Filter Yourself but Don't Filter Yourself

Do or do not there is no try.

Sorry for the Star Wars reference, but my little green Hero's message is incredibly true for us in Advertising.

You need to learn how to filter out the mediocre without actually filtering your ideas.

Make sense?

Advertising is about confusingly awkward success and completely beautiful, utter failure.

What it shouldn't be about is safety.

Example from portfolio school.

I did an ad for Tropicana. It was extremely well-written. A clever headline, nice friendly art direction, incredibly safe concept: All Natural. 

For the most part everyone liked the ad, they didn't have any complaints about it. Then one day a teacher of mine looked at it and said; "Yeah, so?"

And that's when I realized it was mediocre. It was a safe idea. It didn't change anyone's mind, it didn't make anyone think differently. No one was going to see that ad and say, "Hey, I'm going to buy more orange juice from Tropicana." Because the only thing it did was confirm what everyone already new about Tropicana, that it's all natural. And that's when I realized I should have immediately filtered this out.

On the flip side, I did a campaign for Wii Fit. It was funny, everyone laughed, but for the most part I looked at it and saw the two big rules I was breaking: I was a student doing a Parody of another products campaign and my headlines were puns.

You know what though? Every creative director who saw my portfolio said this Ad was the reason he/she wanted to interview me. Yes I wrote puns, yes I parodied another campaign, but I went all out with it. I didn't just tiptoe up to the line. I dashed across it and kept running until I was out of breath.

And that campaign was a mystifying, completely unexpected success.

You see the things you need to do in portfolio school, is learn how to filter out the safe idea without filtering out the really bad ideas or the really good ideas. Because the two extremes are where good advertising lives. 

If you can understand that.