In the interest of full-disclosure and quaint notions of integrity (journalistic or otherwise) until February I was on the payroll as the Executive Creative Director of Digitas' flagship Boston office. I left in part because of the thinking exemplified by today's Times article. It would be great for business if advertising were mechanized, formula-ized and otherwise-ized to always lead to the desired results. Then creative people could be replaced by off-shore programmers or software. This dream is some version of that old apocrypha that says if you give a million monkeys a millio
n typewriters they will eventually scribe the compleat works of Shakespeare, or at least Rod McKuen.
I don't think the world is that linear. According to research conducted by Komar and Melamid, this is America's favorite painting. You see, Americans like blue and George Washington and wildlife. Here's the thing though, it sucks. Read more here:
http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.htmlKomar and Melamid's original article can be found here:
http://www.diacenter.org/km/nation.html
n typewriters they will eventually scribe the compleat works of Shakespeare, or at least Rod McKuen.
2 comments:
George: You gotta admire David Kenny, though. He's worth how many hundreds of millions peddling the aged idea of Science Controlling Art? The thing is, if you read Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach," or even Gossage, you see there is plenty of science in art. But science doesn't control art. And darned if that doesn't piss off so many analysts and marketers and others who haven't the patience to learn or appreciate art as deeply as they do numbers. But can dream, can't they?
There's nothing bad you can say about revenue.
I just hate boring work that masquerades as creative. And I despise those who think there is some formula for creative. I actually believe that sort thinking is behind our demise as a culture. It seems everything we watch, read, vote for has been measured, calculated and meted out to appeal broadly and what we're left with instead is a great beige lump. Barack is beige, Hilary is beige, Brownback is beige and so on. The science of TV news (ratings) says we have to focus on Lohan rather than Sudan. Science has cut off our balls. Though you're right, Tim. David is fucking rich as Croesus.
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