SCABs

Life in the balance – By @angus_crombie and inspired by @davetrott

Angus Crombie

By Angus Crombie

 

Life in the balance 

As the year moves on and the work load piles up, keeping your life in the balance is getting even more difficult. Smart time management is more important than ever.
We just finished the last case study of award season and now it’s time for our last and most crucial sprint up until portfolio day.
My partner and I have set the target of four new books in 12 weeks, a target that’s going to require more work than any of awards we’ve entered.
Whilst this is going to take almost all our time, I feel strongly that unless I regularly keep doing the things I love, seeing my friends and collecting dots (getting outside the ad bubble that SCA can become), the time I set aside for working will become less productive than if spent every hour trying to work.
I find that running ideas past my friends, whose main relationship with advertising is being annoyed by being made to wait five extra seconds to watch a youtube video, I get some of the most helpful advice, because when it comes down to it this is the mind-frame of the consumer who we’re trying to sell to.
They don’t know anything about advertising, they generally don’t like advertising, so if I’m able to get even a slight show of interest from them instead of ‘what the fuck you talking about mate’ the ideas probably have some potential to be effective.
A technique I remember Dave Trott speaking about in ‘Predatory Thinking’ is that every time he gets a new client he gets his team to write everything they know about the brand, before they start doing any research, because this is the only time they will be in the mindset of the consumer.
This is something that really resonated with me and can be really helpful in finding human insights from a consumer’s point of view, before starting to pick the brand apart and find a new angle for the brand.
At this stage in the year where our only focus is our book, strategy is king which means a lot of brand research needs to be done, but taking a step out of the bubble for a couple hours here and there, letting the problems sink in while having a pint, can be some of the most productive hours of week.
As I’ve sounded a bit of a suck up to Dave Trott, here’s a poster for Imodium I did at the start of the year.
got the trotts

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