We usually get advice from people we look up to and trust: an expert, a self-help book author, our boss, our spiritual adviser, or our closest friends. But how many times do we heed the advice that we get? “Most advice is terrible. Nine times out of 10 it’s about as useful as a screen door on a submarine,” psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson once commented. Good advice is authentic, tangible and makes the advice seeker follow a process. If we are the advice giver, we have to be extra cautious in giving it, and it should be based exclusively on our experience. If the advice needs to be executed differently, we have to specify what needs to be done and how it should be done. Bad advice can leave the recipient aggravated, perplexed, or headed down the erroneous trail. If done wrongly, the situation can move from bad to worse.
George Lois’s Damn Good Advice (for People with Talent is an anthology of concepts that motivate us to discover new boundaries in the area of big ideas, the way to find them, to sell them and to produce them. Lois, dubbed as advertising’s original “Bad Boy,” created memorable, in-your-face campaigns that changed the fate of brands companies and personalities. Here are inspiring, shining wisdom from his tome that can set free our latent creativity.
• A big campaign idea can only be expressed in words that absolutely bristle with visual possibilities. These words link up with a visual imagery, and together they work in perfect synergy. Given the campaign direction, visualizers must try to write the idea. They must not always wait for a writer to furnish the words, which usually are not visually pregnant. Some of the finest marketing communication headlines are authored by great art directors who work intimately with gifted writers as they conjure concepts together author some of the finest marketing communication headlines. And conversely, even when a writer works on his own, his words must lend themselves to visual excitement. Lois said, “If you’re an art director, heed my words: Each ad, TV spot, and campaign is in your hands — it’s your baby. If you’re a copywriter, on the other hand, you must work with a talented visual communicator.”
• Think long. Write short. Brevity is cool. “If a client takes 10 minutes to tell me about his business, then it’s not a big idea,” Lois states. The book quotes Abraham Lincoln’s apology for writing a long letter to a friend because he didn’t have the time to contemplate, to correct, and to edit his letter. That correspondence, in miniscule handwriting, happened to be the iconic wartime “Gettysburg Address” written in under three minutes and in just 10 sentences and 272 words. Lincoln’s apology is one of the most articulate lessons in good writing: Keep it brief, informative, to the point, and literary, where every single word counts. Lois underscored, “Write a short one. Condense the concept, because after three sentences of explanation, people’s eyes glaze over.”
• A new direction is the only direction. Most communication is an art. And the solution to each new communication challenge starts with a bare canvas and an open mind, “not with the nervous borrowings of other people’s mediocrities,” as Lois described. And to him that’s exactly what “trends” are. They are traps and they can tyrannize. They make us search for something “safe,” and push us to develop dependence on them, which leads to oblivion. “In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive that discovery is the way to go and grow.
Great communication can perform a marketing miracle! The book cites the case of MTV, which was described as a “sure thing from the start.” Lois put together star power and a four-word tagline — I Want My MTV — to make the difference. It became a generational shout-out after he convinced rock legend Mick Jagger to appear in a TV commercial mouthing the line. Within a few weeks of the premier of the Jagger message, every rock star in America was calling Lois, volunteering to yell the viral “call to action.” Truly a big idea that combines celebrity and a meaningful message can alter the culture of the world.
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• If we think people are dumb, we’ll spend a lifetime doing dumb work. People are smart and they have a microchip in their heads that places a TV commercial, a feature article, or an outdoor signage in its marketing context with lightning speed, enabling them to judge astutely. They always respond to an idea — a strong central concept or image — especially if it’s represented in a warm, human way. “If we don’t believe this, we’ll never do great work,” Lois verbalized.
• Driving our big idea to the very edge of the cliff is great, but it’s a fiery death if we go too far. The point about big ideas has to be their proximity to madness. Creativity is the ultimate adrenalin rush. If we have what we consider a fantastic concept, we must drive it to the precipice. If we don’t take it to the edge, we’ve chickened out. And if we want to do great communication, we’ll push it to the very rim of insanity. The real challenge is when to stop.
• We can be cautious or we can be creative. A creative thinker must be fearless. If we’re more tentative than decisive, if we’re more cautious than creative, we’ll never be an innovative business leader, and definitely not a remarkable visual communicator. There’s no such thing as a cautious creative. It’s an oxymoron.
• Our individual edgy, solo talent can bring us fame and fortune. In the creative industry, we are always confronted with the challenge of coming up with a big Idea. And as we face the challenge, Lois suggests that we avoid group grope and analysis paralysis. We can do the process of creation by our lonesome. He brings up the style of modern-day innovative thinker Steve Jobs, who he described as a dictator and not a consensus builder, who listened to his own intuitions, and was blessed with an astonishing aesthetic sense. Lois observed that once we’ve got the big idea, that’s where teamwork comes in — selling it, producing it, and bringing it to fruition. “Teamwork might work in building a house, but it can’t create a big idea,” he proclaimed.
• If we want to do something sharp and innovative, we have to know backgrounds and histories. Lois explained, “Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.” To demonstrate the point he used the Piero del Pollaiuolo’s painting “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” as the model for his iconic Esquire magazine cover depicting pacifist boxer Muhammad Ali as the target of government persecution.
• Creating an idea is tough, but selling it is even tougher. If we’re the kind of creative people who get our best work completed, mitigating and selling our work to our boss, to our client, to the ad screening council is what separates the sometimes good creative thinker from the consistently great one. Remember to do three things in a big idea presentation: 1) Tell them what they are going to see, 2) Show it to them, and 3) Tell them, dramatically, what they just saw. “To create great work, here’s how we must spend our time — one percent inspiration, nine percent perspiration and 90 percent justification,” Lois added.
• Our surrounding is a metaphor of who we are. The only thing Lois ever permits on his desk is the job he’s working on. And, in his workplace, there is nothing on the walls to distract him from what he’s supposed to be thinking about on his desk. He has always invested so much effort in his immediate environment since the objects and surfaces and forms that surround him must feel aesthetically right to him. Everything he believes in is reflected in his work area. It should also relate to who we are, what we love, and to what we deem important in life.
• A single day without work can be a source of panic. In these days of mounting unemployment, be thankful that we have never been out of work a day in our life. We should hop out of bed each day thrilled about the prospects of doing great work. We should attack each day as though it’s our last.
• If you’re 50, remember that oak trees don’t produce acorns until they are 50 years old. Charles Darwin was 50 when he wrote On The Origin of Species. At 52, Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, turned McDonald’s from a small chain of restaurants into a huge fast-food empire. Colonel Sanders was in his 60s when he started KFC. A New York public school teacher, Frank McCourt, wrote Angela’s Ashes at 66 and a year later won a Pulitzer Prize. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founded the Hare Krishna movement when he was 69, with seven dollars to his name. Samuel Beckett, reflecting on his own career, mused, “Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
“The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself,” Oscar Wilde averred. Lois’s provocative, mind-blowing insights and counsel in his book indeed provide pearly wisdom that can be shared and put to good use.
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