Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The glam' world of advertising


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Originally uploaded by stevenjude
I'm sitting in a pre-production meeting talking about who would be the best people to put together animatics before we hire people to produce spots.

Animatics are a bizarre thing. You put together a piece of a cartoon that you whizz the camera over and then ask people to imagine what it would be like as a complete spot.

Of course people always think that you're suggesting an animated spot and reject whatever you've done based on the 'fact' that beer (or whatever) shouldn't be advertised in a style that is primarily suited to children.

It skews everything - but as the bias is built in to every spot then the baseline is set and you can get a bit of a read on how things work.

The cartoon boards and production time costs a fortune... but then shooting something with CGI and a real director costs a fortune, a kidney and a first born.

Somehow today feels less glam' than I'd imagined it would. But we're getting there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whatever happened to just having a good idea, trusting it and doing it?

(extract from my new book 'MADVERTISING... or how to fall behind and lose friends in advertising...')

Anonymous said...

what happened was production and media inflation... when you're going to be spending upward of $100m you want somebody to show you a graph showing that it's going to work (probably)

Testing is why the ads got crap, but it's also why they still work. Such is life.

Anonymous said...

sounds like formula 1...