Ridicule your own work

Ridicule is big business, especially in the marketing and advertising world. Sites like AdRants, AdFreak, Tribble, AgencySpy and so many others are built around mocking other people's work. Sure, they do other stuff too. Sometimes, they even praise. But more often than not, we ad folk are a malicious group.

Take, for example, Ogilvy Athen's rather bizaar tribute to David Ogilvy. It's hard not to ask yourself what they've been spiking their coffee with. We pat ourselves on the back, knowing we would never do anything like that. Or would we?

We all have terrible ideas. I have them all the time. The fear that I have - and which I think is healthy to have - is that one day I won't realize an idea was terrible and actually go ahead with production on it. Hey, it happens to the best of us. I guarentee you the people of Ogilvy Athens are actually damn good at what they do; they just somehow didn't notice that this song wasn't one of their great moments.

There is a fail-safe mechanism though that can save you from yourself. Prior to committing to an idea, ridicule it. If the idea belonged to someone else, someone you hated, what could you say to belittle it? To mock it? To make the idea and person bearing it look like complete fools? If you can take that criticism and still like your idea, you're probably on solid ground. If the mockery hits a little too close to home, you might want to move on to something else.