Stay curious.
A marker of creativity and relevance is to stay curious, that’s where OSINT kicks in. But how is OSINT relevant to branding, and what exactly is OSINT you may ask?
OSINT stands for Open-Source Intelligence, and it’s the art (and science) of gathering and analyzing information that’s publicly available, not hacked or stolen.
Today, I sat down to generate some random new ideas. The realisation that I can sketch a pretty dodgy-looking drawing, feed it into an AI with some instructions, and get a decent-looking visual representation of my idea is incredibly liberating.
Stock photography made us lazy.
Before it became so commonly used, an art director would render up their concept, and once approved by the client, they would hire a photographer, stylists, models, makeup artists, and props. The salon came stock photography, making the process more accessible and getting an idea into print cheaper.
Budget constraints meant that photographers were only needed for big budget or custom jobs, so rendering concepts for approval became less of a requirement.
Here’s where the beauty of AI comes in. As a creative, once again, I can still storyboard or sketch my ideas and commission someone to bring them to life – that someone is AI. AI is the amplifier.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. A foundational truth for running a business, but why the obsession with stats in creativity? Stats tell a story but how accurate is that story?
Creativity is hard to measure and all along, there’s a constant miscommunication between finance and creativity, finance has won the round of requiring stats but that’s only because measuring creativity is HARD.
An underrated skill in advertising is understanding human nature. Or more precisley, understanding and predicting HOW people make choices to which will positively impact the conversion and ROI on any advertising campaign.
With so many tools now allowing you to create social posts, flyers or any graphic, I’ve noticed a trend. You get your comms done quickly and if you’re lucky you can be one of th first to use a cool template, but the ability to tweak and craft things is not available. things like tweaking the spake between certain characters that are known to have kerning issues, is not available as well as sublet tweaking of images.
That’s okay, it will be the one thing that differentiates a template from a bespoke creation. Apps like Adobe will be fighting for their space as industry leaders and I’ve noticed how much freedom their apps give, but some people are unaware of those subtleties, they just know that the bespoke design ‘feels’ better and they don’t know why.
This year I’ve told myself that I’m going to be bad at stuff I want to do, because everyone starts off with cringe and awfully bad stuff when it’s something they’ve never done before – a beginner has to start somewhere right?
I was inwardly criticising the usual flood of AI slop in my timeline when I realised how most people are really bad at it right now (they don’t know because it’s the first time that they can so effortlessly create visuals) but where will they be in a year?
Bad AI is okay as a starting point, because it will get better, the trick is to be better at it now in order to be the best later.
AI gives you more control, no more wait times, just input a prompt and viola! Everything that previously took a team to handle is now available.
But wait a mo… you’re in sales, you’re not a one-man startup. You want to SELL, that’s what gets you excited about your work, the stuff above is really NOT your job!
So instead of your sales team being out there getting sales, they’re doing a bunch of other stuff and trusting that AI is doing it right first time.
Yesterday I spent about 30 mins updating proposals for sales, yes, they have the template and they can update it themselves, but they know that I can do a much better job.
We all have enough tools we use to make our workday efficient, but no one really wants ANOTHER tool for job that isn’t theirs.