Creativity means taking the bad with the good.

Nice post on Dave Trott's blog today, in which he tells a good story about an unpredictable and enigmatic old school british ad guy I've never heard of. Nice story though.

Creatives can be unpredicatable and enigmatic. Creativity is messy and non-linear. Messy and non-linear is what allows creativity to happen. So you often end up working with unpredictable, enigmatic, inconsistent, messy people. I personally like that.

Obviously, project managers don't. They want order and predictability and they do everything they can to herd the cats and get them to produce 'on time and on budget'.

Here's a nice quote from Dave Trott's post:

The good news about creativity is that it stands out.

It’s different, unusual, and sometimes it can be unsettling.

The bad news about creativity is that it stands out.

It’s different, unusual, and sometimes it can be unsettling.

But isn’t that the point?

The death of the real estate industry as we know it.

15 or so years into this internet thing, it's not difficult to see that entire fields of expertise have been utterly transformed by the digitization and commodification of information that was once rare or hard to access and therefore valuable. The real estate industry is no exception. It WILL be transformed. You can't stop the internet. Ask the immensely wealthy and powerful multinational record companies how trying to stop it is working out for them. Then ask Apple whether applying forward thinking, redefining the retail space for music has added to their bottom line.

Will all realtors be put out of work? No. There are some services they provide that are truly valuable and worth paying for. There are people who need the assistance and guidance realtors offer. So good realtors who provide needed services will survive the coming transformation. The others will find new careers. But some services that realtors provide are simply busy work, padding to help justify the fees. Realtors also provide some services that can easily be done over the internet, without human intervention. Of course most of them won't admit that. Their goal is to make every last minuscule item on their list of services seem indispensable.

The real estate industry is fundamentally flawed. Someone with a little vision, technical savvy, and a lot of capital will come along very soon and start hacking away at its roots. Look soon for TV, newspaper and web ads touting no commission and a menu of for fee services.

Hell, if I was well-capitalized I'd be doing this myself. It's only a matter of time.

I'm going to read some Foucault now.

Finally, Art Follows Advertising

As much as I hate to admit it, advertising is the ultimate copycat game. We steal ideas from everywhere.

A lot of what we do as creatives is adapt things we pick up from the world around us and gently massage them -- or bash them with a sledgehammer in my case -- until they solve the business problem we're faced with. It's not very often that are ads truely uniquely creative, or even half interesting for that matter. But there are gems on rare occasions.

So it's awesome to see 'art' take a little inspiration from advertising, rather than the other way around for once. This new video from OK Go takes some strong cues from Honda's amazing 'Cog' ad (which I've mentioned on this blog before). Obviously the notion of a Rube Goldberg machine is as old as, well, Rube Goldberg, but the similarities are strong enough that I don't think director James Frost was working in a vacuum on this one.



And for comparison, Honda's 'Cog'