Trump Hut

The Work: Last year's Pro Bono Campaign Gold winner, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based DCX Growth Accelerator, returned with another buzzworthy idea that got election-watchers talking. "Trump Hut" was a massive piece of protest art resembling the golden mane of our current POTUS (and was big enough to glamp out in). Meant to highlight how neighborhood gentrification and housing displacement affects low-income communities, it made its debut in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood at the realty-themed art show "Gut Rehab," stopped at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and then returned to New York -- landing in front of Trump Tower in Midtown.

Why It Won: The campaign was a wacky (and fun) creative idea that successfully rode the election media wave to bring attention to its cause. According to the agency, "Trump Hut" earned more than 100 million media impressions, including attention from major outlets such as The Washington Post, which called it, "The most baffling (but eye-catching!) Trump protest we have seen in Cleveland so far."

Shout Out

Shout Out to Terri Sandy - and their wonderful work!

The Story of my life.

Let's start here. 1965. Belfield School Graduation Day. That's me on the left of my mother and three brothers. I'm wishing that I had brought another purse. 

I miss Nora, too.

Nora Ephron: Prophet of Privacy

“Everything is copy,” the writer used to say—unless it wasn’t.

“When you slip on a banana peel,” Nora Ephron liked to say, “people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”

RELATED STORY

Nora Ephron's Edge

This was a guiding principle of her life: power, via sharing. Control, via opening up. You tell the story, so the story doesn’t tell you. Banana-peel logic informs another Ephronism, the one that gives its name to the documentary about Ephron’s life that is currently airing on HBO: “Everything is copy.” The line comes from Ephron’s mother, who—like pretty much everyone else in her family, including both of her parents, all three of her sisters, all three of her husbands, and one of her two sons—was also a professional writer. And it’s a fitting motto for Ephron, who, on top of everything else she accomplished, anticipated the searing, first-person confessional that would become one of the defining modes of Internet writing.

“Writers are cannibals,” Ephron told Charlie Rose in a long-ago interview. “They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.”

Everything Is Copy was created by Ephron’s son, Jacob Bernstein (the son who is a professional journalist) as an act of tribute, and questioning, and sense-making. And the documentary is—as Ephron herself was, it suggests—witty and generous and occasionally brutal in its honesty. Through interviews with Ephron’s many famous friends and colleagues (Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg, Gay Talese, Rosie O’Donnell, Meg Ryan, Mike Nichols, and on and on) Bernstein presents his mother as a writer who lived out loud, insistently. The film is composed of the two layers that most good writing involves, somehow: declaration and exploration, with the one animating the other.

She wrote about fake orgasms, and fake breasts, and the various indignities heaped upon women for the crime of failing to die young.

The “declaration” aspect is clear enough: Everything Is Copy presents the many ways in which Ephron made good on her word, through words. She relied, professionally and personally, on the alchemy of the anecdote. She transformed her experiences—the good and especially the bad, the big and especially the small—into stories. Through her early essays in Esquire, through her novel, through her later essays and plays and screenplays, she wrote about family, and friendship, and motherhood, and womanhood. She grieved her divorce from Carl Bernstein, and in some sense got revenge for it (she’d caught him cheating on her while she was pregnant with their second son) by writing a thinly veiled novel about the experience. She wrote about finding love again. She wrote about being betrayed by our culture’s optimism about romance; she wrote about being redeemed by it. She wrote about fake orgasms, and fake breasts, and the various indignities heaped upon women for the crime of failing to die young. She wrote about her neck. She wrote about her sons. She wrote about pie.

Ephron was the consummate “over-sharer,” using her copious capacity for honesty—“I feel like her allegiance to language was sometimes stronger than her allegiance to someone’s feelings,” Meg Ryan puts it—to exert control over others, and over herself. (Bernstein postulates that his mother’s “control freak” tendencies might have had to do with the fact that both of her parents became, late in their lives, alcoholics: She sought the control that their own lives failed to afford.)

But all of that is the “declaration”: She told the stories so the stories wouldn’t tell her. The “exploration,” though, is more interesting. And it has to do with the one time in Ephron’s life when she violated her own edict: her refusal to write about, and indeed even to talk about, the illness that would, in 2012, take her life. That she was sick—during the filming of Julie & Julia, during the production of the Ephron-written and Tom Hanks-starring Broadway play Lucky Guy—was a secret she kept from all but her closest family members. (“It was very hard,” Meryl Streep, who shot Julie & Julia with Ephron during her illness, tells Bernstein of being kept in the dark. “Because it was an ambush.”)

So: Why?, Bernstein—on behalf of Ephron’s family and friends and fans—asks in the film. Why did the woman who spent her life so ardently and wittily refusing to acknowledge the “T” in “TMI” finally decide to clam up? Why did this most public of people end her life so fiercely guarding her privacy?

That she kept her own secret for so long was just one more way that she translated her personal experience into a broader cultural truth.

The answer, Bernstein postulates, comes back to the banana peel: Ephron’s need to control the story. Coupled with, perhaps, her recognition that “control,” life being what it is, is largely a lie. “I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” Bernstein concludes—“that the things you want to keep are not copy, that the people you love are not copy, that what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you.”

In that sense, for someone who saw storytelling not just as a vehicle of human connection, but of control, it follows that the one thing that so cruelly deprives a person of both—death—would be the exception that proves the rule. “Once she became ill,” Bernstein writes, “the means of controlling the story became to make it not exist.”

This was another way, in the end, that Ephron anticipated the culture of the moment—one that embraces radical transparency, aided by social media, but that also recognizes limitations to that transparency. We live in a world—all that posting and Instagramming and Snapping and sexting—that would seem to believe, like Ephron, that everything is copy. And yet it’s a world that also acknowledges limits to that belief. Some things can’t be ‘grammed. Some things are bigger than a status update.

Everything Is Copy, its title notwithstanding, recognizes that fact. It advocates, in the end, for strategic privacy: for acts and experiences that are made all the more meaningful because they are not shared—except, perhaps, with those who are closest to us. That Ephron kept her biggest secret for so long was one more way in which she translated her personal experience into a broader cultural truth. “She’s the one who said, ‘There is no privacy,’” Meryl Streep recalls in the film, still grappling with the shock of Ephron’s death. “‘Forget privacy, it’s gone.’ And this is the most fascinating thing in the world to me, because she achieved a private act in a world where the most superficial parts of the most intimate acts are everywhere.”

The overarching irony of the film, of course, is that it is Ephron’s son who is reversing that intimacy, who is exposing his mother’s long-guarded secret—guided, it seems, by the very instinct his mother gave to him, and that her mother gave to her. Ephron ceded the control to her son, not just because because death robbed her of the ability to say otherwise, but because she seems to have recognized, in the end, the other power that comes from sharing: love. Ephron spent her life slipping on banana peels, maybe, but she also spent much of it loving her son. Now, he is turning that love into stories. And weaving those stories into her legacy.

Good to know, if you don't already.

How to Kill Creativity in Your Agency

Written by Jami Oetting | @jamioetting

"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything."

This quote from George Lois, the legendary ad man who created iconic work for Xero and MTV and some of the most iconic Esquire covers, sums up why brands hire agencies. They want to tap into a group of individuals who can solve business problems with creative ideas. 

And agencies need to be able to depend on their staff to generate these ideas -- day after day, month after month. Without this, there's not much future for their firm. 

But while many firms would like to think they are fostering innovation and ideas, instead they have structures, practices, and leaders who create an environment that is actually hostile to creative output. 

Without even realizing it, they are smothering the creative flame that attracts their clients. Here's how:

9 Ways to Kill Creativity in Your Agency

1) Discourage Creative Disputes

Healthy creative disagreements can actually generate more original ideas according to a study that found social conflict increases the number of viewpoints and perspectives from a group.

Charlan Nemeth of UC Berkeley analyzed companies such as Pixar and found thatconflict is essential to the ideation process, stating that the absence of conflict can mean that a team lacks ideas and is homogenous in thought. Healthy debate in companies -- and encouragement of this through practices at companies such as Pixar where morning meetings consist of criticizing the previous day’s work -- was shown to increase idea production by 25%. However, arguing just to argue isn’t productive. Pixar’s critique process -- also known as “shredding” -- requires that a critique includes at least one way to make the project better, creating a tone of positivity where the end goal is improvement, not a public lashing.

2) Rely on Group Brainstorming

It typically goes like this: You win a new project and client -- one you really, really wanted. The agency CEO and high-level stakeholders call an “all hands on deck” brainstorming meeting. The result? A mess of people in a room where only a handful of individuals speak while the rest of the team catches up on client emails and browses BuzzFeed.

Brainstorming meetings can work, but you need a structure for making them productive. One strategy that has been shown to be more effective is brainstorming done using an online messaging app, such as Slack or HipChat. A study found that when ideas can been seen by the entire team and they can consume these in a low effort way and respond, it produces more unique ideas.

3) Establish Consequences for Mistakes

For your team to tap into their creative mindset, they have to know that it is OK to make mistakes. It’s even encouraged. This isn’t to say that you should bring all 15 drafts of ad to the client for review. However, the pursuit of perfection is in opposition to creative output. 

InTrust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, Shaun McNiff wrote: “When asked for advice on painting, Claude Monet told people not to fear mistakes. The discipline of art requires constant experimentation, wherein errors are harbingers of original ideas because they introduce new directions for expression. The mistake is outside the intended course of action, and it may present something that we never saw before, something unexpected and contradictory, something that may be put to use.”

This can be especially dangerous now as agencies want to rely on what is known to work to reduce risk of losing the relationship. Create a process for experimentation and testing to show the client that the final approach is the right one. 

4) Tease More Money as Motivation

Teresa Amabile, who has studied creativity-killers and wrote a seminal piece on the subject in Harvard Business Review, wrote, “The most common extrinsic motivator managers use is money, which doesn’t necessarily stop people from being creative. But in many situations, it doesn’t help either, especially when it leads people to feel that they are being bribed or controlled.”

Money doesn’t make people interested in and driven to solving problems. It may force someone to get the job done -- and even perform above standards -- but it fails to increase intrinsic motivation, which Amabile found is the key to increasing creativity.

This intrinsic motivation is also related to grit, which is used to describe passion and perseverance and has been shown to be an indicator of future success.

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5) Promote Micromanagers

Managers and directors who lack the ability to delegate or allow team members to find an independent path to a solution can inhibit creative output.

First of all, a micromanager can cause employees to become disengaged as they feel they have no ownership over the process or the end result. It also prevents people from gaining experience and confidence in a role.

While oftentimes, the controlling manager is simply trying to improve efficiency and get things accomplished in the “right” way, the result is a dispassionate team who feel stifled and bored.

This can also apply to implementing processes so strict they leave little room for interpretation. Consider this: In 2000, the newly appointed CEO of 3M (the creator of Post-It Notes and masking tape) implemented a management technique known as Six Sigma that would “decrease production defects and increase efficiency.” This worked well in reducing manufacturing errors, but the company’s percentage of sales from new products slipped to one-quarter from one-third in the next five years. New products were restricted to those whose profit viability was a known quantity. And the process-focused approach to producing products and ideation broke down the culture of innovation the company was once known for.

6) Constantly Change the Goal

So you don’t want to limit a person’s autonomy through micromanagement, but you obviously still need your team members to produce work that the client will love. To allow people to be creative with the route they take, you need to give them a destination -- or a goal.

John Irving, the author of Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp, and 12 other novels, is famous for knowing for creating highly detailed outlines of his book and writing the ending before he starts the novel. He told NPR:"I always know where it's going. I'm writing toward a sentence, usually to much more than a sentence, to many paragraphs, close to a last chapter -- it's like a piece of music that you're writing toward: This is how it sounds when I get to the end. Because I wouldn't know how I'm supposed to sound at the beginning unless I knew how I was going to sound when I got there."

Knowing the end gives purpose to everything else you create. Before a project ever starts, your team needs to have a clear understanding of what the goal is and what pain point the completed work should solve.

You should also prevent this from changing -- if possible. A constantly evolving end result only causes confusion and frustration. It also leads to an inferior end product as most people will simply adjust the existing work to fit ca changing goal, rather than start over with a unique approach for the problem. 

7) Hire Similar People

At the ANA Conference in fall of 2015, PepsiCo’s Brad Jakeman said, "Innovation and disruption does not come from homogeneous groups of people."

The lack of diversity of race, background, and culture has become a growing issue for agencies as brand execs become more concerned with the fact that the people producing their advertising and marketing work do not reflect a diverse audience.

This lack of diversity is also problematic from a creative standpoint. Teams made up of individuals with unique perspectives and experiences and knowledge are more likely to challenge one another. It is less likely that teams of people who look alike and think alike and grew up in similar ways will change someone else’s perspective or be able to cause someone else to reconsider their view of a problem or solution.

As Amabile wrote in Harvard Business Review, “Because when teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations and approaches to work -- that is, different expertise and creative thinking styles -- ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways."

8) Rush the Process

Deadlines and restrictions on the creative process are necessary. But rushing a project because of a lack of communication or not building in enough time for creative incubation from the beginning will only result in mediocre work.

There needs to be some buffer for mulling over a problem and possible solution -- time for even forgetting about the issue and then returning to it with a fresh perspective. Time for inspiration to strike -- if you believe in that -- or time to just sit down and struggle through the problem. Without time, a person simply relies on going through the motions of doing the work.

9) Force Creative Output

Putting constant pressure and emphasis on the need of your team to produce more and more creative ideas doesn’t foster ideation, either. In fact, when people are under more stress to produce creative ideas, the part of their brain that reduces creativity -- the part responsible for planning and organization -- is activated.

Allan Reiss, one of the authors of the study, wrote, “Sometimes a deliberate attempt to be creative may not be the best way to optimize your creativity.” 

A lovely call for entry. The One Show, 2014

Some say that real ideas feel like they arrive by magic. Others point to notebooks and deadlines and a fear of failure. The very confident can't be bothered to ponder such things. But where do ideas come from? Are they born like babies? Created with love, shaped by your DNA, filled with hopes, and pushed out with great force? Or do they already exist, hidden in everything? Tiny points of inception, waiting to be discovered under beds. In music. Tucket between layers of cake. Stuck to the bottom of your shoe, holding you in place until you recognize it.

Squirrel Studies

(………………………………….)

I never liked being referred to as a "fragile" or the idea that people in the business were tip-toeing around my creative bubble. But, I have to admit there is a soft underbelly of a creative. It's not bad, it's good. When I was working at an ad agency, I always felt like it was very important to appear confident, strong, and tough. "When you present an idea to you need to believe in it!" … "Put your soul into this!" …Well, that does take a lot out of you, and after a project is completed there is a letdown. A time when you are rebooting, psyching yourself up for the next creative journey… don't fret, it happens to all of us. This letdown is more obvious if you are a freelancer, cause then paranoia begins to creep into the equation… "what's everyone else working on?" … I like to think of this as the creative pause. If you are afraid of silence, then freelance is not your thing. But here are a couple of tips:
 

*Always have multiple projects going

*The emotions are going to be there; don’t take them too seriously

*Give yourself a week off between projects

* Designate one day a week for reading

I miss Erma.

She was great. One day a couple of years ago, I went on EBAY and bought as many Erma Bombeck books that I could find. It's weird cause I am not sure why I relate so much to her humor, because I was just a child in the 50's and wasn't the housewife that she was speaking to, but if I am ever a little down or bored, I pick up one of her paperbacks and read a couple of chapters. It always makes me feel better. She was my Tina Fey, or maybe Joan Rivers Light. Maybe it is that she died way too young, even though she was prolific, I am sure she would have a lot to say about life today.   So here's to Erma, my friendly spirit up in my studio that keeps me laughing and trying to use all my talent.

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “ I used everything you gave me.””

— Erma Bombeck

Note to self.

keep this in your pocket at all times.

mAD woman

I really never started out thinking i was going into advertising. it just happened. I knew that I wanted to be an art director, but i wasn't really attracted to the idea of working at an agency. The best part of an agency it seemed, was the softball teams. So, when one of my professors at Pratt asked a couple of us if we wanted to do freelance work for an animation studio,  I said yes.( I thought for sure that I could play outfield.) Luckily for me, it put me a production house,  a small "hands on" studio, located on the lower east side of Manhattan.  I arrived in blue jeans with a pack of x-acto blades in my purse.  I was on my own, learning firsthand how animation worked. There were no computers. Instead, we were in a world colored ruby and amber and black. It was fantastic. 

Everyone likes to be liked.

No matter what people say, it's always nice to take home some "hardware...". Clients love it, too, even though they might deny it. One of the first awards I ever won was from the New York Art Directors Club. They sent me a notice in the mail congratulating me for the award and I remember calling them to make sure it was me. I couldn't believe it. They laughed. But it was a really big deal for me. 

I once went to a photographer's studio and he had used one of his awards as a toilet paper holder.

Why the rodent

I know that for some, it is hard to understand why I chose a red squirrel to represent WeeksCreative, but it really is simple. I live on a hill in Maryland, where there are hundreds of these little guys going about their business everyday. They are always busy and hardworking and funny. Native Americans use them as a symbol for preparation, trust and thriftiness. Pretty admirable brand traits. I think I will go with that.