Sir John Hegarty and Rory Sutherland all in one week...

As the title suggests, it has been a pretty epic week in terms of guest speakers!

We heard from Sir John Hegarty on Tuesday who addressed the problems we are having with creativity in today's media world. He went on to say that TV is not dead, we are just creating "fucking boring" ads for it. He suggested that TV should be used as a starting point for brands to create more interesting conversations then proceeded to play The Guardian Three little pigs advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP88d87AV1k proving that TV ads can be extremely creative. What I liked about John was his no nonsense approach, he was asked multiple wanky media questions which all drove back to one answer: "It's simple, just be bloody interesting!". He kept his points concise and described technology as turning leaks into waterfalls- a point which many of the guest speakers have alluded to. Technology has given the consumer the tools with which to voice their opinions openly and publicly and the ability to share without limitations. This means that the consumer has the power to do a lot of the media work for brands- something I coined as "freedia". Like Sir John Hegarty said- it's simple, give the consumer something to talk about and they will do the work for you. I liked to look at it from the point of view that technology is creativity's wingman- who can both enhance/destroy an idea's game in one fail swoop.

The majority of the week has been taken up with project work for project 2, which is going well! We had our first client meeting that put a spanner in the works but all in all we are on track and I will give a full update once we have pitched on Friday (although we are doing karaoke Friday night so I may not be in a fit state to write on Saturday!). Aside from project work we also had a toolbox session around coding- although very interesting I doubt I will be a web producer any time soon!

The second talk of the week came from Rory Sutherland a man who is unbelievably eloquent and side splittingly humorous. At one point he compared queue jumping in Britain to paedophilia which basically demonstrates the tone of the whole talk. Rory largely spoke about behavioural psychology and our innate desire to rationalise everything. He stated that people always want to attribute success to a strategic decision instead of just accepting that it was pure luck or other factors that generate that success. He likened it to the riding of an elephant in that by in large the elephant will go where it wants to go, yet the individual riding it believes they have control over it. Rory suggested that we need to embrace system 1 thinking in order to produce successful advertising and go back to what people really want. It seems that simplifying the message  according to what motivates the audience is the success SO WHY ISN'T THIS HAPPENING?!

In order to filter the media BS out of my vocab and get back to a simpler way of thinking, I have generated a list (work in progress) of words that are over-used and quite frankly irritating:

Silo, Zeitgeist, Beta, Adhoc, Caveat, moving forward....

The list will no doubt get longer throughout the remainder of my time in squared so keep up to date by following @kerrydatlen and feel free to add your own!