so there haven’t been any quality posts in a while (we’ll just egotisticaly assume there were any to begin with). and i believe it’s due to an influx of happenings rather than a lack of it. but nyeaaah it’s not stuff that deserves to be shared with the likes of kimberly de silva type stalkers.
last week, the karen wong invited me and a few other colleagues to guest assess some student work at TOA. not only was i super honoured, i was completely gobsmacked. and then smug. oh, if only those extra-chromosomed high school “educators” could see me now. the budak kurang siuman, judging student work. HA! so what if i almost failed sejarah? i’m livin’ it up now, baby!
so anyway. i was having a little struggle, internally, about the kind of comments to make. sure, we’re all there to provide an advertising perspective on creatives and messaging, but how much commercialism were we supposed to impose on them? do we kill their creativity now? comment everything to death?
i didn’t want to say much or contribute heavy killer ad vibes into the room. i think karen’s friend yen sie needed no help. i did disagree with the rather client-y comments though. jook’s “client may not like this” statement was still palatable. what really threw me off was the “LOGO NOT BIG ENOUGH” sermon.
you have to start with work you’re happy with, work that you like, and then dumb it down as a compromise to the usual client feedback. if you start with a logo covering up 80% of your creative, there’s no where to go from there ‘cept art direction hell.
it was a good session for me. it’s all very nice and easy to critique work not your own, but i’m sure a lot of us are, from time to time, guilty of straying too far off brief or not keeping communication clear enough or hiding the big message under too many layers. it was a useful reminder.
one of the students (my personal favourite) posed a question about copywriting for ATL and how it differs from writing for the web. never good on my feet, i gave a rather shoddy answer, which i’d now like to append.
it was hard for me to find a clear distinction between “ATL” and “online” simply because i haven’t been doing just above-the-line work. it completely slipped my goldfish memory that i’ve also lived through a fair bit of torturous BTL and event work. just like working in an online medium, you plan out touchpoints and try to work in some consumer interactivity (the starcom job in particular was pretty fun). you think of POSMs which can engage your audience to read, see, touch, think. it’s no different from creating banners for the web. ok, perhaps only in the fact that web banners are infinitely more annoying. so yeah, i was left stumped for 2 seconds wondering myself “what is the fucking difference?” the difference, i guess, is that you have to work that much harder to get your ad noticed. it’s getting noticed in the millions of pages of www versus being spotted in the 60-page dailies. it’s making use of any and all available real estate i.e. email, dashboards, titlebars, descriptors, RSS summaries, tweets etc. instead of planning just a headline, body and call-to-action in standard full-page spread.
don’t take it as god’s truth though. i’m still learning. :)