Category Creativity

The Fast Agency

Jung von Matt Stockholm, the agency where I work, started out in 2006 and was thus a fully-integrated analogue and digital creative shop from start. Being ’idea neutral’ isn’t really enough these days as clients demand more for less – more creativity and more accountability for less money and less time. Since real compensation levels hasn’t [...]

Top of mind

Perception is reality

Most products are commodities. Yet, in this commoditised world many planners and creatives try to communicate product uniqueness.
”There’s nothing unique about this product” is a too common stated that results in frustration or in advertising that is irrelevant.
Relevance and differentiation are of course still important objectives of communication, but they don’t necessarily have to [...]

Innovation and the agency

It has to be said that most advertising agencies are pretty good at market sensing: we imitate, adapt and evolve according to the latest trends in communications. For a long time, this process used to be easily manageable, because trends only affected the output of the advertising agency, not the business model. And even if [...]

The ultimate creative brief

There’s no perfect template for creative briefs. But with the iPad there could well be. This template would be interactive and customizable in real-time – just drag ‘n drop the elements you need. Or download new ones.
The name of this software? iBrief of course. Could somebody please invent this?

The value of creativity

How much does creativity matter in business? According to the research of Micael Dahlén, a professor at Stockholm School of Economics, a company’s success in terms of sales, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction is highly correlated to two areas: creativity in marketing and creativity in product development.
Some numbers to illustrate: if a company invests [...]

Conflict planning

Creating social or cultural conflicts is a great creative strategy for achieving communicative momentum. Especially when the brand allows for it. Above is a “promo trailer” for a fictive company called Sandhamnstek (part of a social media campaign to generate PR) we set up for our client TV3 who will air a reality show about [...]

Entertainment is king

Technology doesn’t only let us create wonderful new applications and platforms. It’s also a good friend for pushing good old content.
As technology becomes commoditized at a fast pace, there’s no intrinsic value of selecting media for any other sake than efficiency. The real agency challenge is therefore not to be innovative per se, but ability to exploit [...]

Success is all about statistics

This TED talk by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi about creativity and flow made me think about what actually determines greatness in life, both from an individual perspective and from a agency perspective. 
It all comes down to one thing: experience. Intelligence and talent is one thing, but becoming super-skilled is all about doing things many times over. [...]

Better creativity (updated)

The credo of Account Planning Group is Championing in creative excellence sounds vague, but the task of the planner has always been rooted in guarding creativity from bad stuff (like client research). And while this is still relevant in many ways, the pressures AND opportunities for delivering relevant creativity has never been greater. 
The most efficient solution for advertising [...]