One of the wonderful things about advertising is that each creative has his/her own process for coming up with ideas.
Mine is very unpopular.
In fact, most people I’ve worked with hate it. But, it’s how my mind works and it works fine for me.
Specifically, here’s the part they hate:
When I get or hear an idea, my mind instantly tries to find as many flaws with it as possible. I think of an idea as a ship. My goal is to poke as many holes in the ship as possible to see …

This week’s post is a ‘Re-Tweet’ of sorts… I read this article written by Lance Freeman yesterday, and it’s powerful stuff. Although I haven’t been to Australia or New Zealand, I have lived, worked, and traveled all over Europe, Canada & Asia, and he’s got it pretty much right on….

Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada …

On the flight back from Miami I sat next to this guy who looked like a nerd-hippie hybrid camp counselor / Patagonia cashier. Earth toned clothing from head to toe (sensibly comfortable, of course), pants with a zillion pockets on them, glasses, 3-day stubble, and all weather socks visible under hiking sandals. I just remember looking at his feet and saying to myself “Socks with sandals. Dammmm.”
I was wearing my lightweight blue Triumph racing jacket. This guy leans over to me and asks “So do you like Triumph bikes, or …

This post will be a little shorter than usual this week because I’m doing a last-minute “Industry Hero” speaking / teaching gig in Miami. One of my old friends from the Miami Ad School (who books the guest ‘heroes’ here) asked me last Thursday if I could do it, and I was on the plane Saturday. I didn’t really need a reason to take a week long trip to Miami.
One of the requirements of accepting the gig is giving the students a brief to work on, then critiquing their work …

I just started my first improv classes this past weekend. Not as bad as i thought it would be. It was full of lots of business folks that “wanted to get better at presenting to clients.” I have to admit that I’m doing the class for that very same reason but also because I want to try something new creatively and to have a fun activity on the side.
There are several aspects of improv that actually carry over into advertising and vice versa like coming up ideas quickly, making people …

That commercial just took a whole different meaning. Please watch carefully. (Video Embedded)

- Julissa Ortiz

I love to exercise. It makes me feel like all of the stressful & genuinely pointless activities I have to experience on a daily basis get washed away in a river of sweat & bad house music (that’s the club’s sound system). Speaking of the club… the general style & swagger of ‘gym people’ is pretty interesting. It reminds me a little bit of how I feel when I walk around in Wal-Mart & observe people, except these people are about 100-200 pounds lighter & generally have all of their …

Usually when I contemplate organized religion I think about the countless number of wars fought & innocent people killed in the name of God. I think about how comforting and convenient it must be to have a book to turn to for all of the answers to life’s most troubling & obtuse questions, rather than come to the horrifying conclusion that we’re all just staring into a void. I think about the guilt and shame, the distrust and repression of our animal instincts that it instills in impressionable minds. But …

I figured gnomes would be a great way to make some extra money. Who better to run my lemonade stand than a bunch of diminutive old dudes. Especially when all they want in exchange is a box of Hostess Twinkies. I rushed to the corner store for some cream and ran into an old classmate. We went to an Olive Garden once and ended up washing dishes because he wanted to start a fight with Mookie Wilson. So as I was leaving with my cream, he asked if I was …

Lately my team and myself have been battling the clients and account people on this subject. We created this big idea. It was awesome. Multi-platform. Digital but not a website. Involved and consumer driven. Perfect in our eyes. But the client was scared. Scared it might not catch on. The legal dept. was scared it might scare people. Everyone was fucking scared. So they’ve been slowly reducing it to the parts that they like: the tactics.  Pulling bits and pieces from the big idea and wanting to execute those. Slowly …