers (largely male Bud Light drinkers) can relate and respond to.

It shows them that they can adhere to environmentalist principles (the Green Police approves the car). And at the same time, it reassures them that they can still differentiate themselves from ‘tree-huggers’ and have fun (the grinning driver speeds off, leaving policemen on electric scooters choking on his (clean) exhaust fumes). 

  

At this point, I should sound the ‘shoehorn alert’.

Because whether your brief is for a Superbowl TV advert or a warm DM pack, it always helps to ask the question I mentioned earlier – “What is going to stop our target from doing what we want them to do?”

What we want people to do here at Bluefrog is, invariably, give to a charity. And the reasons why they might not are, conveniently, listed here. Only by assuaging these doubts and suspicions, directly and honestly, will creative work be a success.

For a face-to-face script, say, that could mean immediately addressing the donor’s frustrations with ‘chugging’ in a friendly and open way:

“Now, I know you think I’m just another out-of-work actor, getting paid on commission to sign you up for a cause I don’t care about. Well, all that is true. Apart from the last bit. I really do care about this cause. Let me tell you why.”

(Just one hastily written example. But you get the idea.)

The more bravely and adventurously you tackle a donor’s concerns, the better. Your creative work, like the ‘Green Police’ advert, might look a bit different, or raise a few eyebrows, or even be misunderstood by some people. But other people will get it, and respond to it. And chances are, they’ll be the people you’re aiming at.

Right, that’s it from me. I’m off back to YouTube. Aline will be back here soon. Thanks for dropping by.

Felix

We give you white pages. Invent. We give you the best tools. Now do it.*

Have you been watching ‘Design for Life?’ The final episode was last week I think (but please don’t tell me what happened as I haven’t seen it yet).

If you haven’t been watching it at all, don’t worry.  For a start, it’s bound to be on I-Player, but also I wouldn’t actually recommend watching it in full. Despite three months' filming, the material is very thin and painfully spread out over six episodes.

In fact, unless you are a goldfish or similarly stricken in the memory department, it’s impossible to watch a single episode without a finger on the fast forward button because the same scenes are repeated three or four times.

The bits that are worth pausing and watching are when Philippe Starck sees and comments on the work presented to him by the young (and, in the main, unbelievably clueless) designers.

(For the uninitiated, the programme follows an Apprentice-like format where the designers are competing for a placement in Starck’s agency and the chance to see their idea for a product and brand brought to life).

What’s great is that Philippe Starck doesn't really comply with the expected Alan Sugar role and behaves exactly like a Creative Director does.

(If you haven’t seen Philippe Starck in action before, watch him here on marvelously unconventional form on TED talking about his approach to design. Do watch it. In fact, if you’re short of time, abandon this post and just watch the film instead. It’ll take you 18 minutes to watch and provides plenty of food for thought.)

He swears a lot. He's rude. Unpredictable. Undecipherable. Demanding. Unbending. Despairing of his students. And of course, usually spot on in his judgment.

I have to admit it was cathartic for me to watch him berate his bungling students as they make every mistake in the book in their dealings with Starck (all of which I’ve made myself of course).

There is though an awful lot to learn from the advice Starck gives and not just for creatives. Most of us take some kind of comments from our peers, colleagues or our clients on our work at some point and the programme is an excellent reminder of how best to respond (by showing you how not to). So here are a few key points that stayed with me that might be of interest to you.

You have to work hard for good ideas. Starck's mantra is 'Work, work, work'. At first, his students understood this to mean sitting at their desks for a few hours, throwing together a few rough ideas. Some of them eventually learnt otherwise. What Starck really means is that you have to immerse yourself entirely to get the best ideas. You need to do research, really understand the people you are designing for and keep working on your ideas until they are thoroughly thought out.

And of course, the same applies to fundraising. This last post talked about a particular piece of research and the fine-tuning it enabled us to make to a successful programme. But, more generally, good ideas come from understanding donor needs and keeping in touch with what donors say (here's one way).

In the work we do at Bluefrog, it also means really understanding the work that a charity does and what makes it special. As much as possible, we try and see projects ourselves (geographical locations permitting) and talk to the people who actually do the work. That's how you get real insights you can use to inspire other, as you'll see in this old post.

You need to be able to present your ideas. As well as coming up with good ideas, you need to be able to present them to others. On a practical level, that means being able to draw them up, but also talking them through first with your creative director, then your client. For many creatives, this is one of the hardest things to do but like everything you do, the more you do it, the better you get. And the most important thing is having your own style, which doesn't need to flamboyant or overtly sell hard. As you'll see from the points that follow, Starck's students had to learn that listening is an important part of presenting.

Don’t be precious about ‘your’ idea. An idea is a starting point and can be developed in all sorts of ways. A very small number of Starck's students eventually understood this. Most were precious about 'their idea' and, as a result, were rigid in their outlook. Despite being asked to rethink, they stuck very closely to their first idea and did not take up the suggestions and advice they received when they presented their ideas for others.

A colleague of mine at Bluefrog sometimes says, 'There's no one more creative than all of us'. And working with a group of people who can encourage you and help you (rather than pursuing the cult of the individual) has a number of benefits – better work and more fun.

Be brave. At key stages, the most successful students were actually able to abandon pretty much all the work they had done and start again, retaining only the first kernal of an idea. Being able to radically re-think your work to make it the best it can possibly be is a real asset.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Many of Starck's students hated the comments he gave them when they presented their work. In a way, it's no wonder. Being told your work is 'bullshit' isn't much fun, but a couple of students were actually able to take it – eventually. Most however turned their criticism to Starck himself (not a good idea), complaining about his comments. It's an easy trap to fall into, but I guess you have to try and see it from Starck's point of view and, if he really can't find anything more constructive to say about a student's work, it's because it's really bad (!) and what's he's trying to do is give someone a (literally) rude awakening so that they actually see this for themself.

Finally, perhaps the most relevent point of all to fundraising. Starck's ultimate drive is for 'function'. And the questions he asks are 'Will it work?' and 'Is it needed?'. These seem like excellent questions to ask of fundraising initiatives too.

So I'll end with that today. Let me know if Philippe Starck's key questions work for you.

*If you got to the end of the Philippe Stark talk on TED, you’ll appreciate the significance of these words.

So if you need a good idea, you should go to the toilet – right?

Today’s post is about ideas. Good ideas. Which in this industry, is like saying this post is about gold dust (and the production there of).

Think back to when you last had a good idea. What did it feel like? Exciting? Magical? Like a thought had come from nowhere, but straightaway you knew it was just right?

Well, sometimes it does feel like that. But sadly that doesn’t happen every day, three times a day, or however often one is asked of you. Coming up with good ideas on a regular basis requires almost limitless mental resources and a generous supply of blood, sweat and tears.

Good ideas are elusive, precious and fragile. Despite this, people often expect them to materialise on demand. 

I’m sure that any creative will tell you that the hardest part of their job is being caught in a dichotomy: they work to very strict and often pressured deadlines to produce something that is, at its best, unpredictable. 

So this post explores the best ways of producing good ideas while sticking to those deadlines – at least 99% of the time. 

It’s an area that many eminent creatives have written about (in some of the books you’ll see credited on these pages). They’ve sought to chart where good ideas come from. And I’ve read a great number of their thoughts in the hope of distilling the answer, turning it into a pill, then sitting back and counting my millions. 

That however has proven to be less than a good idea, not least because if you consult Ogilvy, Arden, Fletcher or anyone else for that matter, they all give you a different answer. And I’ll come to why in a moment. 

But first let’s ask a slightly different question. ‘Where are you when you get your best ideas?’ Believe it or not, from the books I’ve read, there seems to be some consensus on this one. And the answer is…the toilet. 

Well I can’t say I agree, but I would say this. After a long day of sweating over a creative problem, somehow, the moment that I’m on my bike cycling away from Bluefrog towers, answers magically materialise in my mind. 

The toilet. On a bicycle. The point is that staring at a screen isn’t necessarily the most stimulating place to be if you need a good idea. In fact, in my opinion, it’s the worst. Go for a walk. Look at the sky. Flick through a book – lots of creatives put together scrapbooks with thoughts, ideas and pictures in it for just such occasions. Do anything that breaks the deadening pressure of minutes ticking away.

Because if you focus on the fast approaching deadline, you’ll feel desperate – and that means desperate ideas. Instead think about how much you can achieve in the day/hours/minutes you have.

You could also try running past whatever thoughts you do have by someone else. But choose that person or people with care. Some people who have a gift for recognising a nascent idea or saying just the right thing to push you in the right direction. Other people can squash a good idea before it’s really begun.

And I have a similar opinion about ‘brainstorms’. If you get the wrong combination of people, who come together without having done any prior research or thought…well good luck. That’s not a forum I enjoy. But that’s the point I said I’d come to earlier. Over the years, I’ve learnt that people come up with good ideas in different ways. Some blossom in a brainstorm. Others sit silently and intently looking at a screen and suddenly come to you with reams of great ideas.

So if you want to get good ideas from your team, you need to make sure you know how each individual works best and support them in that.

Not always easy.

But to my mind, coming up with ideas is the best part of the job. So if you can get people to enjoy it, that’s an important first step. Then you need to create an environment where that idea can blossom, which means remembering it’s not a competition.

Ultimately, a good idea doesn’t belong to anyone. It’ll start with something someone says/does/draws and it’ll grow into something great because of the thoughts that are generated from that point onwards.

This is a subject that clearly warrants more than one post. So another time we’ll look at other issues like how a brief can help the process of generating good ideas and how to judge whether something will work or not. 

But in the meantime, here’s a last thought about the daunting combination of ideas and deadlines.

Or rather a request. If someone comes to you with a good idea, don’t be too hard on them if it happens not to be exactly when you wanted it. Think instead when or how you might be able to use it – even if it’s another time. By doing so, you’ll be playing your part sprinkling some magic on that idea to make it go somewhere and do something. Good idea?

That’s it for now.