Banksy
I spent my Sunday afternoon skimming some of my old(ish) marketing books, particularly one of my favorite sections from the The Adweek Copywriting Handbook about assumed constraints in history. There was so much assimilation to the challenges in social media I just had to blog about it.
A few examples from the section:
“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.“
Ferdinand Foch, commander of Allied Armies in World War 1.
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.“
Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 1929.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.“
Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, 1943.
“So we went to Atari and said ‘Hey we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said ‘No.‘ ” This was related by Steve Jobs of Apple, on his attempts in the mid-1970s to get Atari interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer.
“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research report says America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.”
In response to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields Cookies.
And my favorite… “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, 1981.
Those of us with a vocation for social media must never let assumptions take hold of our our creative potential, since the philosophy of this industry really has no limits. We must go balls to the wall. If Carrot’s ability to help clients was limited by what ‘was possible’, we would be no different than these large-house agencies now offering “social media” as service offering (#burn). We’re a full-service new media agency, all of it done in house. We work hard to stay on the pulse of what’s new and has that ‘social hotness’. We encourage our developers to have pet projects to learn the newest technologies through our Carrot Labs program. We build on platforms and APIs that won’t be popular for another six months. All this and more are reasons why we can service our clients disregarding any perceived limitations. There is allllways a way to work around problems or optimize a current digital strategy.
Unfortunately, clients often feel constrained by these perceived limits. It is the responsibility of the agency to continuously introduce new features and platforms to help break down the walls of assumed constraints. The creative challenge lies within the ancillary restrictions (budget, timing, etc…), while coming up with the creative becomes the secondary objective. Obviously concepts like augmented reality or QR codes might be more costly and timely, so it’s up to us as an agency to customize the creative process to stay innovative, while keeping the limitations of the client in mind.
Oftentimes, clients are quick to assume that certain platforms or features wouldn’t apply to their product or business. Be it because they’re not familiar with the platform yet or they still haven’t found the brands “voice” yet, whatever the reason, NEW can be a scary word. That is why our creative team is spending time thinking about concepts for clients we haven’t even signed yet (or in a few cases, clients we don’t even have a contact for!) Our motto is “always be ready, be one step ahead”.
Naturally in hindsight, it’s amazing that those historical constraints were ever considered. Carrot Creative is constantly reminded that whenever we hear “you think so?” or “is that even possible?”, it’s just a reminder that we’re on the right path. It’s when we look past these limitations that we find brilliance.
