Are you creative director material?

Check out this nice viewpoint about Being a Creative Director. It worth reading. 😉

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Many young creatives enter the advertising industry with aspirations of one day becoming the creative director at a major agency. Yet not every creative person is cut out for this particular job.

Over the years, the creative director role has become the default goal for many ambitious art directors, designers, or copywriter thinking ahead into the future. Yet many creatives have unrealistic perceptions of what the role entails.

Special set of skills

Many of my students tell me that they want to be the creative director one day. It is a worthy ambition, though it is important to remember that the skills and qualities of a creative director are not necessarily the same as those of a good copywriter or art director.

Management and negotiation skills are vital for a would-be creative director, as is the ability to think strategically. The role isn’t simply to create, but to channel the creativity of the team and to help deliver the best possible results for the client.

The creative director may set the direction for the work, but he or she also needs to be able to lead the team in the creative process. The role is very much about mentoring, nurturing, managing and supporting the creative teams. For many creative directors, it’s hard to avoid the temptation to do all the conceptual thinking themselves.

Managing creative people

As such, one of the most important parts of the job is creating a great environment for creativity and building the right team. One challenge is managing creative people in a way that gets the best from them.

The creative director should, ideally, be the champion of good ideas from the entire team. That means he or she needs to inspire confidence in clients and from the creative team.

You need to be seen as a person with confidence and conviction.

One of the hardest parts of the job is stopping all the things that are trying to kill good ideas – client resistance, internal politics, and budget, for example. There are so many failure bullets to dodge.

Learning other disciplines

A good creative director must also be flexible and forward-looking. He or she must be willing to learn about other disciplines – this means that the creative director with a copywriting background must understand art direction, design, film and digital technology, for example, and should also have experience in a range of media from TV to print to digital.

What’s more, creative directors must be open to lifelong change and learning. It is up to them to stay ahead of how consumers are using technology, to stay abreast with changing tastes and trends in the broader market.

The role of the creative director in any agency is a pivotal one and it can be very rewarding, but it’s not always as glamorous as people entering the ad industry imagine. A great creative director is a client service person, a trouble shooter, a teacher, a cheerleader and a pragmatist.

Not every great creative director is a great visionary; and not every great creative is a great creative director. If it’s a role that appeals to you, you should look beyond your own discipline and learn about strategy, account management and technology. And hone your people skills because they’re as important as your intuition and creativity.

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BY: WENDY MOORCROFT | 22 DEC 2014 08:49 (extracted from BizCommunity.com)

 

Custom Engraved Rolling Pins Imprint Patterns into Cookie Dough

10 Ways That Small Businesses Can Enchant Their Customers

Today I was browsing my Linkedin looking for anything, actually. And suddenly  I bumped with this interesting post made by Kawasaky – Advisor at Motorola Mobility. And I loved it.

1. Put likable, competent and passionate people on the front line. I prefer to interact with employees who smile, know what they’re talking about, and love what they sell. However, companies often put the lowest-paid, least-experienced employees behind the counter or at the front desk and hope for the best. This doesn’t make sense. Ask yourself this question: Is the first impression of my business a good one? Because if it’s a bad one, it may also be the last one.

2. Show me that you trust me. If you don’t trust me, I’m not going to trust you. Look at the small businesses that became huge: Zappos tells me that it trusts me because it pays shipping in both directions. Nordstrom takes my word for it if I say merchandise was defective. Amazon lets me return a Kindle book for seven days—I can read most books in seven days! If you trust me, I’ll trust you, and we can build a relationship. {click to tweet}

3. Remove barriers to entry. Make it easy to get started with your product or service. Don’t ask people to fill out 10 fields of personal information to open an account. Don’t throw up a CAPTCHA system that requires fluency in Sanskrit. Don’t require an appointment for a consultation. Instead, create a slippery slope that enables people to start doing business with you quickly.

4. Make it easy to give you money. Once people decide to adopt your product or service, make it easy for them to give you their money, attention or eyeballs.This requires accepting multiple methods of payment, adopting easy-to-use shopping carts, and reasonable shipping and handling charges. If there’s anything worse than a company that tries to get my money with a crappy product, it’s a company that makes it hard to give it my money for a great one. {click to tweet}

5. Go deep in a segment. The Stanley Market in Hong Kong contains dozens of shops, and many of them sell a range of t-shirts, souvenirs, toys, luggage, electronics and cameras. You get the sense that these stores sell anything to make a buck. The only place that I bought something there was Tam’s Art Gallery because it sells only “chops” (a stamp or seal made from stone). Since there’s only one thing to buy at Tam’s, it’s easier to believe that this store really understands its business. My advice is that you focus on one thing whether it’s selling t-shirts (Threadless), toys (CheekyMonkey), luggage (Edwards Luggage), electronics (Fry’s), cameras (Keeble & Shuchat) or yogurt (Miyo Yogurt).

6. Sell something that’s DICEE. This acronym defines the five qualities of great products and services: deep, intelligent, complete, empowering,and elegant. A DICEE product or service is a full-featured one (deep) that shows you understand my needs (intelligent), comes with support (complete), makes me better (empowering), and is easy to use (elegant). As you create your offerings, ask yourself if they are deep, intelligent, complete, empowering and elegant.

7. Enable hands-on trial. Assume that your customers are smart and let them decide for themselves instead of bludgeoning them into a sale. Give them the ability to try your product or service with hands-on areas or demo versions. This concept works whether you’re buying a car, sampling a dessert, trying a camera, or buying a power tool. Once you’ve got me try something, half the battle is over, and if you tell me that I have to buy something to try it, you’ve lost me.

8. Communicate with salient points. How many people truly understand what a gigabyte of storage means? A much better way to communicate the capability and capacity of your products and services is with salient points. For example, the number of songs a device can store is more illuminating than the number of gigabytes of storage capacity. You may find this harder to believe, but telling me how much weight I’ll gain by eating your food would make me eat at your restaurant more often because this salient point shows that you care about my health.

9. Deliver bad news early. Shiitake happens: products have problems, deliveries are delayed, and employees get sick. Many businesses try to minimize the effect of bad news, but when the inevitable issue arise, be proactive and tell them about the problem before they discover the hiccup for themselves. And to get on top of your game, let them know how you’ll solve the problem at the same time that you’re letting them know it exists.

10. Consider all the influencers. There is a difference between the person who pays for something and the person who makes the decision to buy something. Many companies assume it’s the same person, but that’s not necessarily the case. Key influencers can include a spouse, sibling, colleague, parent, grandparent or child. Who is the true head of a household isn’t so clear these days, so appeal to all the influencers. In my case, it’s my daughter, by the way.

Manually Cranked Wood Toy Performs Sleight-of-hand Magic

Holiday Break

Hi Folks,

This is my last 2012 blog post. I’ll be back to spread ideas around the world about print advertising, B2B, art, crazy ideas, ambient and much more on Jan 7th. Be tuned at alekdirector.wordpress.com.

Happy holidays to you all.

C ya.

Alek

Mini TV Memo Pad

Hey Guys, check this out. I love it. :-()

Adobe Launches Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud

Extracted from http://creativebits.org/

Arriving two years after CS5, and a year after CS5.5, CS6 is now available for pre-order, with Adobe promising delivery “within 30 days.” Adobe’s subscription-based Creative Cloud takes a central role in the massive release, which includes 14 CS6 applications and four Creative Suites. The all-you-can download plan is yours for $49.99 per month, which is the cost if you sign up for an annual contract (it’s $74.99 per month for month-to-month membership). To sweeten the pot, an introductory offer of $29.99 per month for the first year for CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 customers is also available.

But you don’t need a Creative Cloud membership to stay in the game. One approach is to upgrade to CS5.5 prior to May 6, which would qualify you for a free upgrade to CS6. This would seem to be possible for versions all the way back to CS2. Those with CS3 or CS4 can also benefit from special pricing until December 31, 2012, so there’s no rush in this case. It’s worth pointing out that upgrades are now only available directly from Adobe; not third-party suppliers. This product matrix provides a quick way to determine what’s in the various suites. Not be missed is the live launch event, which will take place today at 1PM EST and will be available on the Adobe TV site Tuesday.

OK Go – Needing/Getting – Official Video

Who said that I don’t like music videos? I think that it was myself, actually. Well, this video is beyond the usual musical videos. It must be seen.

New Iphone 5 – Rumor Roundup.

$100,000 On Walls of The Museum Room

What do you see in these marvelous photos? You see a room in the Guggenheim Museum that is filled to the brim with 100,000 $1 bills. The money is actually a honorarium that artist Hans-Peter_Feldmann won for for significant achievement in contemporary art. This is known as the Biennal Hugo Boss Prize. He thought it would be a unique gesture for the museum to actually see how much money that is.

The 70-year-old Feldmann said that this amount of money was special to him because art never was connected to money in the 1950′s when he started making art, and now art has become far too commercialized. It took 13 days for the museum workers to pin up the one dollar bills, and it took up so much space that the dollars had to overlap each other on the walls.

Is your money working for you? Does anyone else besides me think that this exhibit is a waste of $1 dollar bills? And an unbelievable dose of patience?