Inspiration from Above

Check out these beautiful tree house designs.

Art and Copy

Check out the trailer for Doug Pray's (Hype) new film, Art and Copy. It's packed full of powerful insights from some of advertising's most influential leaders.

"The frightening, most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of these thoughts come from - and especially, you don't have any idea about where they're going to come from tomorrow."

What is Your Team's Body/Mind Ratio?

I'm a reflector.

I spend a lot of time analyzing past projects and what made them a success - or how they could have been improved. And it's becoming apparent that most projects I've worked on over the past 12 years had dismal Body/Mind Ratios.

Here's what I mean...In our industry, we throw teams together very quickly once a project is in motion. Everyone knows their role and how they fit into the team's dynamic. Typically, the strategist and account people whip up a brief, call the creatives into a room and hand it off, the creatives disappear for a while and then return (usually with not nearly enough time spent on it) with some ideas.

The problem with this process is that not nearly enough time is spent TOGETHER thinking. If you have 10 people on your team, that's 10 minds that need to be utilized in both strategic and creative capacities. More often than not, we use bodies to run the jobs, but don't respect the minds of all team members. It's not like the team's made up of people from different industries - we're all marketers. We live it and breathe it everyday. Not to mention we're all consumers who have a natural ability to judge brand experiences.

Some of the coolest ideas that I've been a part of have come from account people, production people and even interns. We need to get out of our silos and trust each other. For the good of our agencies and our clients.