Last night I randomly opened the Age of Conversation/2 and landed on Ernie Mosteller’s “The New Creatives Get It” article. Wow. Here’s his take on the two fundamental differences between new and old creative, which I think really gets to the heart of the creative sea change.
- Information first, entertainment second. It used to be that creative led with entertainment to get our attention, and then served up product information. Today people are looking for information, so effective creative leads with information people are looking — even if they’re looking for entertainment.
- Elegant complexity vs. clever simplicity. Old advertising focused on simplicity. But, Ernie warns, “on the Web simplicity fails. Miserably.” Today great creative is telling an intricate story, but in ways that are interesting, fun and compelling to prospects.
Is you organization in the new creative mindset — or the old?
(I love the line on Ernie’s blog: “The medium is the audience.” Oh yeah.)
Thanks for playing along with the meme and pointing us to Ernie’s essay in Age of Conversation 2.
Nice post. Thank you for the info. Keep it up.
Rebecca Corliss’ (@repcor) new marketing music video couldn’t be more well-timed with this post to show us that education and entertainment are NOT either/or propositions, nor even a chicken and egg situation. It’s possible to do both simultaneously.
http://twurl.nl/bq0k8g
(hat tip Doug Haslam for referencing this post)
Morriss,
Great point — and thanks for heads up on Rebecca’s video.