Tightness around #onedirection and other Google Firestarters

I had the pleasure of attending ‪@googledownunder #Firestarters yesterday at their inspiringly impressive harbourside offices. For those not in the know, Firestarters is a series of quarterly events for the planning, advertising and media community hosted by Google and curated by Neil Perkin. Here’s a few key takeouts from the keynote presentations.

Advertising, as we know it, creates more problems than it solves. As an industry we create problems, often based on people’s insecurities that a product would arguably solve. Then we claim that planners and creative are some of the smartest problem solvers out there, and that we deserve a seat at a table when decisions are made.

I am sorry but as an industry we produce monstrous amounts of toxic bullshit straight into people’s faces. With any sensible metric advertising is an epic failure, dare I say crime against our freedom of space. Advertising clearly doesn't deserve anyone’s attention. Design thinking, on the other hand, is used to solve problems for the greater good of humanity. That's the main difference between service design and advertising. Luckily ‘Design Thinking’ is rapidly taking over the Strategy Planning space on agencies, pushing Planners into solving problems with means other than communications.

The smartest thing I heard all evening might have been, ‘do anything other than say something, or propose’. Proposition is the most overrated concept in the whole industry. It’s done the whole loop from ‘Single Minded Proposition’ to ‘Emotional Selling Proposition’ and back into ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ without actually evolving at all.

The fact is that the more insecure and junior the creative are the tighter the brief needs to be. On one extreme there is a team that can’t really work until they have a ‘Single Minded Communications Proposition’.

As a closing argument I’d like to quote Google’s @Beautyskew by saying, “Tightness around #onedirection is HARD.”