March 2009 Archives

Spring, and I'm writing

By Laurence Percival on March 17, 2009 8:45 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Sunday in Battersea Park. Cobalt blue sky at last. It feels like Winter has ruled for an eternity.

But today blossom is emerging in magentas and yellows, joggers are wobbling or striding along the riverside walk, kids in vests are chucking frisbees, and Brits are playing impressively bad tennis (why doesn't Nick Bollettieri open an academy here? Brits just can't teach tennis like the Yanks can). 

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It's Spring, finally, and even though I have a temperature and I appear to have swallowed barbed wire, life is good.

I feel like writing, and while I have a pen all I have to write on is a Sunday paper, but I scribble in the margins and it's great to be back on the creative journey.

I'm reading one of Julia Cameron's lesser known writing therapy books, 'The Sound of Paper', and feeling really inspired. Her prose and her advice are priceless. (Check it out here)

I love Julia Cameron (note earlier post from a year or so ago)

Her creativity is all-inclusive. We are all creative if we can find, in her words, our Vein of Gold. When I worked in big agencies, I always thought the idea of 'creative people' slightly preposterous - and agencies fostered the notion of these strange touched people, eccentric of habit and clothing, who always did everything in pairs. 

Of course, I was 'a creative' too, but I always saw creative people far outside the boundaries of the agency. I had a barrister neighbour who was a concert standard improvisational pianist, I knew an account man who wrote better headlines than any writer in the agency, I knew a receptionist whose observational diary would have yielded myriad Hollywood-standard scripts.

But still strategists and planners (or spanners as I loved to call them in my snide youth) cling to the notion that great strategies can only come from agency planning departments, and great creative only from 'creatifs'.

Richard Huntingdon, the Saatchi planning guru pours scorn on the notion that 'ideas can come from anywhere' on his blog here

This is the man who told me 'straplines are dead'. Yeah right. 

I totally, utterly disagree. How arrogant to think that only big agencies can come up with big ideas - which is what he's really saying. That is totally Jimmy Bullard.

His whole pitch is about being radical, and yet he entraps himself in 'rules' supported by labyrinthine thought processes. Our business is really much simpler than that.

Our own Elle John this week pointed out a screamingly obvious great line around a project we pitched for on Friday. So obvious that none of us had seen it until Elle, not a planner or creative but a suit, nailed it. 

Of course great ideas can come from anyone. Especially on a Cobalt day in Battersea Park. Here's to Spring.


Ads written, websites built, valleys pierced

By Laurence Percival on March 3, 2009 1:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking a five minute break from writing to seek inspiration on the Internet, I found this colourful background to the name I share with the company. (source: Internet Surname Database)

"Percival: This interesting name, with variant spellings Perceval, Percifull, Purcifer and Passifull, derives from the male given name Perceval, first recorded as the name of the hero of an epic poem by the 12th Century French poet Chretien de Troyes, describing the quest for the holy grail or chalice. The name is fancifully taken from the French elements "percer", to pierce or breach, plus "val", a valley, hence "pierce the valley", a nickname presumably given to a keen poacher or soldier remembered for his breach of a fortification. The exact origin of the name is uncertain; however, the most likely source is the Celtic "Peredur" from the Old Welsh meaning "warrior of the cauldron". This name was borne by a Welsh legendary hero of the Middle Ages and the cognate Old Welsh "Pair-cyfall" means "warrior of the Chalice". Occasionally, the name may be of French locational origin from Perc(h)eval in Calvados, Normandy, as in Richard de Percevill (Staffordshire, 1203). The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of William Percevall, which was dated 1229, in the "Calendar of the Close Rolls", Shropshire, during the reign of King Henry III known as "The Frenchman", 1216 - 1272." 

I've always been a FroggyPhile, so my Gallic sympathies suddenly stack up!
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