Coming across some really bad advertising and branding lately, from some of the world’s leading agencies, I realised the following:

Every creative agency evolves to the point where it has the highest chance to have bad ideas approved by clients and implemented.

How?

• Every creative process involves the creation of some bad ideas along good ones.
• Creatives are often not objective about their own ideas, and will occasionally try to pitch them to clients.
• You’d think that the better an agency’s reputation is, the more clients expect, but the reality is that this reputation will have a certain voodoo affect, intimidating clients into believing that maybe not getting the agency’s ideas is their own fault (emperor’s new cloths).
• The fact that successful agencies tend to become better and better presenters and sellers of ideas as they evolve also helps.
• The amount/rate of bad ideas succeeding in traveling outside of the agency may decrease with experience, but then ego, which grows with reputation, kicks in and “mitigates” criticism.
• So a top-5 agency, has a better chances of selling a bad idea to it’s client than anybody else. QED
  
  Wikipedia: “The Peter Principle is a theory originated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter. It states that successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not
  competent.”

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Technorati Tags: creative, advertisement, ideas, creativity, irony

Mary Hodder’s post about “The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere” is a must read for anybody who wants to get a closer look at where the blogosphere is headed. So I urge you to read it before you move to the rest of this post.But first, before I add my comments and 5 cents, I must “protest”. Mary kindly opens her post referring to my talk at kinnernet, but “credits” me with numerous opinions that aren’t mine, which were were voiced by me for rhetorical purpose - to describe some of the existing views. (and incidentally, I did use the word meme, though not consistently, because I did not want to exclude listeners unfamiliar with the term). Having said that, since Mary’s post precedes mine, I couldn’t escape a certain “I totally agree, but…” structure, to bring my argument back to my original intent. Anyway, enough apologetics, let’s see what you think…

There is no “unified purpose”, but purposes matter
I do not think for a moment that there is a unified purpose for blogs, nor that there should be. There are many different blogging subjects and blog genres. However, I do think that a closer look at the dynamics of each genre by itself is valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the last week ill, and it’s getting late…
I do intend to spend the next couple of posts going deeper into some of the content, but Kinnernet (this one was my third) is essentially a “all things weird & wonderful” salad experience and I want to try and relate a bit of the unique atmoshphere of that event.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is just to admit my shame - I’ve yet to put finger to keyboard and write of my Kinnernet experiences. I have much to tell, and many posts in the next couple of weeks will spin off things that happened and were said/heard there.

TheMarker’s “Comvention” followed up without a break, nearly as hectic, mainly due to people “asking to borrow my brain for a couple of minutes” (always good fun).

So this entire trip had nearly zero-downtime, and now I’m back at my desk (and so-called life) catching up etc. I promise to get around to it soon. If you want to make sure you don’t miss it - subscribe by RSS or mail from the right hand column. This is a low(ish) traffic blog, so it shouldn’t cause you too much trouble.

“BRB”

Watch the Kinnernet and Kinnernet2006 tags on flickr for pictures. I’ve also put some favs on my own flickr.