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.