Week 5: TED Talks and Briefings

This was a slow week at work, which I think is a thing in advertising. I had a few of them as an intern, and I have an occasional one now. I think this is especially true when you are in an entry-level position, some projects just need a higher pay-grade so you move in and out of them for the areas in which you're relevant. At least that is what happens to me.

Anyways, this came up during my internship. One of my mentors brought it up with me; he said something like: "I don't always give you something to do, because I think this job requires a lot of personal initiative. You have to find ways to be productive on your own." (That's 100% paraphrased, but it gets the idea of it)

The real foundation idea, I think, is autonomy. As an account planner you get a lot of freedom and trust, or autonomy, and so I think an intangible job skill is learning how to use it productively. This week, I decided to use my free time to focus on another intangible job skill-- leading inspiring presentations.

As I've mentioned before, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can lead a more effective creative briefing. One of my concerns is, "How can I become more inspiring?" An inspiring briefing is a scary goal to set and go for, because it isn't a measurable goal. Like I said, it's an intangible. So I was left with the problem of how I can improve. My solution? I started watching TED Talks, specifically, the most popular TED Talks of all time.

And, conclusion: they are awesome, and they are great benchmarks to try and shoot for. But, so far, I haven't seen a strong pattern emerge. These people all crafted incredibly inspiring briefings, but they all did them in different ways. This is both promising and disappointing. Disappointing because it would be so much easier if there was an easy equation to implement; promising because that leaves the door open for any idea to be made into an inspiring presentation (it doesn't have to fit the mold).

The key, I think, is that each idea needs to be presented differently. Finding the right way to present an insight is as important as finding the right insight. Sometimes an idea (or a creative team) is good enough to survive a sub-par brief, but the role of the account planner is to remove that margin of error as best we can.

-Aaron