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“Lecture Notes” from Celebrating the Golden Age of Creativity by Eka Ruola

Posted by metropoliabiz on

On Wednesday 16th of November Metropolia Business School received an educative presentation from Mr. Eka Ruola, the award–winning Creative Director & CEO of Hasan & Partners.

Update

A short clip of Eka Ruola’s presentation with the Metropolia theme tune added.

If you missed the guest-lecture and the live-streaming too, worry not. The Blog is your friend, and we took these notes for you.

The premise of good advertising is to inspire, but not to interrupt you.

Right now is the most interesting time to work in marketing communications, because the number of toys has increased so much. In addition to billboards, TV-clips and other things before the Moon landing, we now have the Internet whatnots like social media.

This has increased the challenge, because now one has to be really really really REALLY creative to stand out from the mass, hence the Golden Age of Creativity.

The world of marketing communications is shattering. Cutting from it is the easiest way to save money. This could be beneficial, because wasting money is always bad, and creativity is good. Perhaps lower budget will cut the s**t away, because with little money, there is only the option of creativity left.

Dialogue is still, and perhaps even more important now than ever. Companies have to capture their audience, because someone else will. However a real conversation is not just hearing compliments, but allowing the bad stuff to be public too. What would be your level of trust to an organization, which immediately deletes your complaints from their social media site?

Key question:

  • How can we make the relationship between brands and consumers better?
    • What about starting to look advertising campaigns more like seasons of TV-series?

Gatorade did just that with their Replay-campaign. Replay is about replaying undecided matches from sport history with the exact original “casts”; same players, same coaches, even with the same cheerleaders. The relevance to Gatorade? Well, the all the people are now much older. Basically the winner will be the team whose members have managed to stay in better shape through the years. Gatorade helps you to stay in shape. Simple. Right now Replay is on their third season/replay-game.

Idea is everything. Twitter is not an idea. It is an instrument. People talk in stories, and so must we. – Luke Sullivan

Despite not controlling the product Mr. Ruola is convinced that the magic is still in it. “This is the starting point of our inspiration.”

He advises people to be passionate about what the content can do and break down the barriers of marketing. “It’s an amazing time, but do not go crazy with the instruments. If you don’t know what to say online, say just that.” Coca-cola’s first Facebook page was launched by two coke-fanatics and it gathered millions of fans without the corporation’s input. It is likely that someone from the customers will answer to your question. Customerr is therefore the king now more than aware, with the ever-increasing knowledge and information channels.

To stand-out from the masses, Mr. Ruola prompts to start breaking the rules and to aim higher. If you can see the bar, it is not high enough. No matter how creative you are, you still have to work harder. Creativity has no use, unless it is expressed.

In the end Mr. Ruola gave these words as an advice to the students wishing to be employed in the field of advertising:

Be bold, be curios, work hard. You have to know everything about everything, because one day you might work with ship engines and the other day with newspapers. When it comes to CVs… I have hired people who have contacted me with a really interesting and a cool way. Stand out. Make sure that the ones are hiring know that you are the one to hire.

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