HEAD BLOG

The game layer can be dropped over anything we do in order to help customers engage with products, processes or people.

When Head First set up shop, it was on the strength of believing the approaches of each market specialty, from videogames to DIY, could and should engage in whole lot more mixing.

From the perspective of videogames it seemed advertising often took a back seat to illustration, as though the two disciplines were interchangeable, as though merely by saying that a picture was worth a thousand words actually made it so.

The sophisticated techniques, the considered messages, these were often missing from marketing strategies for the fast growing sector of videogames and Head First wanted to change that.

At the same time, however, we knew that videogames had a lot to give. Energy and engagement were just two things that the world of videogames had to offer every other brand. Sure, the big boys knew how to form a message but videogames… well, they could deliver it in ways that just clicked with audiences of all ages.

Videogames, we said (and still say) aren’t something you grow out of.

We understand the power of the industry and believe in it so strongly that we thought it was time to show just how engaging it can be.

Enter Super Twario and a whole new look at how Twitter can be accessed.

For a while now there have been claims to have created the first ever Twitter game but these claims are built around spamming rather than engaging and users often Tweet in anger as they feel cheated into allowing the service to broadcast messages on their behalf.

With Super Twario we didn’t want to engage with Twitter at all, we wanted our users to. By providing the platform (literally) for them to roam through their Feed in an exciting and, dare the word be uttered, an innovative way. Add to this a score system and you have engagement in a very real sense.

What Super Twario does is show how different products (such as Twitter) can be approached in very different ways.

Most of all though, we wanted people to see that Head First has some pretty great ideas.

I’ve been riding a bicycle. After more than thirty years I thought it time to saddle up and try again. Ok, that’s not strictly true. After more than thirty years I was persuaded to try it again.

And yes, they lied. You do forget.

Still, the excitement remained the same. Triggered from the first sound of the chain ticking ; an over-wound clock catching up the years since my last, childhood ride.

It’s a powerful thing, memory. Try as we might to hold onto a moment we find it can slip away whilst other, less desirable memories hold on.

I can’t remember my first kiss even though that is the one thing everyone claims to remember.

I do remember the first time I snuck a book beneath my pillow and, as the sound of footsteps receded, brought out Bobby Brewster and his typewriter to read by the fading light. I remember it because I went to the library on my own that day. I know I wouldn’t have cared about holding on to the memory. I just did.

Advertisers plunder our memories mercilessly. The first kiss image is used time and again to urge us to relate to things things they want us to imagine never forgetting. The not so subtle implication (and why should advertising be subtle?) being that their product is unforgettable.

As a creative it is often important to be able to find that common demoninator of human memory in order to leapfrog the work needed to make people understand the relevance in your message.

Everything in life can be boiled down to a scene within a movie. Worse still, everything can be gently steered towards a scene within a movie.

This simple, but invasive truth is colouring every move I make.

When a friend tells me about teaching English as a foreign language I immediately think of the scene in Good Morning Vietnam where – well, if you don’t know it then chances are you should probably leave this blog for now.

Similarly when I’m mid-flow in an argument I might say something straight from a film. I do. I can’t help it. If the time is right then it just has to play out that way because it felt so good when I saw it played out by Pacino or, ummm… Cage.

It doesn’t stop there.

I’ve even steered an argument towards being able to deliver a line. I haven’t yet managed the “sell crazy someplace else” line but I know exactly how I could push someone towards it.

Clearly, there’s a problem.

The thing is, life and relationships are one thing. It’s easy to start arguments just to be able to deliver a killer line. Life and relationships aren’t serious enough to take steps to prevent myself from doing it.

But creativity, dear god creativity, is.

Imagine my horror, yes, the horror, the horror, as I stare at a piece of copy I’d spent five WHOLE minutes on writing only to realise that somebody else had written it before me.

It’s embarrassing is what it is.

It’s also an area to be keenly aware of throughout the creative process. Sometimes an idea can feel so good, so reassuringly familiar, that it must have been done before. And often it has.

Death is not the end of course and our culture is filled with talented people who make use of this creative saturation and make it their own. Look at Spaced – filled with snippets of other works it remains decidedly its own creature throughout. Self-awareness, keenly expressed, is its hallmark and its creative territory.

Then there is the love-him-or-hate-him Tarantino whose oeuvre is built upon references to popular (and not so popular) culture. Again though, it’s his own spin on these things. His own experience which is brought to bear upon the subject matter that makes the difference.

And that, in the end, is key. It is experience which guides our hand in all these matters. Personal experience. And that’s something that turns a mediocre argument into a divorce settlement.

Every once in a while someone says something that makes you want to reach for the bucket. The comment is so loaded with pseudo- intellectual sugar  that overdose is instantaneous.

The headline statement here is one such comment. It carries self importance about its person like a student at a sit-in and if you’ve any sense you’ll be walking on by with a shake of your head.

But I see morbid curiosity keeps you here. Quite right too because every criticism of advertising you might have, every design bugbear you hold, all can be answered through that swollen claim.

Advertising and design goes wrong when the creatives and marketeers involved forget that they are problem solvers. Some of them appear to be brand evangelists, others appear to be artists, none of them produce anything like the commercially appropriate work they ought to whilst those millstones hang around their necks.

It’s easy to spot them too. Designs that don’t function as they ought to. Image taking precedence over usability. A complete lack of message.

Watch for them all because in their steely good looks are more bullshit statements than our claim to be problem solvers could ever make.

There’s an element to creativity I don’t like: opinion. Specifically other people’s opinions. Idea killers the lot of them. Toil and polish falls away at a handful of words and that, I don’t like.

Of course opinion is also vital to creativity. All that toil and all that polish can get you lost in a dark place, namely up your own arse and that’s somewhere nobody should be lost.

Experience lessens the importance of the opinions of others. Over time a writer or artist learns the impact of their work and how it is interpreted by others. That wonderful, frightening word, “interpret” is certainly one to watch out for as readers bring their own approach to bear upon carefully crafted work. Yet, as I say, experience tempers this element and folds it into the substance of the work. Ambiguity is employed as a tool rather than left dangling, ready to unravel meaning, and technique becomes adept at preempting any dissent in the ranks.

Years ago, way before I’d learned any formal writing technique, a friend read over a poem of mine and said he didn’t much care for it. My work, he offered, was becoming too practised, too glib. I agonised over the comment (and still do) undecided whether it was a good thing. In part he meant the technique I was learning to apply, the structures I was reaching for that would enable me to direct ideas rather than just have them. But he also meant that he missed the roughness and energy a wider understanding of technique often smooths out.

I remember being captivated by The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It was a short novel filled with ideas and surprises. Little of his later work has ever matched that power; growing less with each novel. Many writers lose that edge as their technical ability to structure, to wordplay, increases. Ultimately, it is about how to balance the two and where and when to bring in opinion. After all, it is easy to spot a writer who has studied at UEA.

At Head First, something we are always mindful of being is outsiders. It may seem strange to say this when most of our work is taken up with conveying the excitement of being a Japanese Samurai, a rampaging Marine or a MotoGP rider. Who amongst us is not an outsider when it comes to such rarefied pursuits? Certainly those of you reading this as a person uninterested in any sort of gaming outside football or snap! might suggest that the games we are charged with promoting are more akin with simple candy at a store in that children (for who else buys such tartly coloured things anyway?) will be drawn to the biggest buzz or lumbered with the budget title bought for them by a well meaning grandparent.

Somewhere in between all of this lies the duty of the outsider agency. Understanding where that buzz is created (and just how much money it can take to generate) is only a tiny part. In the vast, interconnected web of our consumer lives the real effort goes in knowing the many different faces of the gamer and seeing the product as they would see it rather than how the product manager would.

Yet being an outsider isn’t as easy as it might at first appear. In reality the outsider agency must not only be an outsider, but every outsider. And what a lot of outsiders there are.

A child, a teenager, a father, a mother, a single twenty-something – even that list, quickly generated, can spiral out of control and, in reality, tells us nothing. Take one: the father. Who is he? Why is he looking to play a game? What is he looking for? Does he go to the cinema? Does he buy books? Did he play games as a child and so is familiar with terms and conventions easily as complex as those of the Internet (and there’s a future article in itself)?

A person could sit down to a multiplayer game of Metro 2033 and be paired with a person they would all but despise in real life. The markers that resonate enough for them to choose something as simple as a shirt will be wildly different which leads to choices in design as to what terminology to employ, what nods to make, what visual cues to activate.

In such a world the question of how alien the main player character is takes a backseat. Indeed understanding the intricacies of the product itself can also take a backseat as our audience becomes as alien and unknowable as any blue skinned warrior robot could ever be.

Here, the outsider agency must arm itself with wit and a genuine interest in portraying the open, honest coolness of a product and fire it into the hearts of whoever walks on this strange digital battlefield.

The worst piece of advice, professionally at least, was to throw out the rule book. As a student studying creative writing it seemed a strange sort of direction, especially coming off a module where we’d discussed how Auden was estimated to have tried almost every form of poetic structure going.

To me, rules aren’t there to be broken, not really. I like the way structure (whilst we are on the subject) channels ideas and even informs their exposition. Yep, when it comes to the rule book I’m there chapter and verse.

So it’s always strange when the way you crack a design job wide open is by ignoring rules altogether. Recently we had to think differently for an online job and the best way, we found, was to throw out the rule book.

Sort of.

What we did was to ignore convention by asking ourselves what if this wasn’t an online job. What if it were in a different medium altogether.

It got us thinking.

Differently.

So we still followed rules. Just not the ones we were meant to.

For me it was Blade Runner. The worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and yes, even the giant of sci-fi: Blakes 7, didn’t manage alien in quite the same way. Their landscapes all seemed familiar, borrowed from the ordinary and polished or roughed up in order to appear different. Even Welsh quarries didn’t manage to pull it off properly.

Blade Runner was different. It wasn’t so much the spaceships and killer androids that made the world of Blade Runner so alien, so futuristic; it was the element of Japanese in it all.

Whether the film had quite the same effect to the Japanese, I can’t say (though I hear they go nuts for Blakes 7) but to me, young teenager as I was at the time, Blade Runner was a plausible vision of the future.

More spaceships wouldn’t have made it any more plausible, nor would more gibberish tech or plastic clothing.

All of this occurred to me just two paragraphs into Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.

The reason?

The feel of foreign.

The future can be two things: familiar (so I’m waiting for Ken Loach’s multi-million dollar space opera) or foreign. It is the latter that brings out our sense of wonder.

Just as Blade Runner forced us to experience the future through foreign eyes so is it important to retain your own outsider status when it comes to answering a brief. The world in which the client lives is not the same world in which the consumer lives. It can’t be.

The client is familiar with the sales targets and campaign aims. The client has bosses to please whether they are shareholders or marketing directors. The client is not going to be buying their own product.

Being foreign is an approach that ought to stay with you every day.

Understanding the client’s business is important, sure. But presumably the client has a pretty good grasp of her own business.

Understanding her customer, being her customer, well that’s what can deliver effective and creative thinking.

Advertising, by and large, is afraid to engage. Consumers, on the other hand, are not.

Recently Head First was invited to contribute to a discussion regarding art in advertising. Among our observations was a statement that advertising rarely innovated and so rarely became art.

And I figure that if advertising doesn’t innovate then there must be a reason.

Consider the rise in ‘crowd sourcing‘. Ideas are emanating from people. Ordinary, non-industry people.

Consider also recent reports of big companies plagiarising ideas from sole traders and designers. These designers are acting on a small scale, pleasing a small number of people. They have no brand to protect, no image to damage. They are unencumbered by procedure or responsibility. Like artists and like ordinary crowd-sourced creatives, the people who create do so in the hope that others will respond to the creation in a positive manner. If they are creating funny videos then there is little or no concern for an audience. When the need to sell is removed from the process, creativity takes on a raw beauty that has great power.

We, as viewers commonly branded as consumers, see this power as honest in scope. As clever, as entertaining as we can be as professional creatives, can we ever hope to reach this level? Can we, in other words, set out to create with sales or even brand propagation as an afterthought?

With FMCG the answer might seem to be a resounding no. Even those peculiar products which don’t quite fit the FMCG model (games and books fall under this banner, at least to my mind), can’t afford to release marketing without some kind of sales message directing it somehow. Books, it has been observed, are having to step up their marketing activities and in doing so may be forced even further from simply presenting their author’s vision and letting it settle naturally into the hands of the reader.

The need to inform can override the desire to entertain. But it is the entertainment value of any good ad that does the engaging.

We are, I believe, entering a phase of advertising where this process, this collision even, are being blurred. Games which technically are adverts throw off their need to inform, or reduce it to a bare minimum. They seek to entertain by not letting the brand get in the way. Good, crowd-sourced ads seem to work because suddenly the agency creative isn’t having to steer a course through briefs and personalities in order that their idea get greenlit and as the more savvy brands cone to understand this we are seeing some engaging creative content being released through any and every means at our disposal.

A cheap little app for the iPhone which was recommended to me by Matt Booth has got me looking at the world in a different way.

Just as the app itself had to look at the world differently.

It’s a camera app called Hipstamatic and anyone with a 3g will know that the camera on the iPhone isn’t something to throw away your Nikon over.

At just 1mb it is the sort of camera you avoid rather than include in your arsenal. It will do “ok” prints for a postcard but that’s about it.

So making use of it means making some big compromises if you like your photos glossy and printed onto canvas.

The makers of the app came up with an idea which makes perfect sense.

They modelled it on old style point and click cameras with old style film. That means you get a camera that adds in flaws of the kind you’d see by looking through your own childhood photos (I’m assuming you are born way before digital cameras came about).

It’s a fun way of making the most out of a camera with such limitations.

And it’s a great way of forcing yourself to look at the world differently.

I’ve been playing with black and white photography. I’ve done this on my dslr and enjoyed it well enough but now it’s a whole new thing. I’m looking more keenly at contrasts and compositions because I wonder what flaws they will produce once processes through Hipstamatic.

Waiting (sometimes even patiently) for the image to ‘develop’ is part of the fun because it means I can’t fire off twenty shots in a second and assume one has captured the moment.

Digital freed us all to become photographers. It’s been a wonderful gift and has produced amazing photos and amazing sites. But seeing and using Hipstamatic has made me understand what our perfect digital world loses in the rush for better quality images. It’s also taught me that dealing with obstacles in life is a route to producing amazing, insightful and thoughtful work.