In Damn Good Advice, the legendary offers some blunt counsel on how to create big ideas. Often billed as the original Mad Man, George Lois could also be called advertising’s original Bad Boy. Starting in the '50s, he dished up in-your-face campaigns for the likes of VW, the Four Seasons restaurant, and MTV. Never one to pull a punch, the adman channeled his brash attitude into some of the most provocative images of the 1960s, including now-legendary Esquire covers that took on issues of race, the Vietnam War, religion, and feminism.
Lois takes the same no-holds-barred approach to sharing his own pearly wisdom. In Damn Good Advice (for People with Talent!), the king of the one-liner offers some inspiring pointers on how to create--and sell--the big ideas while holding fast to some moral integrity. Here are some.
1. My first commandment: The word comes first, then the visual.
When young art directors ask me to reveal my "formula" for creating advertising, I answer … start with the word! This advice, with a biblical reference, is carved in stone--my first commandment. Art directors, presumed by many to be illiterate, are expected to think visually--and most do. They sift through magazines to find visuals, however disjointed and inappropriate, to help them "get started." Most art directors, unfortunately, do not sit and try to write the idea: They usually wait with their thumbs up their ass for a writer to furnish the words, which usually are not visually pregnant. By contrast, a handful of great art directors are authors of some of the finest headlines in advertising--or they work intimately with gifted writers as they conjure concepts together. Conversely, even when a writer works on his own, his words must lend themselves to visual excitement--because a big campaign idea can only be expressed in words that absolutely bristle with visual possibilities, leading to words and visual imagery working in perfect synergy.
If you’re an art director, heed my words: Each ad, TV spot, and campaign is in your hands--it’s your baby. If you’re a copywriter, on the other hand, you must work with a talented visual communicator!
2. "I’m sorry I could not have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time" --Abraham Lincoln
Not too long after U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the iconic wartime Gettysburg Address of 1863 in under three minutes and in just 10 sentences (272 words he had written and rewritten and agonized over), he wrote a long letter, in miniscule handwriting to a friend. The apology above, that he didn’t have the time to contemplate, correct, and edit his letter, is the most lucid lesson in good writing I’ve ever read. Keep it short, informative, concise, and literary, where every single word counts. But remember: It’s not how short you make it; it’s how you make it short.
Think long. Write short.
3. A trend is always a trap.
Because advertising and marketing is an art, the solution to each new problem or challenge should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not with the nervous borrowings of other people’s mediocrities. That’s precisely what "trends" are--a search for something "safe"--and why a reliance on them leads to oblivion. At the start of each new year, as the press scans the horizon for newsworthy departures from the past, I’m usually asked by reporters from America’s news weeklies: "What do you think the trends in advertising will be in the coming year?" My answer is always identical to what I said the previous year: "Beats the shit out of me. I’ll know it when I do it." Trends can tyrannize; trends are traps. In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.
You can buy it here.