ah yes, the mirror

Further to Mr. Castellano's post and his experiences, I don't mean to dump all over creatives – well, not in any way in which I wouldn't also dump all over myself. Clients are not always super nice and super smart and super respectful. They're just people, and you get the same gamut of people within client organizations as you do within agencies, which to say it all depends.

It's just that you can really easily be a very unhappy creative who thinks that everyone else is stupid, and find yourself with an okay book (because clients or account people or dumb creative directors killed all your best work) that's no one's interested in looking at, because you have such an awful reputation. I've seen it happen. The business is smaller than you think.

When presented with an intractable and perhaps incorrect client, the only thing you can do is control your own actions and responses. And remember that you want to be able to sit at a table with the same client tomorrow – and next year. If you put a gun to your head because of this or that piece of idiocy on their part, you're not going to be around to be invited to that next meeting...

You could of course pull the plug yourself and show up to, say, a Ford client meeting in a T-shirt bearing a logo that looks like "Ford" but in fact says "Fuck." (Perhaps apocryphal, but the disgruntled art director who apparently did it while I was at Y&R/Wunderman was disappeared instantly and my sources were pretty good.) But what's the point of that, except to have a good sob story when you're begging someone to buy you a round at the Pilot?

That's all I'm saying.

good times

One of the rewards of this job now and again is to get the opportunity to sit in a room of smart, experienced, passionate people and watch them do what they do best, without any territory marking or argument. That doesn't mean there wasn't disagreement and discussion, but it wasn't freighted with political baggage. It was fun but more than that it was cool – this is how it's supposed to work. Yes JJ, it was good times.

It doesn't happen often enough. Maybe it can't, with all that's usually going on for people at that level, too much stress, too many deadlines, too much managing to do.

But before the start of this big project it's so thrilling and comforting to know that before the creative team ever sits down in our frozen glass-walled brainstorming room, there are some real insights into our consumer and our business, there's a good read on our competition, there's a strategy that's inspired, and there's technical backing for what we might want to do.

One person leaned over to me and whispered, this is what I love, and she gestured to the assembled team. I knew exactly what she meant.

so you walk into the client call and...

Admit it, you spoiled creative ass. You hate feedback. You dread it. You loathe it. You know that even the least talented hack in the saggiest creative department in the city thinks that feedback is beneath him, and you don't think he's wrong. 

Maybe that's why most of you overreact to it. Even for relatively minor changes, creatives whip themselves into incensed states during the meeting. They vibrate with outrage. They become unable to speak coherently. They find their disgust smothered by account people before it squirts out like an exploding zit. They get back to their desks and throw paper in disgust, or staplers in anger. And when major revisions are required – well, if you remember the Old Testament story about the chained Samson bringing down the temple on his tormetors, you have some sense of the vibe.

All of which is stupid because it makes your work worse.

The impulse you feel (trust me, I've lived all of this) is spite. You'll give them exactly what they say they want. You'll take your brilliant concept and amazing writing down to the level they demand, and they deserve all the crap you're about to do for them... Except you really shouldn't. It's not good for your work, or your client, or your agency, or you.

I had... well, let's call him an opinionated client a couple of years ago. He started his job halfway through a major project we were doing, and he was rumoured to be a bear. Just before one of the first calls we had with him, which was to approve music tracks for the job, his underlings warned us that he considered himself to be something of a music expert. He knew everything about it. Gulp. And as he remained silent through all our reco'd tracks, our panic grew. Somehow, in spite of all our lurking despair, the subject of the '80s band Juluka came up. (I honestly couldn't tell you if it was mentioned by him or me.) It was slightly obscure, as no one else in the room was old enough to remember them, and it allowed us to start talking. We arrived at some common ground and we were able to rationally discuss what he wanted. Without (too much) rage.

As the weeks and projects went along, I found that talking directly to this key client was the only way to: a) get him to understand what I was after, and save much more of the spirit of our concepts; b) discuss things with the real decision maker, not minions; and c) feel much less rage. Email was useless, and calls with only the minions didn't help either.

You've got to engage, creatives. You can't be sulky or defensive. You can't fight. And you can't expect to keep absolutely everything intact. But you can simply talk about things and maybe keep the spirit of what you created alive. You'll have a better relationship with your clients. You might even stop thinking of them as being beneath you.

collateral damage

As you of course know, this business is a little... unpredictable. Client asks can change in an instant (after all, the client's business can change at the same speed) and sometimes you get to the end of an evening having been typing or noodling for hours and you're finally done and you're caught up on email and you realize, crap, I've got nothing coherent to say tonight, even given the low expectations I have for this little space.

 

maybe this is why creatives have been known to have a pint every now and then

Yes, we offer outstanding strategically driven ideas to our clients, and when our client relationships are working we can feel like partners in their businesses.

But in direct and digital creative departments, there's one unalterable reality. After you sell that big cool idea to client and there is much congratulation and backslapping and you start thinking you're hot conceptual shit, you've still got to go back to your desk and make the damn thing.

You've got to put in long hours over a keyboard and mouse, work out a million details with your IA and tech folks, or wrestle with your print production manager about what Canada Post will let you do.

After the glory of the blue sky stuff, we have to become really good craftspeople. We need to know Flash and grammar and inDesign and how to proofread. We need to build insanely complex PhotoShop files showing in depth how something will animate, or write hundred-page copy decks full of not just brilliant content, but navigation and error messaging. We write forty letter versions for a package, or spend endless hours wrestling with iStock to find the one perfect image that may not exist. We don't get to outsource it to a studio, or a junior team or a production house. We have to get consumed with the details.

There are lots of folks out there who can competently handle execution no problem, but can only ever manage conceptual clichés. And there are a fair number of folks who are fantastic ideators (ugh, what a word) but who don't have the willingness or skills to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty for weeks at a time.

Craft is boring, executional and absolutely essential for what we do. We all know that great execution can almost save a bad idea, and bad execution can really sink a great idea. (The Diamond Shreddies stuff is a great example of bad execution. I know it won tons of awards, but for me it isn't anywhere near as good as it could be. Something seems really flat about the assembly line part, like the script and the direction just missed the point. And what's up with the mannequin at the end?)

All of which goes to demonstrate that the best direct and digital creatives have to have two almost contradictory skill sets, mind sets and purposes – free-ranging yet obsessive, outlandishly creative yet unerringly logical, accepting no boundaries but always being aware of them.

Okay, let's actually write the punch line, as if I needed to: good digital and direct creatives need two heads.

a pantload of writing advice

New book coming out that all writers need. Not just because if you're a writer you need to read a lot, but because it's about the folks who pretty much invented modern comedy.

For instance, Larry Gelbart is a name you should know. Why? Well, he not only created MASH for TV and wrote its first several (and best) seasons, but he also wrote Tootsie and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum and other stuff. (And Blame it on Rio, but we won't hold that against him.)

He also helped write Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, along with some punks you may have heard of named Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen.

Larry was funnier than you'll ever be. He knew stuff that you and I need to learn.

I am aware of all Internet traditions...

...and so, in the spirit of Tbogg and Atrios, it seems right to start a Friday change-of-pace blog thing about writers. Maybe it becomes a tradition, maybe not.

J.D. Salinger died. I made the mistake of not reading Salinger in high school, because when I finally did come to Catcher in the Rye in my mid 20s, it was horrible. Even in my confused and tormented post-adolescent state of mind, I saw Holden Caulfield as someone who deserved to be beaten up. This was the basis of The Great Reputation? Because that was impossible, I kept going, into the later Glass stories, only to discover that they're contrived and precious and, well, awful.

So, in honour of his passing, let's talk instead about Hunter S. Thompson. I'm not claiming that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the great American novel, but it sure as hell captures the cheap, low-grade hustler quality of so much American life, even (perhaps especially) professional and business life. The novel is untidy, self-indulgent and not suitable for young people, but it's alive and angry and funny as hell.

There's something about that heavily Republican time that reminds me of living through the eight years of Bush. We forget that after the summer of love, Republicans won in 1968 and 1972. Advertising talked about joy, but fear and anxiety were top of mind for a huge chunk of North American voters at that time. It was much more like 1984 than anyone realized – anyone except HST. And if you weren't completely obsessed with consumer gadgets for the last ten years, perhaps you came up for oxygen long enough to realize that.

His hatred of uncorrected power, his unerring eye for trends, his libertarian ideals, his anarchist love of self-responsibility – they all contributed to the eight or so years when HST was simply the best at reporting how all of us felt and acted and were.

It's all summed up in the line: "As your attorney, I advise you to pass me the mescaline."

(By the way, here's where the all Internet traditions thing started.)

using our powers for good, instead of evil

I know, I've used that line far too may times...

I'm working on some update communications for the Haiti disaster for World Vision tonight, and getting some perspective on what happened, and how the world and our client responded. It actually amazed and humbled me all over again – for instance, stories like the WV staffer who spent five hours getting home to his family after the quake, then turned around and was at work at 7 a.m. next morning, getting ready to deliver whatever medical supplies they could find. He literally saved people's lives.

Compared to that, we've been sitting on our asses doing nothing. But our team actually has worked tirelessly over the past two weeks and it's occurring to me that we're a part of this enormous effort – we've helped WV raise the funds to respond to this catastrophe. All the emails, radio spots, banners and DM we executed in virtually no time at all helped our client raise over $10 million. I don't say that to boast, but to congratulate a team that has done whatever was asked and much more. They knew what was at stake, they understood that there was a whole other dimension to our work.

It also adds a sense of pressure, knowing that failure has consequences. Of course failure has consequences for every client – sales mean jobs, and jobs mean mortgages payments and food – but for World Vision, the relationship between our work and the results is particularly immediate. The faces of the kids from the village near Koutiala where we shot our spots are all the incentive I need to consider all the angles, to take a second look at all the work, and wonder how we can make it better.

how many sites has Elmore Leonard designed?

Well, none, I'm guessing, but he's got some brilliant words of wisdom for designers.

"I try to leave out all the bits that people skip."

(Okay, Elmore's talking about writing, but none of the art directors I know would pay attention to a piece of advice about writing, so shhh.)

He talks about how you've got to be able to distance yourself from the work. You have to develop the ability to kick back and say to yourself, that part's pretty and this part is really interesting to me and oooh I loved coming up that – and then realize that anyone else coming to it is going to think all it's a waste of time and skip right over it.

Yes, Virginia. People are going to skip over all the crap that's between them and what they're really interested in.

Users don't give a shit what you're trying to say or how clever you are; they want to start doing what you want them to do. Or rather, what they want to do. (For writing, it means that the eyes of the reader are going to pass right over that page of description of how good looking someone was, or the paragraphs of philosophical perspective, until they get to the point at which the story starts again.)

This sensible wisdom is born out by the fact that the IAs I've worked with have been insistent about concentrating on boring questions like, "What is the one thing you want the user to do on this page?" They then started smacking clever ADs and writers until we pared the page down to focus on that one thing, instead of all the cool/cute bells and whistles that we were thinking somehow made the page, in some vague way. They got Elmore, even if we didn't.

"let's just have some fun"

I never watched Conan, at 12:30 or 11:30, until the last show. And I have to say that I was impressed with the energy and the feeling of it; it reminded me of Letterman in the old days. Obviously this loose, fun tone was driven by the situation, and the fact that he had nothing to lose.

Having that responsibility lifted from your shoulders can be an amazing creative enabler. I once got into theatre school at York after doing a kickass audition piece as Lenny from Pinter's Homecoming. The problem was, it was only kickass because about five minutes before going before the judges, I had decided that I didn't want to spend the next four years with a bunch of hams-in-training. I literally had to be sitting outside that room to figure out that in my heart I knew I wasn't an actor. That freedom was only one reason that I was decent enough (that one and only time) to get accepted, and it was absolutely impossible to replicate that.

I guess the question for us regular employment-type agency folk is, how do you keep that lightness, that fun, in your work over the long term? There are a whole bunch of MBA-ese qualities that help set that stage, like respect, good communication, and other noble corporate virtues.

More than anything, I think it's about tone. Of course you take the job and the client's business seriously, but you don't take yourself or The Advertising Business too seriously. I'm not standing around pontificating or pushing marketing ideology, and neither is anyone else here. Being part of the reality-based community means that you value the time and experience of the people around you. In other words, you listen. And our team is loose enough that when someone (for example, me) fucks up, no one is afraid to say so.

Having a tendency to self-deprecation is also a real plus, in my eyes. Most of the best people I've ever worked with tend to play down their abilities on a day-to-day basis. They love their work and their craft, but they don't boast about their skills or victories.

Because you probably don't want to spend your days at work with someone who's looking to, as another Conan said, "crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women."

Slightly unthematic but related follow-up: In baseball, apparently, other players will say of a really good player, "He can play a little." That feels right.