Yet, there was a time when we actually did some neat innovative stuff. Who needs research when you can just let those other folks do it. It’s like we’re ducktaped to the side of a manic rhino lumbering through a swamp (Boy, I hope he knows where he’s going!). I read that and I swear I could hear a whirring sound as all those fur traders buried on Mount Royal started spinning in their tombs. I once saw a piece in the Montreal Gazette during a cold spell which showed us how to put plastic bags in our shoes to keep warm on cold days (an article taken from a Fort Lauderdale newspaper). And that tingling feeling in your fingers isn’t stroke onset, it’s frostbite. We have to get a handle on where we are, not who we are. They have to be solved by addressing our proximity problems. We’ll just watch them.Īll these problems with our low productivity relative to the U.S. We’ll take their mediocre lives over our mediocre lives even if they don’t ring exactly true. Business learned this ages ago.īut it’s not just business. We don’t even bother inventing anything any more because they’ll do it sooner or later down there and we can just copy or borrow. We’ve faced south so long now our asses are frozen solid. Therefore, agencies like Taxi, Grip, Palmer Jarvis DDB and others of great creative force, are in constant danger from their own success, because success attracts big money, and with it comes technology which breeds systems which are enclosures and enclosures breed complacency. When the best of these creatives set up their own agencies they prosper for a time but inevitably become so centralized that they themselves are forced to adopt the technological additives which eventually assure their downfall. Their move to the centre ultimately deprives them of their power which is the individuality of the perimeter, in terms of creative thought. My argument is that it is the feral, free range thinkers, the creatives, and misfits, perennial dwellers of the perimeters of power, whose talents are lost here. How similar this sounds to the feral advertising team observers distanced from the power structures of their agency milieu but able to observe, being away from the every day systems, but firmly within the environment of their audiences and fully capable of reaching them persuasively. Each could therefore portray immense subtlety in theatrical characterization, whether for instance in the modes of expression and colloquialism between the different classes or in overt manifestations of real human emotion “what is said is not necessarily being what is felt, which nonetheless is acutely revealed”. Both Mozart and Da Ponte were essentially outsiders, never fully accepted by the establishment yet their peripatetic lives, together with their current situation on the fringes of society, had furnished them with superb powers to observe, accumulate and interpret the infinite varieties of human behaviour. Jane Glover, in Mozart’s Women, explains how the extraordinary creative team of Mozart and Da Ponte worked together so productively. Perhaps we can see something of Innis’ later observation on the power of the periphery to generate perspective if we consider the operas of Wolfgang Mozart and his lyricist Da Ponte. We can see this in the sixties in advertising when the Bernbachian approach moved from the outsider Jewish milieu into mainstream New York advertising and dislodged the incumbent Presbyterians, the chosen ones themselves then eventually dislodged by the advertising technocrats and their acolytes, the planners. Innis showed how civilizations moved into being before ideas from the perimeter began competing, overcoming a balance and these ideas then becoming a monopolistic force. Whether we talk of rebel groups forming in the mountains, religious sects taking over mainstream religious thought or even the fact that Toronto seldom develops its own talent, instead attracting it from the perimeters then blending it into its normality, we can picture original thinking starting to build, moving to the centre becoming a monopoly and finally consuming itself. My argument against the centralizing use of planners for developing creative thought can be placed within the Harold Innis idea of the periphery being the source of ideas which can offer original perspectives. Graham’s memorial service will be held at the Mount Allison University Chapel, in Sackville, NB on 26 January 2020, at 1:00 PM Here are some of his words that he shared with me. Graham was semi-retired when I met him and we had many conversations on various topics over the years. With no commute or regular hours I could cycle during the day and drop by the local café for a chat. I met Graham as I was beginning my freelance career in 2003. The only person to ever have guest blogged here is Graham Watt, a friend for almost 20 years.
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