Websites are essential. Social media is essential. And I’m not for a second arguing the validity of the online sphere in providing immeasurably valuable experiences and insights. I’ve spent the better part of my life on computers since I sat on my dad’s knee with the Apple II, and since the first time I browsed the internet a few years later, I’ve been on that constantly too.

But I’m also a historian, both by interest and by education. My perspective on life involves questioning why and how things happened throughout the past, in order to better understand the present and, dare I say it, the future too. I look at things with a view to how they’ll be remembered, and that kind of long-lasting memorability is something that the online world is not meant for, and was never meant for.

Digital’s Hubris

That’s the hubris of the internet and the designs we create on it: by themselves, they rarely provide lasting impact. The content may carry the potential to change people’s lives, and it may do just that, but certain things resonate more in print because of the medium itself. Our human nature is changing, as Nick Carr argues, and with it the power for certain things to resonate over others by virtue of both their message and their medium.

The internet and all it entails will never go away, and heck, I never want it to; it’s an essential part of my life. But as the cynic in me periodically asks, what’s the point of devoting so much time, effort and resources to designing for something that’s always changing, will be outdated in a few years and rarely leaves a lasting impression beyond a “that’s cool” remark and a tweet?

In some ways, a website is a quick-fix solution, a quick-hitting promotion. Every few years the client develops a gotta-change-things itch it needs to scratch based on the latest developments and trends in the online sphere. It’s the new advertising and it has been for some time, and for the most part, websites are not intended to last more than a few years. Such is the nature of the medium, and such is the nature of the business.

But when you create something in the image of a band-aid, it’s no surprise that it’s constantly devalued in the eyes of clients. This mentality breeds quick-fix solutions, and will only continue the downward spiral of the value of design in the eyes of many — which, as Frank points out, is paradoxically matched with the increasing sense of the importance of design. But that’s just it: clients nowadays realize that there is an importance to design, but the true value of it gets missed.

And maybe that’s how web design should be. Passable graphic design is far easier to come by nowadays, and maybe that’s what the digital sphere should largely consist of: Chris Anderson’s oft-stated “good enough.” And maybe the best design should be reserved for those who’ll cherish it, fund it and enjoy it for what its worth. And is there any better way to convey that than print, at least when fully used to its maximum potential?

Design for Those Who Value It

It’s not just the tactility of print design that imbues its potential for a greater impression. It’s not just the strength of a brand identity that makes a greater impression. It’s not just the fact that you can look at something without the aid of a digital screen that makes a greater impression.

It’s the fact that when you combine everything together that comprises the “traditional” design world, it creates a lasting impression that no website can hope to reproduce because it utilizes more senses than vision. It engages on emotional levels that exist below the surface. There’s mountains of trashy print design that has accumulated over the history of printed design, but a printed experience at its finest engages its “user” in a far deeper, far more emotional way than a similar-quality (if such medias can be compared) website.

We say we want to make a difference. To really stand out. But to do that, you have to either knock something out of the park in the same field or you move in the opposite direction. Zig when others zag. March to your own beat. Designers are born to march counter to the rest of society, yet when so many of us seem to trip over each other following the latest trends and technologies, the term “unique” is rendered completely invalid.

This mentality of difference is why print design will never die. Because the tactile experience of holding something in your hands, carrying the modest hope of being retained, cannot be replaced. Witness the creation of 8 Faces, a bi-annual magazine devoted to typography created and edited by some of the finest figures in typography, whether they work primarily digitally or in print.

Annual reports will make their comeback, in a different way than they existed before, perhaps incorporating the best of open two-way communication to make them more relevant. Illustration has somewhat made its comeback, adding a unique visual element to the tactile element of a printed piece. Magazines and newspapers will keep on chugging. Look around you in a coffee shop, at a bookstore, or on the bus: hardly the funereal landscape of a dying industry. As I said in last week’s post, history is a cyclical mistress, and it’s cruel to those who observe the peaks without acknowledging the valleys.

The Margins

The highest-quality design was always something intended for and appreciated by the margins. Like the cultural institutions of a city, the best of the best will largely go unnoticed. But for those who do care, they’ll find it that much more worth their while, the same way that an art gallery will be known of by many but cherished by few. Maybe this is where the value of great design is best realized: not for the masses but for the few. Good design can benefit anything, and for that we have templates, but great design can only benefit a few.

While the floor should rise, maybe the ceiling should rise along with it.

In a sense, it’s the opposite crisis to what art school education seems to be in the midst of at the moment, with ill-prepared graduates taking the entire length of their studies to explore their creative vision but lacking hardened technical skills. This could be one reason for the genesis of the earliest design blogs, and the best among them still serve their purpose of supplementing a pre-existing or developing theoretical knowledge with practical guidance. But that good-intentioned ship sailed by 2007 when the web exploded with an army of look-a-likes barely distinguishable from the next one over.

The Smaller Industry

Blogging as a principle is amongst the most valuable developments of the past few decades in the technological sphere. It’s given a voice to many who would be hard-pressed to be heard otherwise, and the insights which can be gained by reading and writing them are many.

But any tool is merely a tool, and can be equally used for good or ill. The mass of design blogs out there may be run by talented people creating wonderful things, but how are they helping anyone by propagating an endless spiral of identical content? List posts, tips, galleries, exhibitions; tossed together, they chiefly serve to promote the dominance of technique over ideation.

Design is not a “quick fix” industry, and as such the “quick fix” solutions provided by the vast majority of design blogs precipitously demean and devalue the industry. If designers think that using HTML5 and CSS3 make them a better designer just because they use them, then they’re sorely misguided. If that’s the case, then how can they ever offer something unique to their clients? As the theme of this year’s Cannes festival echoed, technology ≠ ideas.

The natural next step could be to trim the fat, but the curators and writers of those blogs will certainly never take that step. It’s beholden to the community to break through the rut and start asking for, demanding and expecting more “why.” To some degree, this is already happening with the recent emergence of a greater number of “thinking man’s blogs” to complete the pioneers, but we have a long way to go yet.

The Larger Industry

A similar argument has been in existence for decades, predominantly as a debate surrounding awards competitions. But what the “old guard” of the creative industry inspired in its readership was the desire to aspire to be the best, by showing the work of the best. That’s not to say that your career’s not worth anything unless you have a Cannes Lion under your belt. But the scarcity of possible outlets at that time and the quality of editorial oversight needed to run these editorial institutions rendered any exposure valuable in a way that online publishing — precisely because of its core strengths of unlimited scalability and ease of access — can rarely hope to achieve.

The first lesson any student who takes high school history learns is that history is cyclical. For this reason, there’s more inspiration and insight packed into Meggs’ History of Design than 90% of the published design content that’s online, because you learn about groundbreaking work within the context it appeared: supplementing the visual “what” with the mental “why.” The greats are great for a reason, and you’ll learn more about editorial design soaking in an Alexey Brodovitch spread or a George Lois cover than you will looking upon 90% of the magazines on the racks today.

Focusing the lens on advertising, this is what’s wrong with the ad business right now: by and large, style is triumphing over substance in campaigns where the agency has control, and cold, boring substance is triumphing over style in campaigns where the client has control. This is not an absolute truth, but the story was much the same at the time of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and the art-house, nonsensical advertising of the early-1980s: the prevalence of style over substance.

There’s a cycle, where advertising either becomes part of popular culture or it’s derided as the symbol of everything wrong with modern, capitalist, western society. This usually marches in step with the economic cycle (advertising is a leech on society when the economy is bad, and tolerable when the economy is great), but not always. Related literature even follows this pattern: No Logo and the Cluetrain Manifesto were both published at the turn of the century right as the dot-com boom busted, and books such as Buy Everything were published in 2007, in the heady times just before the most recent economic crash.

The cycle we’re in now is contradictory to this in some ways, as conventional, what-people-think-of-when-you-say-advertising advertising has become increasingly lifeless at the same time as start-ups, companies and consumer culture has become smarter about the world around us. Advertising should be getting better under tighter budgets and deadlines, but with greater restrictions arriving in tandem with greater oversight and more hands in the pot, it’s not always the case.

All this is to say that the proliferation of mediocre design blogs are not the root cause of all that ails the creative industry, but they are symptomatic of its worst side. Anyone has the power to create something special, and anyone has the ability within them to truly offer something of value. But human nature, on the whole, tends towards shortcuts over depth, and this is exactly what’s wrong with the state of today’s creative industry on most fronts.

Back to Blogs

Now with all this, I’m not saying avoid the ‘dime a dozen’ blogs. I’m saying choose wisely and carefully. Practical knowledge and guidance is crucial, but to further yourself as a designer, what you need is more discourse, not more tips. Tips are best learned by experience anyway: it’s by providing the added “why” that the written word can best help.

Now, when looking around for your next bit of inspiration, what would make more sense: to copycat your peers or to look beyond the insular walls the blogging industry is increasingly building up around it? I’m talking different fields, different disciplines, different time periods. Creativity is not, has never been, and will never be a linear process. Open your mind and the ideas will follow.

The recent drama that has surrounded Alex Bogusky’s decision to leave advertising and his role as Chief Creative Insurgent at MDC Partners brings all this to the forefront. Fast Company published an article on their website last week which attempted to stir Alex’s departure up into the soap opera stratosphere, chiefly concerning Alex’s relationship with Miles Nadal.

Leaving the media’s politics out of it, I think that a person of Alex’s position and stature could leave advertising in pursuit of something bigger — whatever he has planned — is an act we can all learn something from.

Alex realizes that there’s a larger world out there than the creative industry, which is sometimes hard to remember amidst the navel-gazing nature of the business. Far from just talking about it or trying to make a difference piecemeal while satisfying client demands, Alex is actually putting his money where his mouth is and is trying to change the world.

All of us, to some degree, are boat-rocking revolutionaries as teens, but that instinct gets stubbed out of us as we age. The work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky and the accolades it’s received has catapulted the agency into one of advertising’s most highly-regarded shops, and it’s largely been based on the cheeky attitude of its creative director.

As Miles has been quoted to say, “Alex reverses with age. Every year he gets older, he looks younger.” That youthful spirit, that rebellious derring-do, was key to CP+B’s advertising success, and it’s absolutely vital for Alex to keep if his “on the fringe” approach is to have any chance of success

Advertising is a black-eyed industry populated with outstanding, motivated, talented and creative people. Fast Company itself writes continually about the value of creativity in the modern workplace culture Recent innovations in technology and media and the rise of start-ups prove this. Alex is tapping into something larger, and in some ways he’s emblematic of this age, in a way that the best in advertising once was emblematic of popular culture, but largely isn’t anymore

His next steps are unknown to me and many people, and his success is uncertain, but his passion for social good and giving back — witness his several books, FearlessQA, his public attitude towards fast food, child obesity, the environment, etc — is well-documented. Pursuits on a larger scale such as these have long been the domain of government research studies, and this approach has simply not proven effective enough. What real social progress needs aren’t more politicians or bureaucrats who half-heartedly engage with the issues while keeping an eye on their approval ratings.

What these causes need is someone who doesn’t care about their next campaign or paycheck. Someone who can take the core of a subject dear to the hearts of many on a subconscious level and drag it, kicking and screaming, into the hearts of a country.

Who’s better prepared to do this than someone from advertising, an industry which is entirely based on engaging the hearts and minds of an ambivalent audience in favour of a product or idea? And who better at that than one of the best in the business?

I don’t pretend to have any knowledge of MDC’s inner workings or Alex’s ambitions. I’ve never spoken with Miles or Alex or anyone directly involved in the situation. But I do think that Alex’s decision to leave advertising while virtually at the top of his game, having left CP+B and MDC in more than capable hands, is one which takes the pessimism we can all sometimes feel about our roles in propagating the best and the worst of consumer society and does something about it.

What’s your move?

The Big Idea and the pursuit of it has defined advertising since the creative revolution; indeed, it’s the single most important takeaway from the marriage of art and copy. While the most powerful and effective advertising from the past half century has revolved around the big idea, the reach of media buying was equally important to a spot’s success. With only three media to choose from (TV, print and radio), it was expensive but relatively easy to get your message across to a huge variety of people.

While the message was just as important, today’s changing media landscape signifies a shift in how the creative business operates. With countless channels available to reach an ever-dispersing audience, it’s not the media buy that will attract attention, it’s the message. The same principal has defined advertising for 50 years, but the scales are tipping closer and closer in favour of the concept over the delivery. In this brave new world, where media is endlessly dispersed, attention is endlessly decimated and markets are endlessly divided, professional communicators at all levels will become even more important than they are today.

Changing Definitions

The Cluetrain Manifesto has it right in that all markets are conversations, because they are 100% made up of people. Where the Cluetrain Manifesto is wrong, however, is the assertion that advertising and marketing has no space in this new cultural landscape. Now, with an infinite number of consumer touchpoints, the power of a concept to resonate with whoever it’s intended to reach is now much more pertinent. The value of what a creative company can provide will finally, and definitively, shift from the power of a media buy to the power of an idea.

Ah yes, those untrustworthy old words — consumers, touchpoints and markets. While they may not necessarily reflect the entirety of what we’re looking for in the current age of conversation, those words do still carry weight. But it’s part of a bigger puzzle now, the same way that conversations — what people are saying — and community — the philosophies and groups they belong to — are part of the new media puzzle. As Ian Mirlin said a few months ago as part of Advertising Week here in Toronto, any new media that has come along hasn’t replaced an older one, it’s simply complemented it. Such is the case with the digital revolution.

The Idea

What’s important is the idea behind the message. But hang on a second, was this not always the case? The true value of effective communication is a meaningful — even magical — idea well spoken. Not simply the act of speaking (or designing, or advertising) well. As much as things change, the more the principles behind them stay the same. We’re not doing anything we haven’t done for thousands of years, we’re simply doing it in a different way — online, with those not in our immediate geographical circle.

As a result, the concept is no longer just a smart delivery, it’s about truly making something relevant in a way that will best resonate with an individual. Recent social media and other “new-style” campaigns have already proven the effectiveness of a wider concept; in fact, the huge volume of agency promo videos tooting their own horn about how effective their social media campaign was proves this more than ever. A good concept will get noticed. A great one will get remembered.

Ultimately, the principles of effective communication will always remain, regardless of the method. There’s a time and a place for every mode of communication, and conversation is simply one part of the advertising equation. Traditional advertising — even in a changing media landscape — is another. The establishment of a corporate culture is a third — though the corporate cultures of the future will likely become ever-shifting sands of personality instead of the hard-wired dogmatic creeds from the past.

Design Thinking Misnomers

Shifting focus away from advertising to focus on design, I’ve been somewhat puzzled by the recent prevalence in the phrase “design thinking.” To me, it’s a fancy term for what we should have been doing all along: designing for more than just the aesthetics, with a larger concept in mind. A term that I’ve noticed generally used to fluff the feathers of ego, it’s time to smarten up.

When was design not about thinking? Why is this even a revelation? Communicators of all stripes, from designers to advertisers to brand managers (talk about your precarious industries) should be involved in every step of the way for anything, because there’s no more important step than the first one. The fact that the phrase has gained recent traction is a positive because it finally means we’re smartening up to just how important a holistic approach to communications really is, but it’s a huge negative because it should have been the point all along.

Harmonization

The advertising and design industries — and all branches within them — are edging closer together, and have been for some time now. This is nothing new. What it signifies, however, is that the approach of the past is no longer relevant. Full stop. A holistic approach to advertising needs to marry a holistic approach to design and communications, a “full circle” approach which necessitates deep involvement by the creative agency with the client every step of the way. No longer is it simply enough to announce a new product on avenues new and old once it’s ready to go; the innovative creative agency should be involved from the start.

The reason for this is that any creative agency worth its salt has its fingers tapped into the pulse of mainstream society in a way few other industries do, and can use this knowledge to help create and promote something of greater value to more people than any navel-gazing Fortune 500 company can know on their own. Not only are the silos within creative companies quickly being destroyed (as Chris Staples explains), but the gaps between clients and their creative companies are quickly being reduced as well. As a result of this harmonization between agency and client — which will hopefully lead to greater loyalty from both sides as the new realities sink in — will come truly effective and prosperous concepts.

Let the revolution begin.

As we go about our busy days as designers, there’s precious little time that can be spent on keeping up to speed with the latest developments of the creative industry. Whether looking for inspiration, insight, knowledge or references, finding the time of day to sit down and read a magazine is tough. But the fact is that magazines — and I’m using this term to describe high-level, professional, themed content, regardless of the publishing medium — carry a special cache which results in a far greater impact than what most of the newer media (read: blogs) can hope to approach.

There is great value in staying on top of a selection of creative blogs out there, and any designer worth their salt has an RSS reader bustling with the latest articles from these media. However, the content, the perspectives and the platform that a magazine provides contributes something which blogs, for all their good intentions, cannot hope to reproduce as of yet. Blogs are intended to be of-the-moment, and sites such as Smashing Magazine — to use the most ubiquitous example — have made a name for themselves by publishing highly current web design trends, techniques and inspiration.

However, for all of Smashing’s plusses, sites like it tend to focus largely on what other members of the exact same field are up to: not the ideal way to open up a creative’s mind. Creativity is best realized as the product of multiple sources of knowledge and inspiration, and mixing too sharp of a focus on one particular industry with a devout following of readers can only lead to a widespread culture of sameness — a development which has largely already happened. When these sites do provide round-ups of other fields of creativity, they tend to be fairly weak and lack the insight which comes as a result of a magazine’s professional, dedicated efforts.

Now, I’m not slagging blogs for the sake of it, as there are a tremendous number of high-quality ones out there. However, they offer only one piece of the inspirational puzzle, and any creative who has ambitions beyond maintaining the status quo owe it to themselves to broaden their horizons and push their own influences to take in work and insight from a variety of creative fields. A wider range of influences can only result in stronger creative work, as you never know where your next idea come from, whether it’s tomorrow or six months from now.

So, I’ve gathered together a list of a few magazines which, to my mind, act as a global compass for the best of the best. These are magazines which may focus on one particular creative niche or they may not, but the point is that the resources propelling these publications result in editorial content, scope and quality that is beyond compare.

Hand-in-hand with editorial quality is the experience of reading a magazine. Whether in print or digital format, it is an entirely different experience to reading a blog, one which engages the mind in a deeper way and makes a far greater impact on the reader’s mind.

Several months ago, Smashing posted a similar post listing several print magazines for designers to read, and while some of those magazines are good, a good number of them could go out of business tomorrow and nobody would be any worse off. But it’s my heartfelt opinion that, should the publications below go out of business, a void would be created in the global creative discourse that any website I’ve come across would be hard-pressed to fill.

Full disclosure: I work as the community coordinator and online editor at Applied Arts. However, I hold the magazines I’ve named below in the highest regard as essential measuring sticks of the creative industry. Whatever their editorial or geographical focus, these publications all deserve a spot at the collective media table.

Communication Arts

Long considered the North American champion of the creative industry, Communication Arts canvases the global creative industry with in-depth editorial and quality profiles, but most importantly through their awards. Regarded as one of the industry’s best competitions, if your name’s in the CA annuals, you know you’re on to something.

Creative Review

Focused more on editorial than awards (though that’s changing), Creative Review is based in the UK and focuses largely on the European creative industry, with dispatches from around the world. Also focused more on design-related issues than other fields, it provides a wealth of insight and knowledge, whether it’s profiles of the hottest studios, the latest books, conference reviews or intellectual opinion pieces. Bonus points for ongoing typographic coverage.

Eye

Not published as often as CR or CA, but perhaps the deepest of the lot, Eye magazine is an absolute treasure. Focused on graphic design, packed with deep, insightful articles, lovingly produced and stuffed with gorgeous imagery, Eye is the world’s journal on graphic design. A must.

Applied Arts

Focused on the Canadian creative community, the closest cousin would be Communication Arts. Most creative disciplines are covered within Canadian borders, with occasional explorations into international issues or other related creative fields such as industrial design.

PDN

The photography industry’s flag-bearer. I must admit that I haven’t read an issue in a long time so things may have changed, but it’s one of the pre-eminent places for photographic news and inspiration. There may be better alternatives to PDN, but I’ve not come across them yet.

IDN

Essentially a cousin of Eye’s, IDN is still a strong publication that covers the global design industry. The editorial coverage is superb, the layout is constantly trying new things (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much), and you’re pretty much guaranteed a wealth of new ideas by the time you put the issue down.

CREATIVITY and Graphis

These two were two of the best in their day, but have transformed in recent years. Creativity stopped publishing at the end of 2009 and moved entirely online on a subscription-based model, but they offer a quality overview of the creative industry, skewed more towards advertising than other fields.

Graphis, meanwhile, put out a magazine but were also amongst the best awards in the industry. The magazine is no longer printed, but their awards are still going and are published instead in a tome of a book, with different books for each competition. Looking at the back issues of Graphis is looking through the best of the creative business since the second world war.

I got into the creative industry because I like to create things — visually. I think pretty much everyone on the creative side of the business feels the same way, but while we’re blessed to live in an age where creativity and intelligent unorthodoxy is finally being celebrated from atop the ivory tower, I can’t help but feel that the power of social media and other customer-oriented efforts are taking over the industry. Social media is king, and to some degree this is to the detriment of the visual side of things which, for many of us, acted as our calling.

A Little Bit Of Everything

On a daily basis I get the feeling that we as creators — whether we’re in advertising, design, branding, photography, anything — are expected to speak the language of social media and other new forms of (let’s be honest) marketing and customer service in order to properly serve our clients. Should we be knowledgeable about the latest developments and, where appropriate, offer our services in that category to clients? Of course, and it’s an empowering thing to think that now, more than any other point in history, the knowledge of the world is at our fingertips and we can efficiently and demonstrably teach ourselves something new every single day we’re alive.

But it seems to me that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and the newest forms of communication have overtaken visual and other time-honoured solutions as a way to best communicate with your audience. This is obvious; the power of social media (though I’m going to use the term ‘internet’ going forward, as social media is too constrictive) is that it is such a revolutionary method of communication, and with it comes the breakdown of uniquely-crafted visual solutions. We’re drowning in a sea of mediocrity to the soundtrack of revolution. And that’s a shame.

YouTube proves this. The sheer popularity of some blogs prove this. And admittedly, most of the better ones have undoubtedly had significant resources invested in their graphic and user experience design to provide the optimal digital viewing experience. But ultimately, if every creative individual has to know everything there is to know about advertising, branding, cinematography, design, e-commerce, facebook, gowalla and more, when are they going to find the time to actually get down to creating something worth creating?

The Potential For Everything

On the one hand, a versatile creative mind can see things which a focused one can’t, and that’s largely going to be the case amongst the better-developed agencies. I’ve just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” (late to the show, I know), and there’s a part in there where Gladwell explains that primate and human brains have a massively-developed neocortex in relation to other species, due to our social natures. There’s no reason to believe that our brains of the future won’t be able to handle so much stuff. But on the other hand, there comes a point — and it’s likely different for every individual, and by extension every agency — where the expertise is just not there, and it can’t be expected to. And that’s where the “you need to know it all” evangelists of the past few years are wildly off mark.

I’ve spoken time and again about how the powerful intoxicant that is the future hovers on the notion that silos will be broken, barriers will be fallen, and the future designer will have a toe dipped in every lake worth dipping in. For the most part, this fits squarely with my own personality of DIY-experimentation, but the more I think about it, the more I fear the culture of sameness that might follow such a distracted course of action.

The Agency of Everything

The future designer cannot possibly be expected to know all there is to know about everything in their field. That much has always been the case, and that much will always be the case. But that’s where this collaboration key comes in, and why —from the outside — agencies such as Rethink Communucations seem to be doing things the right way. To my limited understanding, they’re building an open environment of collaboration and cross-pollination without barriers within their studio. Each creative has their speciality, but they’ll be damned if they can’t offer you everything you’re looking for — and with a wicked-good pedigree to boot. This is an open mentality which comes up again and again when you peek into the young agencies and mid-sized shops who are doing the better work out there.

Yet today’s Rethink was yesterday’s DDB, and I wonder if this method of action might not eventually result in another kickback towards dominant specialist agencies and the like. But seeing how we’re just on the cusp of the large-scale rise of the really effective, full-service digital-centred shop, it’s pointless to look beyond the other side. I firmly believe in the open concept of a creative environment, and have gone so far as to re-arrange my own office to encourage an open, “classless” enviroment as best I can (despite the Office Space-style building we work in). But there has to come a point where specialties matter, and no single person or agency can be expected to do it all.

Taking Everything Personally

On an individual level, the pressure to “keep up” is astounding. It’s easy to get lost in the landscape of new knowledge being shared every day, which is why working in an environment that encourages experimentation but also fosters focusing on your own talents and skillset is absolutely essental. However, if you’re working as a freelancer, it’s impossible to keep on top of everything while still offering quality results to your clients, and since budgets are inherently smaller, smaller businesses and other groups which go to freelancers over firms will likely continue to receive subpar advice or solutions simply due to a lack of finances or focus.

No single person can offer it all to anyone, and the client that can afford to hire multiple specialists and develop a well-coordinated plan of attack is a rare breed; they’re the ones who can usually afford agencies. As a result, we get into these situations where those that should be focusing primarily on their skillset and interests have to divert mental and temporal resources to learning something of benefit to their clients (and to them) which they may not be ideally suited to learning or advising on. It’s a situation that, run unchecked, can only breed mediocrity down the road as budgets are ever shrinking, time is ever wasting, and people are ever diversifying.

Where am I going with all this? My intention isn’t to rant and ramble against the quick pace of the modern world; there’s more than enough people who’ve lived far longer and more interesting lives than I who can fill that role. Rather, my intention is to alert myself and hopefully you as well to the fact that we live in a revolutionary time — at least as revolutionary as the early 1990s in the age of PCs, the late 1970s in the movie business or the early 1960s in advertising — but that, for everything new we come up with, there’s a value to what came before. In the rush to fill our own technological and knowledge-based insecurities with the latest trends, it’s easy to chuck the baby out with the bathwater, but that would be a mistake.

You don’t have to march with the lemmings to stay ahead of the pack.

These books also, on the whole, chucked in the downfall of advertising while they were at it. It’s a tempting concept, hauling down the giants of the conformity-pumping past through the power of consumer willpower. But it’s a misguided assumption to conclude that advertising has no benefit. Instead, the benefit has changed.

Advertising To Date

Advertising’s primary purpose has always been to, well, advertise a product or service. Morphing to include brand-building campaigns and other soft sells, advertising spent the better part of the 20th century enabling the media which people liked to consume by promoting the products which people might like to consume.

It’s true that, for the most part, advertising had the unquestionable ability to control the initial message, but it never had the ability to control people’s reactions. It’s been said time and time again for decades that nothing kills a bad product like good advertising, and that concept rings as true today as it did in 1950. However, the soapboxes and water coolers which have long been the stages for consumer discontent have now been amplified past clustered social rings of friends and family to the entire world.

Not exactly rocket science.

Where the downfall-of-advertising evangelists have it wrong is that advertising has no role in society anymore, and that the consumer is king. Well, the consumer was always king, they’re just much more effective monarchs now. While the effects of social media are demonstrable and widespread, they’re not a replacemen for content, of which advertising is just one type (scary, huh?). Social media is a medium, not a producer.

The Two Steps of Advertising

I think of the procedures of the modern advertising and marketing professions as being comprised of two distinct steps where, previously, it was largely one step. Step one is, of course, advertising a product. Step two is the conversation that follows. The revolutionary forms of social media are tools which can easily benefit the first step of the process, as we’ve seen with countless viral successes, but they are far more intertwined with the second step.

The diversification of media provided by the internet which has accompanied the rise of social media can also act as a boon to advertising. Referncing an earlier piece of mine about the power of culture in the future of advertising, the diversified audience actively seeks out topics which interest them, providing a very targeted opportunity not available at all in the days of mass TV. Targeting advertising towards niches offers a far more effective avenue than mass media for targeted products or services, mimicking and building on top of the media buying revelations surrounding the rise of specialist TV channels in the 1980s. We’ve seen this with branded content and microsites and this will only continue given time; witness the rise of branded video with BMW Films and Stella Artois’ “Up There” among others.

Social Media’s Role

A phrase stuck out to me when I was reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Sernovitz: “Word of mouth is the feedback loop that forces marketers to pay attention to the consumer. It brings advertisers out of isolation and forces them to confront the reality of the impact that their products and marketing have on real people.”

That’s the crux: social media and other conversational tools are designed to facilitate conversation (duh). Social media is often mistakenly believed to be a replacement of advertising, when in reality it’s simply a complement, primarily the second step of the equation but also another avenue for the first, when used with moderation. There are countless examples of viral hits which have spread like wildfire, but social media were simply the avenues for the content: the ad itself.

Recent examples of consumer-created nacho chip flavours and the like are proof that social media can have a demonstrative impact on creating a product. Another example of this open approach is the willingness of Google to open their products to their users in the beta development stages. However, the diametrically opposite success of Apple proves that this is not always the most effective method. The role of social media is completely different for each step, whether spreading the message or creating it. While Google now innovates with the help of its users (and the Doritos chip flavour competition was just a gimmick), they completely ignore social media due to the ubiquity of their products. A typical example? Perhaps not, but the takeaway is that what’s right for one brand is not for another. That applies to social media as well.

Pony Up, Producers

The burden, now more than ever, lies squarely on the manufacturers of the world to create products which people like. The same human motives which have driven a capitalist-based society for decades have not waned, but the methods with which we partake in it have. It’s now astoundingly easy for any company to receive immediate feedback on its product, and the onus is on them to actively listen and do something about it. The ones that won’t will fail.

Social media is unique in that it can help both steps of the process, spreading the initial “hey look, something new” advertisement as well as the follow-up discourse once the product or service is out in the wild. While the power of social media cannot be over-estimated, all messages have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually advertising. But if there’s nothing to say, there’s no point in taking the first step

Where’s The Beef?

So tell me, naysayers of advertising doom, how does any of this pre-empt the role of advertising in getting the initial word out there about a new product or service? No longer limited to the 30-second spot, the definition of what advertising is is now completely open to discussion, but whatever route it takes it’s still a phenomenally effective way to get the word out about something new. After that, it’s up to the companies in question to actually do something with the reactions.

On a philosophical level, things are pretty much the same. On an effectiveness level, everything’s changed.

It’s no secret that we live in an almost entirely digital world. As a result, it has become more and more difficult to remember what passes before our eyes on any given day. As creatives, we have unprecedented access to inspiration and insight through a virtually endless variety of blogs, websites and other wellsprings of knowledge. But due to the ephemeral method of delivery and sheer volume of information, it has become much harder for any of it to sink in beyond the moment we click to the next page.

The reason is that life is built upon experiences. A trip to Rome makes a far deeper impression than reading somebody’s travel blog about the Eternal City. This line of reasoning also applies to attending conferences. The perspectives, inspiration and insight offered by conferences and other live events related to the creative industry are available in a multitude of other places; magazines, books, websites and mobile apps all provide intelligent solutions to whatever it is we’re searching for. But taking that same content and placing it into a live event completely transforms the experience, creating a much more lasting impression.
Founded in Toronto eight years ago and originally geared towards Flash developers, Flash In The Can (FITC) has expanded to cover the general creative technology industry and now hosts a series of annual conferences around the world. At this year’s FITC Toronto conference, held in late April, a number of presenters stood out for me, most notably Halifax-based designer James White. Well-known throughout the online design community with his distinctive “retro-futuristic” style, White is even more impressive in person, bursting with enthusiasm, passion and energy.

He bounced around the stage talking a mile a minute about his influences, also revealing some behind-the-scenes glimpses into his creative process. White believes that finding a personal style should not require a conscious effort, but occur naturally as you push yourself a step further in all your work. He also believes that all members of the creative community owe it to each other to help each other out by sharing their knowledge, insight and expertise with each other, not protecting it to keep a competitive “advantage.” In terms of content, White’s presentation didn’t reinvent the wheel. But his passionate performance inspired pretty much anyone who saw his presentation.

Unfortunately, FITC scheduled five simultaneous talks at any given time, meaning that I missed many other presentations. Other attendees gave Jason Theodor’s Creativity and Chaos presentation rave reviews. Jacoub Bondre (director of production at Grip Limited) was particularly pumped, having written four full pages of notes charting Theodor’s observations on topics as disparate as particle physics and its relation to creativity. As much as you can gain from reading Theodor’s blog, seeing him live is a completely different experience, one which resonates much deeper. Just ask Jacoub.

Other industry conferences in the past have been equally influential. In his 2007 book “79 Short Essays on Design,” Pentagram partner (and prolific public speaker on design) Michael Beirut devoted an essay to the theatrics of Tibor Kalman, who spent the entire 1989 AIGA conference causing a ruckus in order to make his point that design’s role is to “inject art into commerce,” not be a slave to commercialism. The well-known blogging network Under Consideration also recently announced its own conference this coming November in New York. As well, the RGD, GDC and Icograda not only have web presences but they all devote significant resources to hosting events of varying sizes and regularity. The proliferation of new media obviously hasn’t replaced conferences, it’s enhanced them.

One final example. New media was demonstrably influential in getting Obama elected to the Presidency in 2008. And yet, over the course of the campaign, people turned out by the hundreds of thousands to the oldest media of them all: to see him speak in person. While conferences obviously occur on a smaller stage than history-defining presidential election campaigns, “real life” events surrounding the creative industry are just as memorable. The web may make information instantly accessible to us all, but nothing leaves a lasting impression quite like seeing it live.

We’ve done sponsored content. We’ve done interactive content. We’re starting to create location-based content (which, to many, is downright creepy). We’ve done a passive, say-it-and-they-will-come approach.

The question we all have to ask ourselves is what’s coming next? Not as in what’s the latest trend, but what’s the newest way in which we can provide relevant content to the end user — whether it’s through existing models or new ones — in a way which won’t make then turn off and tune out?

Some may say that it’s already too late, and that the cynical public won’t come back to advertising because they find it to be annoying, abrasive, pervasive and offensive. While that is the case for much of traditional advertising — 30-second spots, print ads, banner ads and the like — there is a rapidly emerging area for creativity to shine which has been for the most part ignored.

The latest Ford Mustang website contains a host of short movies created by filmmakers, all of which revolve around some element of Mustang culture. Is this advertising? Not in the traditional sense, but it certainly builds up a sense of pride, community and identity amongst the Mustang owners (and, more importantly, the would-be Mustang owners). Through sponsored content, it advertises a culture.

This is where the next developments in advertising are going to be, in the realm of custom content created on behalf of a brand which relates most to the target, thereby harnessing its culture.

It’s the exact same principle that has shaped advertising for most of the last fifty years — make it relevant, make it interesting, make it relate — but now we’re no longer limited to a sheet of A4 or 30 seconds of airtime. Now, anything is possible, and the rapid diversification of entertainment streams has engineered an opportunity for advertising to fill the spaces created by these new opportunties.

Traditional print, TV and radio advertising will never go away, but it will simply become part of a greater media pie, just as each new media development became part of the pie that came before it. We’re not divvying up slices of the pie, we’re adding more pie (and who would say no to more pie?). On an individual level, people usually won’t buy your product because they see your ad, but reinforcements of your brand in all the major touchpoints in their lives will keep you top of mind. This isn’t rocket science, but it’s important to note because just creating a series of web videos or just creating a cool microsite usually won’t do everything.

The coming generation will, in my opinion, be ever more open to developments in other artistic fields and how they might impact advertising. Music video directors — long a source of budding advertising talent — will become a much larger part of it, along with photographers, videographers, developers, artists, musicians; anyone who has some creative talent is a prospect in the new advertising landscape. Because people may hate being sold to, but they certainly love being told that the choices they make are the correct ones, whether it’s the clothes they wear or the cars they buy. And what better way to emphasize this than to create, harness or share the culture surrounding a brand?

Everyone can lay claim to the term “community,” but only the few can truly create a culture. It’s culture that people most identify with, and while it may have been kicking around the scene for a few decades now, the coming decades are where it’s truly going to become the force to be reckoned with in the advertising world.

Obviously, this isn’t the case for some categories or brands — yet. The model (or whatever model can be established) will need to be established with those brands first which already have a clear culture associated with them. However, once that happens, there’s no telling who might make the best use of it. Who knew that vacuum cleanes could be made sexy (relatively), but Dyson did it. Now, it’s time to mix that design thinking with advertising to foster and stoke the flames of a pre-existing culture. In this game, neither the brand nor the people are in complete contol, but rather it’s both sides of the aisle coming together in pursuit of a common culture.

This is not to say that every brand that attemps it will be successful either. Rather, the ones who are successful will be the ones who continue to engage, remain active and keep up their presence consistently over time. We’re no longer selling features or experiences, we’re selling a sense of belonging.

You need to do that

You need to do the other

The dispensed wisdom of others — as genuinely meant as it may be — can only muddle up the brain of someone searching for it

The solution?

Different for each person

For me, it’s take what everyone says to heart, and try a little bit of what they say

Write a bit more per day

Draw a bit more per day

What feels right, I’ll do more of

What doesn’t, I won’t

As there are hundreds of paths to take to your end goal, what one person says works for them won’t work for you

You have to find your own

But you have to learn from others too

And combine it with what you feel to be true to yourself

Through that, you’ll develop your own wisdom

And what’s wisdom but learned habits and learned thoughts and learned emotions?

The point is learned, not dictated

I will take what people to say to heart

And I will try and follow what they say

Because what they say has value

But only when combined with what I can bring to the table

So my sole hope is that, when all is said and done

Someone will then find value in what I can bring

As I found value in what they brought

And the circle of trust will continue

This post is a tribute to Dave Trott

And it fits my 250 word count perfectly