PROSPECT CENTRICITY VS. THE FOUR INCH SCREEN: Why I won’t be teaching Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ in my Open Seminar July 10th. Learn the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ instead.

The first Friday of every Circus term, I do an Open Seminar on Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy.  Open to All – students of any school (ad, high schools, college/ university, Circus or not), professionals or anyone else with an interest. 

This term’s Open Workshop will be Friday, July 10^th, 9:30 a.m. to noonish (with break).  The subject, however, will not be Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy™. 

I’ll be doing an interactive examination of The Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ instead.

The Kamikaze Creative Work Plan™ and Prospect Centric Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ are the most important things I teach.  They’ve spread throughout the industry.  I’m still editing their e-book, still represent the Prospect in creative, still use the KCWP™ for Copy/Concept/Content assignments (media regardless), strategic consultations with Start-Ups, businesses huge to small. 

The switch?  I am tired of beating my head against a wall so thick, the only evidence is the pain where I sit. 

Prospect Centricity is the basis of everything we do.  B2B, B2C, Direct, Old, New, Social, Video, Emerging, Apps, e-anything, Promotional, Editorial – what we write must be an honest, intimate, meaningful conversation with the person we’re trying to reach/motivate. 

We must grok our Prospect on every level.  Recognize and understand them by common analytics.  Learn their differences.  Gut the common emotional threads holding together huge, demographically similar groups of people. Prospects so close, at the same time so far apart.  

Blame it on helicopter parenting, on addiction to constant babbling contact, on everyone-gets-a-trophy.  Blame it on a generation’s total focus on self, life lived through the four inch screen.  Whatever it is, I’ve not been able penetrate.

Years ago I had a student – now a famous, internationally recognized ECD (you’d know him if you saw his picture) – live that “you never really know a man until you have walked in his shoes” truism.  I bade him spend a day wearing someone else’s shoes.

Prospect Centricity – empathizing with the Prospect.  Today, he tells me it’s one of his work’s guiding principles.  The shoes did it.

Unless you’re Counselor Troy (ST Next Gen), empathy is something most must grow into.  A few are born with it.  Some learn in church, at home, in books, life, the streets.  Without an empathic connection, the complete Prospect grok, you may be able to manipulate a Prospect (Blog 3/21/15) but Motivate?  Doubtful.

It’s been growing.  The more I get in front of the Me and My Screen generation, the more I fail.  Being able to speak only to each other is no way to succeed in advertising.  Or life.  Yet that’s all most seem to want – or be able – to do.

This past term, I gave students a modified version of the “shoe walk”  my ECD friend found so important.  Handed out an assortment of thrift store finery to wear, take selfies of themselves with people outside their experience they came into contact with.  Study how people’s perceptions changed based upon their dress.

A Hail Mary assignment after a near complete failure of my “Go somewhere you’d never go” assignment.  (It's in the blog, too), I hoped this second excursion outside their comfort zone would spark emphatic beginnings, understanding, caring, realizing theirs was not the only world people live in.

Of all the selfies/photos I got, only one included a stranger, looking.  

The rest, pure selfies, showing their embarrassment at the thrift store items I required they wear.

Enough.  I stopped working on Creative Strategy, only on copy.  I offered outside sessions on the KCWP™ and Prospect Centricity.  One taker.  The same student who took the picture of someone beside himself responding to his glittered plastic-alligator American Gucci handbag.  He was also Number Fourteen on the “A” shirt list.

This coming term, on Friday, July 10^th at 9:30 a.m., I will be holding an Open to All workshop on the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™.  I get many letters re: the Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ – check my LinkedIn recommendations, you’ll find plenty of support of their continuing relevance, importance. 

I will not stop writing, talking about, practicing Prospect Centric Creative Strategy.  The bedrock of hundreds, possibly thousands of CCOs, ECDs, CDs, shop owners and other creatives who passed through my classrooms.  I’ll just not be teaching it formally, as part of my curriculum.

I cannot fight the narcissism of the four inch screen.  I will restrict my teaching to strictly writing copy.   

So (a Kamikaze Copy Sin, did you know?), please attend the July 10^th Open Kamikaze Creative Copy Sins™ workshop.  9:30 a.m.-noonish, with break.  Handouts end of the session.  Tell the security person at the Creative Circus student entrance you’re there to see me, you’ll be directed to the auditorium.  Attend, I promise you will never write – or read – anything the same way again.

FOR MY CURRENT STUDENTS AND OTHERS:  Bring magazines w/print ads – Motor Trend, House Beautiful, Forbes, Wired, Esquire, Rolling Stone - anything with ads in it.