Hasta La Creative!

Editor’s note: Please welcome Annie Heckenberger of Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners to AdPulp. Her first post is a “get to know me” piece and an excellent intro to her fast moving world.

I have this favorite childhood memory. Every Friday afternoon in the summer, my best friend’s mother would drive my best friend, her younger brother and me to the Atlantic City train station to pick up their dad. We’d bypass a ground level platform in front of the station, the four of us walking through overgrown weeds, gravel and wildflowers along the tracks until we found the perfect spot.

My friend’s mother would give each of us a penny or a quarter and we’d carefully climb over and place each of our coins on a rail of the track. Then the three of us would step back, away from the tracks, and wait.

The anticipation was overwhelming.

We felt it coming on the ground before we could even see it. Tremors shook under the soles of our summer sandals, reverberating up through our knobby knees. Then the noise. Suddenly, like a mirage, we’d see a massive locomotive racing toward us at a speed collected over some 360 miles. Our mighty 60-pound frames blew back a bit and we were warmed by gusts generated by this beast as it pulled ahead into the station.

When my friend’s mom gave us the ok, we’d race to the tracks to find our coins. And there they were, pressed by heat and power into something completely new. Flat and big and warm to the touch. The shape and image different each time. We’d race to the station to show our friend’s dad what we created. And on those Friday nights, we’d sleep soundly with our hands wrapped around flattened coins under our pillows. We had made something, both story and product.

That’s what working at Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners feels like.

Every day there’s that anticipation and the question, What am I going to make today? Sometimes the creative opportunity is as big as a locomotive and has that kind of beastly power behind it. Other times it’s that perfectly pressed and shaped penny. Nearly every time it blows you back a little with its force.

We’re an agency in the moment right now. You know the moment. It’s that twinkling second when an agency goes from mid-sized to well, more, and everything is changing so fast that the frame is blurred.

Some of this rapid acceleration may be because the industry landscape is shifting relentlessly. Creative thinking and content is needed across platforms at a speed like never before. Social media equals deliverables times infinity. The content hole will never be satiated. You will feed the social content beast forever. And when you best it, you will be bested. That’s the game.  Get in or get out, ad world.

We believe that the best creative comes out of collaborative teams. As such, art directors and writers and creative directors and developers and production and social and digital strategists and media planners all work together at RTO+P. Always. And we silently thank Buddha, Jesus and even Elvis each night for the badass account people who advance us while keeping it all together.

I’m not going to get all kumbaya on you about this. The real skinny on working at a creative agency during a period of immense growth and momentum is that you might feel more like the conductor driving a train than the childlike observer. There’s a tremendous amount riding on your performance. Every ride is weighty regardless of the distance traveled. And the hours might break you, if the breakneck speed doesn’t clobber you first.

But the thing is, the anticipation is overwhelming. We share a common drive to get up, get in and get it done like it’s never been done before.

And on the best days, you can still feel it in your knees.

The post Crushing Copper with Annie Heckenberger appeared first on AdPulp.

Scott Goodson, Founder, CEO and Chief Creative Officer of StrawberryFrog, is not content making ads. Far from it. For Goodson and his fellow amphibians, it’s all about inspiring “Cultural Movements.”

Cultural Movements is the StrawberryFrog way.

It is our process to come up with innovative strategies for our clients.

Cultural Movements is the StrawberryFrog competitive edge, our DNA. It sets the course for all the Frogs and our clients to follow. It’s what we deliver. It how our case studies are written. It’s our process to release innovation and liberate creativity. It lets us create a blueprint for change.

Cultural Movements is what we do at StrawberyFrog to maximize investments in marketing in light of all the changes happening around us, such as the fragmented media world, the radical decline of the 30 second TV spot, and the rise of the truly interactive class.

Sounds like fun. But it also sounds like a stretch. To me a cultural movement involves risk taking, collective effort on a massive scale, intelligence and guts. And it means you’re moving the culture forward to a better place. I’m not sure a brand can move the culture forward.

Of course, I’m focusing on the word “Movement” here–Civil Rights Movement, Womens’ Movement and the Labor Movement. Perhaps, Goodson is thinking of Cultural Movements differently. Maybe it’s pop culture movements he’s hoping to spur. It probably depends on the brand he’s supporting.

Wired’s running a feature called “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.”

Nat Ives of Ad Age spoke to Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, Editor of Wired, about the free economy. There’s much to absorb in Anderson’s thinking. Like this:

The third model of free is the gift economy. This is what used to be called freaky, Berkeley, hippy-commune stuff and now is the basis for Wikipedia, the blogosphere, Craigslist. There is a real economy out there that is motivated by nonmonentary consideration such as reputation, attention, expression — all the social incentives that are turning out to be incredibly effective in getting people to do things for free.

Another interesting thing Anderson says is, “Advertising isn’t the victim of the free economy; it’s the engine of the free economy.”

Duncan Watts is causing a ruckus. Just as Madison Avenue gets its head around niche marketing on a macro scale, Watts says marketing to so-called Influentials doesn’t work. He says the whole idea is bunk and that he has the data to prove it.

Watts has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

[via Fast Company]

Music blog, Motel de Mocha, is showcasing a great quote from W.E.B. Du Bois. It’s one that creative professionals can certainly relate to.

“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”

Jason Calacanis has some ideas for Twitter monetization. Namely, in feed advertising, SMS advertising and subscriptions. But that’s not the interesting part of his post. This is:

Ev shouldn’t worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users–which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple of billion.

That’s what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can’t help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money.

Speaking of Ev, The Economist is running a feature on him. The British magazine’s premise is that Ev is an accidental innovator. That Blogger and Twitter were not intended, but rather the outcome of something else he was working on.

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.