Crazy Commercial – By @gringojoe96
By Joe Ribton
Crazy Commercial
Like many of my course mates I’m still relatively unsure what my personal brand or style actually is. What I’m consistently bringing to the table is turning whoever into a sound cloud rapper, using the font on till receipt and SMPuns.
The problem with this, as certain members of the class keep finding, is that craziness must remain commercially viable.
Crazy can very easily become too risky or off-brand. Dan and Jake, for instance, keep making funny and weird work, every piece shows them getting stronger and their team brand becoming more concrete. Their ideas are crazy, but they are rooted in really well-considered strategy and simple concepts that are then injected with their creativity.
The strategic base, which we have all been so lucky to learn from Olly, preserves the commercial side of their idea and allows the client to never feel overwhelmed by the weirdness of it all.
Conversely, myself amongst others (cough, Dean, cough), who creatively execute ideas with similar intentions to Dan and Jake, have struggled to impress.
Despite this, the Cadbury’s gorilla was somehow born. How persuasive must the team have been to win the right to create and distribute that work?
We have a long way to go, learning to pitch an idea like Forrest will prove to be another milestone in commercialising whatever weirdness we come up with.
Poor Dean, he has a great creative mind but keeps losing the audience with his pitching. With more persuasiveness he could’ve won us over with almost any of his work.
Visiting mentors have spoken about how fruitful a ‘skewed world’ approach to any product or brand can be.
I completely agree and always find my flow when I become the creator god of some poor and depraved new world. In a distant reality I’m worshipped by a skewed universe of poorly drawn celebrities and well-exercised hedgehogs.
Even writing this has made me realise that I need to push myself outside of my comfort zone when scamping. Perhaps creating a skewed world is too easy, and is the reason I’m often trying to present ideas with recurring humour.
I’d really like to try and move people, produce some copy as good as Tarun’s, craft some print as vibrant as Aleks’ – and not resort to the safety of weird. It’s partially the overwhelming nature of the course as a whole, now that we are operating at nigh on full speed, that I am feeling quite frustrated with my work.
We have the tools to be good at advertising now, and that feels exciting, but I often feel weighed down by some of the briefs we are getting. I want to move past the 2 week briefs and focus on my book but I keep getting waylaid.
I haven’t even made a topical in AGES. It’s all very full on, which at the moment is resulting in everything I do feeling a bit rushed or undercooked. Bring on the day when I can sink into one of the sofas in the pit, beer in hand, 100 percent proud of my book, whatever I presented that morning, the beautiful reflection slide I made and the impactful scab that I put real time into.
The copy scores 62 in the Flesch Reading Ease test
