Adweek Creative Seminar: Design or Advertising: Who Gives a Shit?
On monday afternoon at the Adweek Creative Seminar, Neil Powell, the ECD at MFP, gave a really good presentation on the blurring lines of advertising and design. Mr. Powell comes from a design background, but has continually resisted the “design box” that people always tried to put him in. He talked about the silo-mentality at agencies keeps design and advertising in artificial corners, and also mentioned how some advertising art directors feel threatened by graphic designers working on “traditional” ad mediums.
On the website for MFP, you’ll see alot of examples of work that straddles the border between advertising and design, yet remains really compelling.
He also showcased his excellent work for Rheingold beer as an example. (the website for Rheingold seems out of order.)
Seeing all the Rheingold stuff was interesting to me, because i can remember when that stuff was first running, I looked at it online and thought “cool, but it doesn’t look like advertising.” Now i’m happy to see i’m no longer the sort of dumbass who’d say something like that. Let’s quit trying to decide whether something counts as advertising and just do what works.
Update: Corrected agencies’ name.
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Repetition, especially to excess, is hard on...
I give a shit. And Neil’s a bad-ass. Nuff said.
LOL! Too funny. Conventions/seminars can be helpful but sometimes they can end up being collections of heads listening to (a) the obvious (b) the irrelevant (c) the no where near as smart as they think (d) could be smarter if they’d only listen to folks who they spent they other +360 days ignoring.
i wasn’t at this particular seminar, so i can’t say which category it fell into if any, but if it’s anything like most of the ones i’ve attended in the last 15 years, True might not be too far off.
and bad-ass or no, the bluring of advertising and design hasn’t been news for at least 10 years.
It may not be new, but its still news. Because it hasn’t been mastered. Hell, half the time good design in advertising is just plain forgotten (or ignored). Until its second nature, I think it qualifies as news worthy and needs to be drilled home.
I agree with True’s point (and admittedly didn’t read his last sentence carefully before posting my first comment). We don’t need to worry about categorizing as much as we need to worry about continuing to blur the lines. Call it whatever you want, but lets make good work the norm.
I’ll leave the opinions on seminars/conventions alone.