So Apparently Quitting Your Job To Pursue A Creative Dream Is Hard

This insight brought to you by Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger, those two South African ad people who left their careers for a year to go travel.

(And presumably find themselves and/or the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre.)

Travel and accommodation are not cheap things, and it seems that having the adventure of a lifetime can also mean cleaning toilets and doing rather un-creative jobs.

It’s easy to pile on at this point. If you were jealous before of their travelling and beautiful photos and how easy it seemed to be for them, now is your chance to feel a bit smug. Certainly when I read the first article on them I felt more than a tinge of green.

But actually this revelation makes me like their story far better. All too often on AdWeek and the like, you read these “quirky” stories about advertising people, especially young would-be advertising people, doing something to get attention. You know the kind.

“Let’s take your award on a trip to New York!”

“Let’s go around Cannes being quirky and documenting the experience!”

“Let’s send armed mercenaries to deliver my portfolio to the ECD!”

It’s all very well and good. Some of those projects are something worth doing, worth a read.

(Particularly the mercenaries one, if you haven’t already read it. It’s like, super quirky.)

My issue comes when you realise that the underlying assumption of so many of these creative efforts is “have plenty of money”.

There’s nothing wrong with wealth. It’s just not a shortcut to creativity.

So I’m glad when I hear an honest answer from these two – that creative projects and adventures are great, but they aren’t easy. And they shouldn’t be easy.

Money helps, but it doesn’t teach you how to work without that monetary help. Doing that cool thing you like with money – that’s easy. Doing that cool thing you like for money – well, that takes a bit more work.

You can find their post, and blog, here.

Every Ad is Someone’s Baby

A colleague said that to me the other day. It’s important to remember sometimes, when you take a break from the trench warfare that is agency-client relations, that your co-workers aren’t just people doing a job. Whatever your role in an agency, your work is your baby. Still more so as a designer or copywriter. Every line and placed graphic is part of your personal validation, evidence of your ability. And for it to be questioned and picked apart by those around you is no easy thing. You really do have to work to have a thick skin, because your work is both inherently personal and inherently vulnerable.

And that’s a good thing. It would be easy to dismiss what I’m saying as just the prissiness of artistes, self-obsession, unnecessary touchiness. But that’s what makes for great work. Great work, at any level, at any level of ‘importance’, demands personal commitment. If you can’t care, you can’t work – as I’ve said before, if you can’t bring yourself to care, why would your audience?

So care, and fight, and rage against those who want to change what you’re doing. And bend, and compromise, and conciliate. Because those twin impulses are what advertising is about – creativity plus corporate. Practical art.

And as an account handler, with a foot in both the client and the creative worlds, respect your client, certainly. But also respect your creative partners. Because they are the key to making the work that you really want to be a part of. And the ads that you are making are their babies.

A little care and attention goes a long way.

Don't Be Defensive

This is another anti-ego post.

It’s easy when you’re throwing ideas around to become fixated on your own positions and thoughts at the expense of everyone else’s. This is true whether it’s for a pitch or a campaign execution, or whether you get Nandos or KFC for lunch.

(For the record, the correct answer is of course Nandos.)

The point is, if you argue your point, and you’re still out-voted, you have to be able to accept it. Even if you’re the boss – one of the best skills in leadership is knowing how and when to give way, even to subordinates.

And sometimes it isn’t even about outright rejection of your ideas. It can simply be becoming defensive when your ideas are questioned or challenged or tweaked. You can’t defend your original vision to the death.

The most important thing in all this is to remember that your colleagues are competent. Sounds obvious, but in the heat of the moment it’s easy to unconsciously behave as though you’re the only person capable of good ideas. Which isn’t generally a popular or safe opinion to express.

And with that established, you have to then understand that if your ideas aren’t the ones that win out in a discussion, there are two options: First, that you need to step back and work out how to express your ideas in a better, more engaging way, or second, that maybe, just maybe, your ideas weren’t all that effective in the first place. And that perhaps it’s just possible that you only believe that they are great ideas because they are your ideas.

Food for thought.

Although for the record all my ideas are the best ideas.

Taking Things to Heart

This too shall pass.

You’ll find throughout your career that you have good moments and bad moments.

(I know! I was surprised too.)

Consistency is of course a good thing to strive for but it is never going to be a reality. You are human after all (I hope). So there will be highs and lows, great successes and the odd abject failure. And of course everyone around you is human too, so even if it’s only a minor failure in real terms you can find that it is treated by others as piss in their coffee.

Here’s my point:

Don’t take it to heart.

Neither the good nor the bad. Enjoy the praise and the accolades when you get them. Learn from the mistakes and the blame. But don’t dwell, don’t be complacent, don’t think of your character as being comprised of these moments.

You’re not defined by the past but by the present. Jumping for joy over last week’s performance review can lead you to fall right into a pit. And obsessing over an error-strewn Excel sheet can blind you to a new opportunity waiting for you. So look forward, not back.

Don’t misunderstand me – it’s natural and normal to feel down when things go badly, and to feel invincible when things go well. But be mindful, because scientists have found that the leading cause of 78% of screw ups is the belief that you finally know what you’re doing.

A career is a winding road of ups and downs. Just have the patience to see that nothing is permanent, good or bad. The sooner you can adjust to that, the faster you can react and respond, and avoid the traps of complacency or dejection.

Defeat and victory are both impostors. The true goal is just to keep learning.

There is Nothing Wrong with Selling

There’s an ad campaign going around in London, of various images sent in by people with the tagline “#beframeus”. Every time I read it I read “be fram-e-us”. And it annoys me. When I get home I’m going to try to find out what this campaign is all about. Because that is all the information given.

And that’s the problem. Sure, I’m going to make the effort (hopefully, unless I forget because I might have better, more interesting things to do), but I don’t really want to. And most other people I imagine don’t want to either.

“You cannot bore people into buying your product.”

Too many advertisers try to be overly clever with their campaigns, to make it a puzzle, to make it a mysterious pathway of content to carry the audience forward.

That would be nice if the audience were watching every ad in a row like a movie. But we don’t. We watch piecemeal – we watch at random. You can’t assume anything about how much the audience has seen. Of course you don’t want to patronise the audience. But don’t force them to do research to understand what you’re doing.

Too often this byzantine form of advertising is done because we’re afraid that our audience hate advertising, and want to have some kind of organic content experience. I’m not quite sure what that even means. But here’s the point.

You can’t be afraid of selling the product. Don’t hide behind clever lines and “guerrilla” advertising that is so guerrilla that it lives in a part of a jungle that no one has ever visited.

If you have a point to make, make it.

I don’t give a shit about #beframeus. Tell me what you want me to buy.

(Having looked it up it seems to be JCDecaux' new editorial content feature. So I guess in the end it doesn't matter that no one knows or cares about it, since the target is so small anyway.)

The Interesting Product Trilogy Part 3

It seems I can’t leave this topic alone.

This is more just a clarification of the underlying point of the previous two posts on motivation and the justification for advertising.

Why do you need to work to advertise boring products?

Why waste money advertising the mundane?

Both of those questions are themselves begging the question. What makes a product boring?

Boring is subjective. That is the issue that too many people don’t understand. What makes great advertising is not the ability to make something boring into something interesting. It’s the ability to make anything interesting. Because boring is not a meaningful term for a product. Boring is a limitation that we work around.

After all, what makes flowery smells exciting? Why do ads about fermented grain fill us with glee?

Beer is not a fun product just because it makes you drunk. That’s a leading factor, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Products are interesting because we decide they are interesting. Sure, we are human. We have biases and tendencies. But ultimately our defining trait is our sociability. That is to say, our ability to change opinions and behaviours based on what others around us believe – or even simply what we think that they believe.

The point is, when dealing with dullness it’s important to remember that dull is not a scientific concept. It’s a human one. And you only have to be limited by it as far as you want to. Or as far as your abilities allow you to stretch it.

Why Advertising?

What’s so great about advertising? What interests you about it? It’s an industry that comes in for a great deal of flak. Advertising is to a lot of people a shorthand for dishonesty. For superficiality. For the soulless materialism which, it is alleged, is consuming our world. Obviously I disagree with that assessment. I hope you do as well. But why choose advertising?

I’ll tell you my first impulse towards it. I enjoy self-expression. Be it writing, or talking, or any other form of creativity. Communication interests me.

But it’s always been drilled into me that you have to be practical. It’s not enough to be artistic because the world is full of artists big and small. So use it in a way that can also sustain you, in a sustainable way.

Hence, advertising. Creativity, but corporate.

That’s a bit unsatisfying as an answer though. I think there’s more to it than that. Because I don’t see advertising as just caged artistry. Advertising is practical art.

What I like about advertising is that it’s all about expressing ideas in the most engaging way possible – and it’s like any kind of art form in that regard. Maybe it’s a bit idealistic to say that adverts are a form of art. But both are essentially about communicating ideas.

In advertising the idea is often pre-determined. Perhaps “sell more toilet cleaner” is not enough of an artistic impulse. Perhaps that disqualifies it from being “real” art. But Renaissance painters weren’t obsessed with the purity of their work. Trust me, they really weren’t. Art wasn’t respected in the same way back them. So they did most of their work to order. It wasn’t art for art’s sake, just a way to make a living. Art was an industry – with clear standards, competition, and a vicious love of gold. It still resulted in some of the greatest works in human history.

(There’s at least one post to be written about Renaissance art and advertising. It will come.)

In any case, the execution of the ideas is where so much of the interesting work lies anyway. An idea is important. But ideas change as you express them.

Moreover, with advertising, unlike other art forms, there’s a clear way of finding out how well you’re expressing those ideas – in the commercial success of your advertising. You learn quickly how best to communicate to your audience. It’s art with energy, art with focus, art with fight.

So there it is. I like advertising because I like art, and I’m interested in communicating ideas. And advertising is like art after a couple of Jaegerbombs.