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Five words that could destroy the
adver­tis­ing industry

They’re also com­plete and utter nonsense.

When a technology/soft drink/holiday com­pany approaches an ad agency, they’re buy­ing exper­tise, expe­ri­ence and tal­ent that they don’t pos­sess them­selves. If they did, they’d have no need for exter­nal pro­fes­sion­als and I’d be play­ing piano in a bar somewhere.

Yet I’m hear­ing those words – along with the more colour­ful acronym, JFDI – much more than I used to. And that’s a shame.

It’s a shame and it’s also self-defeating. You see, “The Cus­tomer Is Always Right” ben­e­fits no one: not the agency, not the client, not the end cus­tomer.

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Lego. As a young per­son, I had it. You had it. We all had it.

But what did you ever do with it? Me? Poorly thought out space sta­tions and space­ships. In this edi­tion of the Couch we’ll be see­ing what creative-types around the world have been doing with the old plas­tic bricks.

Cool Cre­ative

From the White Stripes “Fell in love with a girl” video to the wildly suc­cess­ful “Lego <insert movie fran­chise here>” game series from Traveller’s Tales, peo­ple have been tak­ing hun­dreds of bits of plas­tic and mak­ing some pretty cool stuff with it for years.

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When you’re build­ing and test­ing sites there are a lot of things to con­sider. “God is in the details” and all that. You can save time, heartache and avoid hav­ing angry clients by set­ting up your browser with a few lit­tle tools to help you check some of the basics.

Fire­Bug

For when you absolutely, pos­i­tively have to go into the code your­self and have a dig around. Indis­pens­able lit­tle add-on when trou­bleshoot­ing sites, giv­ing you (the tech-savvy PM) the abil­ity to check the code that builds the site. Also has a handy “Net” tab telling you which files are load­ing (or ever hand­ier, not load­ing).

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