I watch the Oscars. In film school, we used to have Oscar parties with friendly wagers on who would win each category and on things like how many people would appear in the death montage. To movie nerds, it is our Super Bowl, which I also greatly dig. Except this year. I hated the Super Bowl this year. I do not remember the outcome of the game. (Mostly because I had to block the agony from my memory). I do remember that the Super Bowl commercials generally stunk.

I know the Super Bowl is bigger and most people follow the ads with more interest but, to me, the commercials during the 2012 Academy Awards just had better stories and were crafted at a higher level.

For instance, Wieden & Kennedy’s Diet Coke commercial was a quiet understated testament to the power of the Hollywood dream.

During the Super Bowl, Go Daddy! spun another lazy fantasy sequence unspooled in unsubtle cuts.

Commercial characters were used better in Oscar commercials. Like in Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s Met Life spot, the indelible Peanuts gang are taken out of their usual haunt but their behaviors remain in character and their reactions are employed in getting the message across in a cute manner.

In contrast, Diet Coke dragged out the poor tonic-swigging polar bears again. What was once cuddly and whimsical, is now tired.

Yes, as MasterCard’s Chris Jogis states in Ad Age’s article – “The Super Bowl is about shock value” but advertisers do not have to sacrifice story and character for mere bombast and boredom. Football is a fantastic sport, rife with collisions of adversities, heartaches, and triumphs. The game and its real but larger-than-life characters are sold short by being hawked with the same tropes of dudes, chicks, and brews.

Although I am always partial to a commercial with chimps. Thanks, Career Builder!

By Sarah Lombardi, Captains of Industry

In the workplace, nothing is worse than having ideas that don’t get heard, unless it is ideas that are heard, but are repeatedly shot down without much consideration by the listener, i.e., your boss. Stifling an employee’s creativity ranks up there with working too many hours or never getting that promotion you know you’ve earned; there’s a reason the term “soul-crushing” is so often applied to jobs. At least, the term is more often applied to jobs than to, say, “clamshell packaging” or “too-tight socks.” But I’d make the case for those last two as well.

I’ve worked in a number of creative positions in the recent past, so it’s easy for me to say, “Any workplace can inspire its employees to be creative without having to plan a month’s worth of strategic meetings around it.” I interned at a television production company that would, once a month, hold meetings where everyone—I mean EVERYONE from the most senior VP to the greenest intern—could pitch a new idea for a tv series. And I started at Captains of Industry as an intern where, on my very first day, I was invited to a brainstorming session for a video shoot and actually asked, “What do you think?”

Encouraging the creative process is as much about fostering an environment where “ego” and “hierarchy” are dirty words as it is about entertaining new ideas. This is a no-brainer for small companies, but larger companies are perfectly capable of doing this too; look at the examples of Pixar or Apple. And if that doesn’t get your creative juices flowing, maybe it’s time to get out of that soul-crushing job.

I think of myself as a very creative person (outside of Captains I’m an aspiring fiction writer, a musician, and have recently tried my hand at drawing), and I’ve always needed a creative environment to thrive. Captains of Industry is nothing if not that. Because we’re all creative in our own ways, we’ve been able to democratize the creative process. Everyone is encouraged to spit out any ideas they have about any project, whether they’re working on it or not. I love getting e-mails from our Mike Kennedy, our video editor, for a naming or logo project that the team is working on. And in return, it’s a lot of fun to step into the edit suite to review a video I’ve never discussed before, knowing that my ideas are welcome, or to participate in a brainstorm for a new client with the whole team. Some of the ideas are crazy, some make us laugh for days, and other just clearly won’t work – but they all lead to another idea, then another, then another. Creativity breeds creativity, and our freedom to share ideas without fear ultimately leads to the fantastic end products that our clients – and we – expect. I can’t imagine being happy anywhere without that level of creative freedom.


Regular Jedi duels with Ted Dillon don’t hurt either.

I always chaffed at the term “creatives” as applied to the copywriters and art directors who work in advertising. It’s not that these jobs are not creative – they clearly are – but the term seemed to imply that other people in the agency environment were not. The “creatives” at my first job, McCann Erickson in NY, referred to the account people as “suits” – and the admin staff, forget about it. I found this to be kind of toxic and dumb. When I speak on Friday at Creative Mornings in Boston, I’ll share some ways we at Captains of Industry have found to catalyze creative thinking for everyone here. I’ll give you an example. During the height of the 2008 economic crisis, I was incredibly frustrated that we were not able to land a solar energy account. So frustrated that I blurted out, “If we don’t land a solar account this year, I’ll eat my shorts.” In a staff meeting with the whole company, I asked the Captains if we should make a video where I promised to eat my shorts on camera if we failed to land an account. Our office manager at the time, Lauren Antonellis, laughed and said, “Absolutely – but at the end of the video you shouldn’t be wearing pants.” We ran with it, launched the video, and landed a solar account in less than 2 weeks. So, the million dollar question lit up in neon lights is, how the heck do you bring about a culture where more people are coming up with great ideas, and feel free to share them? As you’ll hear on Friday, it all starts with the Manifesto.

Join me this friday on Newbury Street, you won’t be disappointed:

Ok, first off, you have to watch this. I know you get emails all the time from friends saying you have to watch something, but most of the time the clips are not earth shatteringly great. This is. It’s a TED talk by Vijay Kumar, a professor of robotics, about a new kind of flying robot that’s able to cooperate with other like-minded robots, emulating the behavior of ants in order to complete tasks. The part at the end, where the robots play the James Bond theme, surpasses the most wild imaginings of Ok-Go or any other band, and can best be described as jaw-dropping.

Now, picture these robots at a shopping mall, handing out product samples for Hershey chocolates to astonished shoppers, or performing aerial acrobatics in an Apple storefront to lure people in. Or, imagine the robots working together as a swarm to paint the Nike logo on the side of a building. It’s not science fiction – these robots could do this all this and more, right now. Vijay, can you please call me? Can the Captains be your friend?