Image courtesy of Aussiegall

Occasionally I have the enormous pleasure of judging New Media Age?s Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards. And a very splendid awards scheme it is too, with this year?s kings of the digital castle crowned in some style last month. I get invited to fill the ?enthusiasm-over-experience? role of digital-curious advertising outsider. This usually involves gobbing off in a cavalier fashion and then being slapped down by people that actually know what they are talking about.

Image courtesy of Markus Nielsen

There are many terrible cliches that lurk like sewer rats in the daily effluent of the advertising industry. And much like sewer rats they are always close to the surface, wholly unpleasant and bloody difficult to eradicate.

By far the most pernicious and destructive is the now widely held belief that ?ideas can come from anywhere?. What this annoying little platitude means is that anyone engaged in a project whether client or agency and regardless of their discipline may be the person that cracks the big idea.

Image courtesy of awwwww.cc

A couple of weeks ago I gave a little talk on the power of emotion in advertising. I thought I'd share a little of it because there are some nice examples.

I have also included a handy little PDF on emotions from Robert Plutchick that adds more depth than in the presentation I gave. In particular it shows our evolutionary response to those emotional stimuli. For example in the case of being presented with an unpalatable object (say a cigarette full of gunk and not tobacco) we appraise that as poison which stimulates digust. Our reaction to disgust is to vomit and eject the poison. And that model helps us to understand why disgust is sucha powerful emotion in advertising if you want people to change behaviour (like give up smoking) and not just change their attitudes.

After the huge success of the co-authored Age of Conversation last year, it is back but bigger and better.

This year 237 authors from 15 countries have put their minds to the subject of 'why don't they get it', with each author contributing a chapter.

I have written a manifesto which highlights the real distinction for me between people that understand how things work in the Age of Conversation and those that don't. Lets say its all about control versus influence.

You can order your copy here. Remembering that just as last year all the profits from sales (thats $10 for every $12.50 e-book) go to the children's charity Variety. Last year AOC raised $15K for Variety so the aim is to beat that.