How the Bores Stole Creativity! (With apologies to Dr Seuss...)

Every soul down in adland liked ideas a lot...

But the bores, who often worked on top floors, did NOT!

The bores hated ideas! They hated creatives!

Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knew their motives.

It could be creativity filled them with fear.

It could be creativity was just too dear.

But I think that the most likely reason of all,

May have been that their brains were two sizes too small.

Alas, t’was the bores that held all of the power,

They cared not for great work; they charged by the hour!

The adland-ers loathed making ads safe and bland,

They knew that distinctiveness was how you built brands.

So they all read Contagious’ new publication,

Which was chock-full of insights and fresh inspiration.

Armed with clear precedents and apprised of new trends,

The adland-ers would show their top floor-dwelling friends.

‘But wait,’ said a strat, giving her pencil a chew,

‘We’d unlock this tension, if the bores read it, too.’

‘I like how you think,’ an account man weighed in,

‘But the chance of them reading it seems quite slim.’

‘Nonsense,’ a young writer was heard to retort,

‘They’ll read anything, if it’s labelled "report"!’

The young writer was right, the bores read it with glee,

And they read it again when they saw it was free.

And what happened then…?

Well…in adland they say

That the old bores’ small brains

Grew three sizes that day!

As soon as they learned that creativity hiked sales,

They wanted it in buckets, they wanted it in pails.

Mid ads were now cheugy, as the zoomers might say.

The Most Contagious Report had won out the day.

Grow your brain three sizes by downloading the free 2023 Most Contagious Report, here.

Campaign of the week / Code My Crown

Dove conducted research that showed 85% of Black gamers believe video games poorly represent textured hair. Meanwhile, nine out of 10 developers admit there is a lack of resources for coding natural/textured hair.

To improve the representation of Black hairstyles in games, Dove and agency Edelman, New York, partnered with the Open Source Afro Hair Library for the Code My Crown campaign — a free guide for coding Black hairstyles in video games.

Code My Crown is an instructional guide for coders and developers to code more true-to-life depictions of Black hairstyles in 3D. In support of the initiative, a team of Black 3D artists, animators, programmers and academics developed 15 original hair designs that include step-by-step instructions, 360-degree photo mapping, and cultural insights so that developers can better model textured hair and styles in video games. Contagious.

Wrap this / Spotify's annual data dump

On 29 November Spotify unveiled its annual listening data feature, Wrapped. According to the digital music platform, the most-streamed song of the year in the world is Flowers by Miley Cyrus, with more than 1.6 billion streams. Kill Bill by SZA was second, and As It Was by Harry Styles came third.

Spotify launched the idea as 'Year in Review' in 2013; the concept transformed a stack of unmined streaming data into an aesthetically pleasing, hyper-personalised visual for users to enjoy and share.

The ‘Year in Review’ became ‘Wrapped’ in 2016, and every year Spotify has introduced new features, such as listening personality types and ‘Sound Towns’ (matching users to a city where the most people listen to the same artists). The data stories have gone from a marketing campaign to an external microsite to today’s in-app minifilm, presented as a series of Instagram Stories-style slides with dynamic graphics and music from users’ top artists of the year.?

Over time, Wrapped has experienced ‘exponential growth’, Louisa Ferguson, Spotify’s global head of marketing experience, told the Guardian. The moment it goes live, the team pops champagne, ‘Then, it’s immediately back to our laptops,’ she adds.

They might keep the champagne on ice this year, given that the company is laying off 17% of its staff in a bid to reduce costs. The Guardian.

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