Perhaps the bravest part of examining our creative service meant proving ourselves in new ways. The landscape of advertising and design is changing rapidly and, whilst we still believe the idea should always come before the technology, it has to be recognised that being able to understand how that technology is affecting society can make all the difference from a strategic point of view.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in social media.

So we set out to see how ideas could impact upon something as big as Twitter.

That’s when Super Twario was born.

In creating Super Twario, we wanted to show clients how a single exciting idea, bravely realised and confidently pitched, could resonate with people.

It did.

Even before Apple opted to run it as a featured app the test videos had been viewed over fifty thousand times and most every magazine had run a feature. Word of mouth carried the name of Super Twario right around the world and the Twitter searches we were running were moving faster than we’d ever expected.

We set out to get noticed.

We succeeded.

The meetings and conversations we have had since have been exciting and more apps, different apps, are in development.

All from the conviction we have that anything can benefit from a bit of exciting thinking.

What a year it has been.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

So how’s your year been?

It’s not been the best has it? We have seen many companies, much admired companies, go under and many talented designers, game creators and writers have lost their jobs.

Recession has presented us with a whole bunch of challenges (are they still challenges or is the latest term “opportunities”?)

Whatever, it’s been tough.

At Head First we had to examine every part of what we stood for and what we offered in order to stand out.

And stay standing.

For a company that services such large brands that was quite the challenge. Early on we realised that “we aim to excite” was more relevant than ever before. We had to excite and we had to encourage our clients to excite.

As a result we began to talk to people, one on one, to show them the opportunities available by exciting people. We came up with ideas, often unsolicited, and threw them at the people we wanted to work for. It didn’t matter whether these were paid for ideas or even potential ideas. What mattered was that they were exciting ideas.

We ranged from suggesting ways for companies to open up new dialogues with their markets to examining what their real business actually was.

And if a client called us to a job we sometimes turned them away.

Not empty handed of course. But with an idea they could implement on their own.

An exciting idea.

For such a small company, Head First often punches above its own weight. There are few projects we have balked at.

That’s because we know that along with the ideas comes production.

You could say that Head First is about ideas in production.

When one of us comes up with an idea, someone else is thinking how to make it work.

Our clients seem to like this approach.

It means they don’t get one dimensional production. They get the responsive, thinking approach to production.

That’s much more exciting.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

The first day of an A-level English literature course ought to have been a baptism of fire. At least the way they used to teach it. Shakespeare was a given but Pope, Eliot (T S not George) and Bronte would demand close reading and F R Leavis would show us how.

That wasn’t how it started.

After a brief appraisal of literary terms our teacher decided to start again. This time at the very beginning.

Sweeping us through basic rhyme structures; iambic pentameter, sonnets, even limericks, it was clear he was aghast at the lack of basic knowledge. How could we be expected to comment on the beauty of Tennyson if we couldn’t hear the meter? How could we understand the literary wit of Pope if we didn’t know bathos from pathos?

So for a week, my English teacher treated us like children.

As someone who has never needed an excuse to keep things simple knows, being treated like a child wasn’t such a bad way to start the year.

Covering Topsy and Tim may not have been on the hastilly rearranged syllabus but I remember discussing how to rhyme swan with stone. Pop quiz: anyone know which poet did this and why?

Then we began on onamatopoeia, to the joy of children everywhere. As insulted as those who understood these terms ought to have felt, the simple pleasure of a refresher course as given by an inspiring A level teacher was hard to beat. I still maintain that going back to basics is essential. Certainly it could help many a marketing ‘guru’ escape from their own overwrought terminology.

Then the teacher said something that could have led me to the side of Hughes and Heaney. Instead it led me to David Abbott, Tony Cox and a school of copywriting brilliance far older and more brilliant than me.

What, he asked, can’t you do to a Knirps?

Straightaway I sat up.

“K-nacker” I said. Just like that: k-nacker.

The most effective way to introduce alliteration was through an advert. It stuck in the mind.

Because the most effective way to make a brand of umbrellas stick in the mind was through alliteration.

Advertising is like talking to children.

Make it kick, make it stick.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

It was great. Now if only it would last for just a season. Big impact drama and less of the soap opera. That, I’d stick with.

That’s not going to happen of course so, reading the reactions in the aftermath and wondering about Dimitri, GBO man and why the hell Mark didn’t just put the bracelet on his other wrist, I began thinking how easy it would be to write a show like this by throwing a thousand “what-ifs” into the air and sitting back whilst the creative network out there began gathering and piecing them together again. There would be nothing quite as powerful as listening to the way a million creative minds attempt to explain the inexplicable. Given half a chance we can make a muffin out of nothing and then claim the Government put it there.

It’s also a great way of gauging the bits of a story that grabs the imagination. Like focus testing but less contrived and more in line with the way everyone is banging on about social marketing. The Mosaic website angle in Flash Forward is a superb addition. A little clumsily inserted into the narrative perhaps but it still manages to work.

It all helps us feel a part of the story. It moves us on from passive viewers to active (superficially at least) participants. It gives us a degree of ownership of the story and a stake in the show’s future. Apple did something similar years back when they launched the iPod and encouraged consumers to create their own iPod ads. It appeals to the creative in all of us, often with great results.

For the lazy adman this option can be a dangerous thing but for those genuinely interested in creating something wonderful it can be a rewarding tactic. There’s nothing as potentially powerful as the collective creative and shows such as Flash Forward demonstrate how this could be used and how other forms of media such as video games, comics and even novels, could tap into an open desire to just create.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Here is a brand built around the simplicity of a connecting brick. A children’s toy to unlock the imagination, Lego has been adopted by the enthusiast like almost no other toy before or since. But it, at its heart, a physical product. And like so many traditional toys, it faced a difficult future as video games and the internet stole our children away from the floor space and put them in front of the computer monitor. It would, on the surface, seem unlikely that Lego could make the transition to the digital sphere in the way more social games could and did.

Of course, Lego did exactly that, building itself around the concept of imagination and the character of those amazing Minifigs. The idea that you can build anything with Lego was seized upon and translated literally into some of the most fun video games we have today.

Even better, for me, is the new Lego Games range, extending the brand within the real world by creating fun versions of classic games. Minotaurous and Creationary are two I’ve seen and been captured by but the range is extending all the time. It’s hard to see a possibility not suitable for these dynamic little bricks.

Well done Lego. Other classic toys could learn a lot by dismantling your example.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Rob goes on to say that for him, public polls reveal what advertising is effective AND creative. It’s a point I don’t quite agree with. At what point does public opinion, creativity and the sales total correlate?

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

“I could put this product into paper bags and it would still sell” he declaimed.My eager heart raced as the opportunity to stand up to this ignorant ogre presented itself. I found myself upright, the chrome legs of the cheap leather chair scraping quickly backwards.

“But only to perverts” I announced before reclaiming my seat and rejoining the meeting. My last statement in the matter was a little more humble as realisation welled up.

“However, there are an awful lot of those about to sell to.”

Of course, a product sold in a paper bag is bound to attract attention but I got his point. He felt that going to any trouble (and for trouble, read “expense”) with pack design was a waste of time (and for time, read “expense”). For him it came down to the desirability of a product. If people were queuing up around the corner because your product had all the hype or all the originality then who cared how the pack looked?

So does good design only matter when the product is either poor or has to compete against similar products? This has to be one of those posts where the answer can only be no. As designers we are preconditioned to believed that good design matters. But what do you think? And how do we even set about showing design effectiveness? Is this a case of proving a negative? Unless two designs (one “poor” and one “good” are launched into the market with the same spend then how do we disentangle the many elements of marketing to discover where effectiveness lies?

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.