Sometimes the pigs get the upper trotter though:

I rarely buy the Guardian, but I do think it’s a good paper. I hope it’s one of the survivors of the mess the daily media are in at the moment.

I’d like to see the broadsheets focus more on investigative journalism and features. Not cheap to do maybe, but I guess that essentially, the papers’ problem is that people are getting their news from other places – tricky to compete with that. But give me a paper stuffed full of great features and I’m not going to get those features anywhere else.

I think the broadsheets can do features and investigations to beat most other stuff out there. With more of that focus, it might make them smaller operations, and maybe not dailies, but that’d be fine with me

Anyway, I enjoyed the ad. It’s pretty much the only one in the last while I thought worthwhile posting up on the blog. Definitely passes the so-what test…the so-what test being the subject of chapter 12 in Robert Solomon’s The Art of Client Service.

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Some related blog posts:

➜ Whodunnit?

➜ What’s the best marketing, advertising, and copywriting for our new creative society?

➜ Why are stories so powerful in copywriting, marketing, advertising?

➜ Deadlines and jellybeans

➜ Copywriters are not the only Creatives

➜ Who can help your business innovate?

➜ Great Copywriting without Writing Copy

On average, we’re wired to be a little bit optimistic: we tend to believe that things will work out ok. So people who are mildly depressed, tend to predict the future more accurately.

But our beliefs also impact the outcomes of things: if we believe we’ll succeed at something, then we have more chance of succeeding.

If we weren’t on average wired to be a little bit optimistic, then back when we were cavegentlemen and caveladies, I’m not sure we would have ventured far, invented much, or taken risks. Optimism drives evolution.

Of course, we need imagination too, so we have ideas to be optimistic about. Imagination + Optimism = getting our fingers out and doing stuff.

Do optimism and imagination kick in when we really need them? — like now, in our economic crisis?

Maybe they do — maybe that’s part of the reason there’s so much innovation at the moment. Though the technology / the tools that are helping fuel the innovation, have been cooking for some time.

For a lot of businesses, business-as-usual doesn’t work anymore. That means the market is wide open for people who are sticking their necks out with new solutions.

Imagination and optimism can help our heads design new solutions.

Not every new solution will be a success. But if we’re not failing sometimes, we’re not sticking our necks far enough out to find the great solutions.

I wonder if we can learn from those people that are still full of imagination and optimism: children. Because they’re not afraid of sticking their necks out.

Or rather than learn how to do it, maybe we need just need to remember how to do it.

What could you do with a kiddy approach?

Here’s an illustrator who gets ideas from kids all the time:

(The ‘realistic’ versions were done afterwards — based on the kids’ drawings.)

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See more of those pictures here: http://www.themonsterengine.com/artwork

……..

Some related blog posts:

➜ What’s the best marketing, advertising, and copywriting for our new creative society?

➜ What do copywriters and entrepreneurs do on the toilet?

➜ Why are stories so powerful in copywriting, marketing, advertising?

➜ How technology can change writing

➜ Hey Look At Me. I’m a Copywriter!

➜ Copywriters are not the only Creatives

➜ A Blind Sculptress Could Beat Your Copywriting

➜ Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

➜ Who can help your business innovate?

➜ Good copywriters take time to twiddle with their things

➜ How Copywriters come up with your campaign ideas

➜ Can You Help Create a Hole Through the Earth?

John D. Barrow said that.

So the more we understand it, the more we simplify. Or the more complex the description is.

So, while we can point fingers at who helped 2011 turn out the way it did, maybe the how and the who of it is not so simple as a murder-mystery:

And ’tis a mystery what will happen in 2012:

Of course, that won’t stop people predicting — especially around this time of year. But for the best chance of figuring out what’s going to happen, maybe the best people to listen to are people who are really good at pointing out what changes are happening now. (That’s not me.) Because often change happens before we realise it; those changes become bigger. The future then, is the present.

But we don’t need those clever clogs to tell us that there will of course be art.

Accidents:

New people:

Problems:

Solutions:

Bad stuff:

Good stuff:

New lives:

And parties:

Happy New Year

But why would we have evolved such a massive brain to use only a teeny bit of it? The neuro-people are now saying we use the whole lot of it. And we use both hemispheres for all tasks, whether they’re ‘creative’ or ‘logic’ tasks. The 10% thing is a myth. Even the simple task of putting on your socks fires up way more than 10% of your neurons.

That’s what a brain camera shows: bits of the brain light up to let us know they’re at work. But maybe that’s only half the story:

Another half story might be of the Russian composer Shostakovich, who had a metallic splinter in his brain — a shell fragment; and when he tilted his head to the side, he heard melodies — an infinite supply — all he had to do was write them down.

And by stimulating the brain with electricity, the neurologist Wilder Penfield had patients evoke ‘elaborate mental states’ — intense and vivid hallucinations that are not fantasies, but are actual memories. Mister Penfield reckoned the brain keeps a near perfect record of life’s stream of consciousness.

Experiences like Shostakovich’s and Penfield’s perhaps help to make invisible potential, visible…

And with more people deciding that the abundance of material stuff isn’t the whole story for our lives, a more connected, humany approach to the way we organise our societies might just tap into broader potentials of our brains…

… in the old way of doing things, the corporation came first. Sell masses of plastic to a mass market. One size fits all. That old way makes for jobs that make people into production-line parts.

The new way looks to be more about answering to human needs. Not just food and shelter, but creativity, sociability, connection. And when people not corporations come first, it’s not about one size fits all anymore. We’re not production-line robots. More of us have to think, interact, create.

So to fit that idea of a thinky interacty creaty society, maybe the best advertising and marketing is stuff that has us thinking, interacting, creating…

…for products that answer our needs, before the needs of a production line.

Perhaps our old society was holding us back; maybe now our societies are beginning to catch back up with the evolution of our brains.

Because when we engage more of our brain potential, we are more human.

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The Social 0.0 Lab videos found on Osocio.

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Some related blog posts:

➜ Is Neuromarketing good for us? And: old tricks and new dogs

➜ Could a Crow be a Copywriter? And how do you make luck?

➜ Deadlines and jellybeans

➜ How technology can change writing

➜ Pepsi ‘Refresh’ campaign — How to See with Sound

➜ Why Western Economies Will Get Back on Their Feet and Why the World Might Not Be Screwed Yet

➜ Hey Look At Me. I’m a Copywriter!

➜ Marketing to people who wear shoes

➜ Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

➜ Can You Help Create a Hole Through the Earth?

People remember faces.

Like these 2 ‘stachioed fellas:

So maybe better than the age old client cry of ‘Make my logo bigger’, we should hear more cries of ‘Make my moustachio bigger’.

Is that good branding? — using memorable faces?

Well, bring in a catchy tune…because music goes straight for the amygdala — that bit of the brain that processes emotional reactions, and in that 118-118 ad, you have yourself a market leader in directory enquiry numbers.

Though maybe moustachioed actors are overworked:

…there are probably non-moustachio ways of making good use of the special place the human face has in our brains.

And in the marketer’s toolbox, there are seemingly fancier techniques than throwing in a memorable face and a catchy tune:

You can ask people’s subconsciouses what they’re thinking:

Recently, a politician in South America upped his approval rating 20% by making changes in his campaign, based on brain activity data collected through swimming-cap-type things that wired people’s heads to a computer while they watched the politician’s campaign videos*…

…kind of like focus group analysis, but instead of talking with the confused 5% brain activity of the conscious mind, the swimming-cap technique is about listening to the unconscious mind.

That might seem like fancy technology. But brain science is in its infancy.

The potential of brain science might seem scary to some: because we are so driven by our unconscious minds. What will governments and marketers make us do!?

They might make us eat more burgers. And do other stuff too. Another day, I’ll maybe see if I can cobble together a critique along those lines.

But brain science can be used in good ways. In one study, a cafeteria reduced average calorific intake by 30% by simply switching round what foods people saw first, and switching to smaller plates.*

And if brain science is part of our current renaissance, we can all benefit. We don’t have to be pecked to death by the powerful.

We can dive in, learn, and be more powerful ourselves.

But how much use will we make of this knowledge; these tools…?

Well, if the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, we can ask: how often do you see marketing material that just doesn’t hit the button?

Pretty often?

Here are some words that Seth Godin listed out on his blog:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

…there’s a bag of simple tools. And in that list is every word that is in the brilliant Green Eggs and Ham.

We can do brilliant things with plain old tools.

But equally, we can’t ignore the new things that are happening in brain science, in technology, and in other areas. There’s so much we don’t yet know, and we need to make the best use of the best tools so we can deal with all the stuff going on on our planet.

Will we do that? And is past behavior the guide?

…more media coverage of war, violence, and corruption might lead us to believe that there’s more of it today. And more talk of the decline of moral standards might not help.

But we no longer blow our noses on the tablecloth (as I hear they did in the olden days), and per population, war and violence has declined. Steven Pinker reckons that as well as being safer today, we’re also nicer to each other than we used to be, and he has the empirical evidence to back that up.

So maybe past behavior is not the absolute predictor of future behavior. And if we all get a bit wiser in our renaissance; if we become more aware of how our brains tick, maybe that awareness will help us shift more of our brain activity away from our reptilian fight-or-flight neurons, and to our human, creative, imaginative, cooperative, intuitive, logic neurons.

When those neurons get excited, they drive us to smile, to do good things with and for other people. That’s good for businesses. There are rewards for marketers who help guide people towards good. And it’s good at the level of govern-mental policy, too.

We’ve all got our heads in the same soup: the collective consciousness…

…there’s nothing quite like a fresh green egg and a wedge of succulent ham, but to fix the problems, maybe we also need to learn some more about the tool that can blend the soup so it tastes better.

The human brain can do that.

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*References to be added in.

……..

Here are some related blog posts:

➜ What do copywriters and entrepreneurs do on the toilet?

➜ Could a Crow be a Copywriter? And how do you make luck?

➜ Nothing much to do with Copywriting, Part 4. Unravelling the Species: Can we Live Forever?

➜ How technology can change writing

➜ Pepsi ‘Refresh’ campaign — How to See with Sound

➜ Why Western Economies Will Get Back on Their Feet and Why the World Might Not Be Screwed Yet

➜ Hey Look At Me. I’m a Copywriter!

➜ Marketing to people who wear shoes

➜ Can You Help Create a Hole Through the Earth ?

I’m sure scientists, designers, copywriters, and a whole bunch of other people come up with ideas while they’re on the toilet, too.

But why isn’t everybody an ideas person?

Of course, developing the habit of being creative makes the brain more ideas-prone. And Downtime for our brains is important for creativity. So maybe ideas people spend longer on the toilet.

Or maybe there’s more to it than that…

On the personalities of entrepreneurs:

Some people are simply more resistant than others. They soldier on when the going is tough.

They are more flexible in how they deal with problems than are others. They are more adaptable and more creative with solutions; which means they figure their ways out of sticky situations.

It’s easy to see how a personality like that can be a result of natural selection.

But how can the less flexible, less adaptable, less creative person be a result of natural selection?

Natural selection has given us all moods. Maybe low moods are meant as a kick in the butt to make us give up our goals when the goals are too big, so that we focus on realistic things. Perhaps being phased helps people learn what to focus on in order to be productive.

And perhaps the entrepreneur is less easily caught up in low moods, or less easily ‘tricked’ by low moods. He or she keeps on keepin’ on. Like Edison, who said:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

And maybe the 2 types of people combine as an efficient force for productivity for society. Not everybody can focus on the big ideas. Some people need to focus on getting stuff done with tools that we already know will do the job.

And the people who are upbeat when others would be down…who find solutions when others would give up. They drive the evolution of our tools.

Without those people, would we have the wheel? The printing press? Electric light? The microchip? Mobile phones?

Twists and turns don’t phase these people…

…their brains are always ticking, no matter what they’re doing. And when they’re doing nothing much, their unconscious minds are working their ways towards Eurekas.

That’s why entrepreneurs come up with ideas while they’re on the toilet.

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SwissLife ads found on IBelieveInAdv.

……..

Here are some blog posts on similar subjects:

➜ How technology can change writing

➜ Why Western Economies Will Get Back on Their Feet and Why the World Might Not Be Screwed Yet

➜ Hey Look At Me. I’m a Copywriter!

➜ Copywriters are not the only Creatives

➜ Copywriters, Kids, and Innovators — Wise Fools Who Know How To Smoke

➜ Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

➜ Good copywriters take time to twiddle with their things

➜ How Copywriters come up with your campaign ideas

Nothing acts faster than Anadin

True of course: because all pain relievers act at the same speed.

That writer stuck his ‘Adult Ego’ filter on. At least for a second. In structural psychology theoreticalisationings, we all have ‘Adult’ egos, ‘Child’ egos, and ‘Parent’ egos. With the Adult ego we figure stuff out. And the Child ego is about bubbly fun stuff.

The Child ego might help us hatch ideas like this:

…great idea. No need for any massive knowledge of psychology. It’s just a good idea from a good creative department. Anybody can come up with that stuff, but people who don’t do much creative stuff can find that their Child ego melts away somewhat, which makes their brains not so ready to fire out belt-fulls of ideas.

Same principle with loads of stuff, I suppose. A wrong balance of things hain’t good for your ‘ead:

That’s part of the reason the creative department is creative — not necessarily because the people in it have any more creative ability than some people who are not in creative departments, but simply because the environment and the job help keep people’s playful Child egos alive…sometimes they’re over-the-top hysterical:

…while the Adult ego fires out cool calculations. Because the Adult ego is about knowledge and judgment. It can say ‘This will work well because of this’.

That’s why you need a copywriter with a well developed Child ego and a well developed Adult ego. Because that person’s brain properly knows how to play, and fire out ideas. And that person’s brain, like the Crow’s, can put itself in other people’s shoes, which is of course key to figuring out what will encourage people to buy your product.

And because the Child ego and Adult ego are fundamental bricks of the brain, it is healthy to keep the 2 sides: Creativity and Judgment, in good order. Like the crow, you have all this stuff in you. And if you don’t work in a creative department, it doesn’t matter. You can build your own creative department just by giving your brain some play-time. This all stacks up to make for a better brain. And it’s how we make our own luck:

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Martini video discovered on the Denver Egotist.

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Here are some more posts about Creativity and stuff:

➜ Advertising, film, and gardening that might help kids ask the right questions

➜ Sometimes Copywriters Piddle in Boxes or Limitations Help You Generate Ideas

➜ Your Copywriter will steal your electricity for the idea factory

➜ Copywriters are not the only Creatives

➜ Copywriters, Kids, and Innovators — Wise Fools Who Know How To Smoke

➜ Great Copywriters steal and write rubbish

➜ Creativity in copywriting and business and What would Socrates say?

➜ Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Though it looks like the owners of these webs put up with each other for a while:

…the spiders all climbed trees when there was flooding…

Anyway, scientists isolated the gene in the spider that produces the protein that builds spider silk, and they stuck the gene into a goat.

The goat produces milk with that protein, and Mister Scientist sieves out the protein and builds spider silk. The silk is such good, tough stuff, it’ll make bullet proof vests, 5 times lighter in weight than regular ones.

What does that say about the web of evolution? That the gene from a spider — not even a mammal — ‘works’ in a goat…? I guess it supports the idea that once upon a time we were all just blobular mess in the ocean.

And way back before we humans made spider goats, we were tinkering with species: in breeding dogs, for example. And veg too: carrots used to be white, until Dutch growers made them orange — as a tribute to William of Orange, so the story goes.

And scientists are doing loads more fancy stuff now that they can relatively easily transfer genes between species. They are sticking glow-in-the-dark jelly-fish genes in rabbits to make the rabbits glow in the dark. I’m not sure what the purpose of that one is. I’m sure it’s not just for fun. Scientists are ‘switching on’ regeneration-genes: if you lop off the tentacle of a starfish, it’ll grow back its tentacle; switch that gene on in a mouse, cut the mouse’s spine in 2, and its spine grows back. And they are growing human organs in sheep — maybe we should each keep a flock as a reserve.

In ravelling and unravelling the stories of species I guess we’re adding to natural selection — perhaps we should refer to ‘natural and human selection’ instead.

And with some more research and development, Aubrey de Grey reckons we can live forever. He reckons that we have a fifty-fifty chance of getting our research to that level within 25 to 30 years. The basic idea is to keep replacing bits: like a car — you can keep it on the road indefinitely if you keep on replacing bits.

Will we really be able to live forever? Well, here’s some more on what Aubrey de Grey has to say about that:

(76-minute documentary)

And here’s a link a to a documentary on transgenics.

…

The Nothing-much-to-do-with-Copywriting series:

➜ Part 1: Can You Help Create a Hole Through the Earth ?

➜ Part 2: Copywriting for Fish

➜ Part 3: Why Western Economies Will Get Back on Their Feet and Why the World Might Not Be Screwed Yet

Jon says: “I’m going to give you a list of facts and figures.”

Jim says: “I’m going to tell you a story”.

Who — Jon or Jim — is likely to stop you picking your nose and perk you up, all ready to listen…?

If it’s Jim, then maybe even before the telling of the story, just the simple word ‘story’ can flick on your pleasure switch.

But what type of advertising or promotional material are stories useful for?

The world, as you know, is a mass of random stuff — like a load of brambles; and to get somewhere, we have to pick our way through the brambles. In our path through the brambles, we can pick some juicy blackberries, but we’re always going to miss some, just because they’re not on our path.

Likewise: a narrative is a path through some of life. It has some nice juicy blackberries, but because the narrative only stops by those particular blackberries, it’s a skew-whiff view of the world.

So a story is a lie.

But stories help us understand. We learn though story. Wee young things understand hugely profound concepts through story.

So a story is truth.

Or maybe a good story is the truth of a concept, but the lies of facts and figures. So we perhaps get similar value from good documentary that we get from good fiction. We should get some real facts from documentaries, too; but it’s all skew-whiff narrative. And it all impacts the narrative of our lives.

Just as it does for the man who lives in a film:

…well, ok, maybe not quite like that…

Story is our native language. Whatever facts (documentary), and ideas (fiction), you are promoting, by talking in our native language, you stand more chance of perking us up to listen. As Peter Guber says, story ignites the meaning part of our brains, and to remember, we need meaning. So with whatever advertising or promotion, story will help it stick.

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Some related posts on the Wordfruit blog:

➜ Why are stories so powerful in copywriting, marketing, advertising?

➜ Copywriting with words

➜ Copywriting and Social Media Strategy — Do You Give a Prune?

➜ A Blind Sculptress Could Beat Your Copywriting

➜ How Copywriters Eat Popcorn – And How to be More Productive

They are how we make sense of everything. From a very early age, we poked around, learned what things are, and linked things up:

We grew up drawing pictures of the stories of our lives. Kids in warzones draw guns in their stories; others draw smiley suns. Psychologists use the stories from play, to analyse kids’ psychologies.

A story is the linking of event-A to event-B to event-C, etc, with all the zillions of other stuff cut out. A story is a thought-experiment: what happens when there’s A then B then C…?

Thought experiments help us make plans — the more we’ve sussed things out with thought experiments, the more we can figure out what will happen if we do A then B then C. And plans help us do better in life. They are fundamental to survival and to success.

Maybe that’s why we enjoy films, and books, and stories in conversation. Because survival of the fittest has made the story flick on the pleasure switches in our brains — so that we learn. So we can survive and prosper.

We are each the center of our own stories, of course. And when you make your product integral to our story, you are keying into the fundamentals of how we understand the world.

Here’s how Lay’s (Walker’s) can help make you a part of a story of a potato, towards the end of the potato’s life — so that Lay’s / Walker’s is a part of your story and your life:

……..

Some related posts on the Wordfruit blog:

➜ Can You Help Create a Hole Through the Earth?

➜ How technology can change writing

➜ Your Copywriter will steal your electricity for the idea factory

➜ Copywriters, Kids, and Innovators — Wise Fools Who Know How To Smoke

➜ A Blind Sculptress Could Beat Your Copywriting