George Lois: Damn Good Advice
George Lois is a member of the Art Directors Hall of Fame, the Advertising Hall of Fame and the Copywriters Hall of Fame.
His book, Damn Good Advice is full of lessons learnt from a career as one of world’s most famous ad executives.
Here’s 5 of my favourites.
Go for the big idea: All the tools in the world are meaningless without an essential idea. Always go for the big idea. The big idea in advertising sears the virtues of a product into a viewers brain and heart, resulting in a sales explosion.
Get out from your desk: Don’t expect a creative idea to pop out of your computer. Don’t sit down at your computer until you’ve grasped a big concept. You can’t run until you can walk.
Every trend is a trap: The solution to each new problem should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not the nervous borrowings of other people’s mediocrities. That’s precisely what trends are, a search for something safe. A reliance on them leads to oblivion.
Reject group grope: Decisive, breakthrough creative decision making is almost always made by 1, 2 or possibly 3 minds working in unison. Collective thinking usually leads to stalemate or worse. And the smarter the individuals in the group the harder it is to nail the idea.
Make headlines: Every ad campaign should have a built in PR campaign. If your advertising doesn’t have the power to become a topic of conversation for everyone in the nation, you forfeit the chance for it to be famous.
Lois’ book features these five lessons along with 115 others.
Pick up your copy here.