Category — Trends & News

Thought I’d pass on this tribute to reading in general and a recognition of the growing importance it’s taking on in all our lives these days, even as the news from the publishing and journalism worlds seems filled with only tales of gloom, doom and recession. It’s a heartwarming (for readers and writers) article by novelist Ann Patchett, in today’s Wall Street Journal.

One of the main takeaways from the piece is that despite what’s going on for those of us who work in creative professions, the basic human impulse to learn and to be delighted — whether from entertainment like books, movies and television shows or from ads, magazines and newspapers — isn’t going away. In fact, all of today’s latest technology — though it is no doubt causing massive, convulsive change in these industries at present — is reinforcing that impulse. It’s up to us to harness these technologies and find ways to adapt that will help us “ride the wave” into the future.

More on that in a future post — until then, you can read the full text of Ms. Patchett’s piece here.

How will copywriters work in the future, and how will they approach what they do as advertising dollars continue their push away from print and broadcast media into online environments?  This piece in yesterday’s New York Times gives us some clues, as it reports on new companies that are starting in response to the age-old question of what makes users click ads on websites. Money quote:

The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad’s success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad’s brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.

The question is, “how do we combine creative energy, which is a manual and sort of qualitative exercise, with the raw processing power of computing, which is all about quantitative data?” said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, the investment unit of Publicis Groupe.

“I think it’s clear that the traditional process of agencies is clearly not going to survive the digital era without significant changes to our approaches,” Mr. Hanlon said.

Read the whole story here.