Announcing our Winter 2010 Art Interns
PeakBiety is pleased to welcome three art interns this quarter.
Josue Franco is a senior in Graphic Design at the Art Institute of Tampa, and compares himself to an octopus: “Ever changing, shifting and wafting in accordance to its environment, the octopus has a great ability to adapt to its surroundings meticulously. My designs are flexible and adaptable to various approaches, media and styles.”
Alejandro Valdivia is also a senior in Graphic Design at the Art Institute. Alejandro describes himself as a creative problem solver, decision maker and team player, and has several years of freelance experience. He says “I’m a firm believer that simplicity is key. The attention span of the target audience is limited and finding a way through the maze of advertising that is already out there is challenging to say the least. That is why, usually, less is more.”
Nick Brower graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Advertising Design in November. He is eager to gain real-world industry experience and strives to create ads that not only solve problems but are also works of art.
Tampa Bay Water renews partnership with PeakBiety
TAMPA, FL – PeakBiety branding + advertising® will continue to serve as a creative communications partner with Tampa Bay Water. PeakBiety has assisted the water supply utility with various internal and external communications efforts since 2007.
“We have enjoyed a very pleasant partnership with Tampa Bay Water for the past three years,” said Glen Peak, president of PeakBiety. “We hope to continue to assist Tampa Bay Water in whatever ways we can, as they work to meet their on-going commitment of providing high-quality drinking water to the Tampa Bay region.”
Tampa Bay Water was developed as an agency to serve six different governments in west-central Florida to help manage, allocate and improve drinking water resources in the region. The agency, created in 1998, serves Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties and the cities of New Port Richey, St. Petersburg and Tampa.
PeakBiety is one of the few agencies in Tampa Bay to meet the strict requirements for membership in the prestigious American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As). For more information, call Glen Peak at PeakBiety branding + advertising, 813-227-8006, extension 114, e-mail gpeak@peakbiety.com or visit PeakBiety.com.
Marketers Need To Better Understand Creativity
by Dr. Bob Deutsch, Brain Sells via The Inspiration Room
It can be said that creative advertising is like brain surgery. When advertising is artfully done it cures people of the status quo by activating neural circuitry.
To be creative artfully requires a dynamic mix of imagination and understanding of how the world might work. This is not a matter of being correct, but rather a matter of making the audience wonder, provoking a self-referring reverie that elicits an expanded idea of ones-self and how the world works. As a result, we see anew.
This, of course, flies in the face of traditional methods of measuring advertising effectiveness. It also runs counter to today’s corporate metric-mania and near incapacity to conceive bold strategies and innovations.
Insight is the coin of business success. While numbers can provide a means for measurement they cannot “embody,” or suggest, meaningful insights into the human experience. At worst, numbers provide an excuse to abdicate decision-making responsibility while placating executives desirous of propagating ‘business-as-usual’.
What’s Needed for Creativity?
Creativity requires two things: focused subjectivity and doubt. One needs the ability to focus on something long enough to conjure possibilities not overtly manifest in the moment, along with an acknowledgement that not everything is known.
The unknown is fertile soil from which a world of wonders can be conjured. Here mere facts and data are circumvented in a non-linear, symbolic, not wholly rational way. The mind plays a cognitive trick on itself by creating metaphor. “I call what I don’t know by name something that I do know.”
This mental leap-frogging allows the creative impulse to extrapolate unknown scenarios. It moves from the past, which instigates an inkling that lays the basis for the beginning of a new narrative, to a springboard that weaves a web of new patterns and associations, to an insinuation of the future kicked up by metaphor.
This process produces, from the outside-objective point of view, what can be perceived as seemingly off-topic meanderings. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
An Open Playfulness without NO
What is in operation is a kind of playfulness with ideas that is essential for creativity. This toying around contains a bunch of NOs—NO analyzing (yet), NO doubts. NO pressure to conform. NO pretense. NO restrictions. NO judgment.
Those who are playfully creative possess a curiosity given backbone by their expectation that they will find what they seek even though they don’t know what exactly that is.
People from many walks of life actually live this way: writer, designer, scientist, parent, small business owner. All share a belief in a beautiful human quality—Directed Serendipity.
Just listen to them, “I have a plan which allows me to begin to move forward, and in doing so I learn about myself such that when other doors open I sometimes walk in. But you have to have a plan to switch from the plan.”
Another version, “You go down a path and things evolve. By adapting to randomness you shape, but do not control, your end point. You define your end point by your own reaction to it: Ah, ha! I like this. This is for me. This is me.”
Buffeted by a Directed Serendipity
People who allow themselves to be buffeted by directed serendipity live at the creative point of becoming—who they are and what they do are the same. They don’t know—and don’t need to know—the end. They are open to the process as process, and are gregarious with their fledgling notions. They share ideas before they are fully formed. They want camaraderie. They want feedback. They’re excited.
In a state of directed serendipity you first focus on problem structuring rather than problem solving, seeking to understand rather than to explain. You try to comprehend meaning from the inside out, in its unfolding. You are not approaching the world from an intellectual stance.
Einstein, in a 1945 speech at Princeton, gave elegant voice to this perspective:
“Words or data, as they are logically written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my primary mechanism of thought. The psychical entities that do seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and images. These elements themselves are visual and muscular in type, originating in the intuition of the body.”
The creative communicator is an alchemist of thought, attending to the reasoning of emotion. That’s what they should get paid for. That’s what they need to have time to do. In their natural habitat, they are artful image-gatherers, whose only enemies are cynicism, number crunchers and arbitrary tinkering.
Corporate executives should embrace their creatives and let them attack the status quo. Then CEO, CMO and their courtiers can sit back and count the profits.
A Traditional Agency
by Glen Peak
In a recent blog article, What Kind of Agency Are You, an ad agency owner observed his struggle with how to “categorize” his agency, e.g. digital, creative, branding, etc. Lots of varied services and talent no doubt led him to describe such a struggle.
I was struck by the author’s observation that they never use the word “traditional” to describe the agency and wondered aloud if even “traditional” agencies use the word. Well…we don’t currently put the word “traditional” in the descriptors of our 4A’s advertising agency but this discussion prompts me to think that we should proudly include this word in our messaging. Perhaps someone would actually ask: what does the “traditional” descriptor mean?
I don’t believe that many of today’s clients understand that ad agencies were once considered to be true marketing partners (a term that has since been beat to death and misused). Better agencies were involved in high level marketing strategy, new product development, market research, package design, media planning and buying, collateral material (yes… even that stuff), promotional programs and, oh yes, advertising that worked. In short, the agency was viewed as a business-building partner and expected to bring ideas to the table that could make a difference regardless of the medium. To achieve that, agencies had to have the marketing capability and passion to understand the client’s business as well as examine trends.
If “traditional” is about being generally recognized, customary and even long-standing, I really want to incorporate this label into the characterization of our agency.
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