in shorter

Continuing my soapbox declarations from earlier this week, I uncovered the item below from a list of great agency sites that someone quite smart sent me today; it was originally posted on Digital Kitchen's blog.

It's a letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol, about the cover of what would be Sticky Fingers. Apart from being an amazing artifact of a really interesting time, it's an amazing creative brief:

Simple, strong, direct. This is every creative's fantasy brief: here's the assignment, here's a bunch of stuff you can use in any way you see fit, try not to make it too complicated... but what the hell, do whatever you want. And please tell us how much money you'd like.

Short of getting a letter from Pope Julius II saying he needs a ceiling painted, this is as good as it gets.

A creative can dream.

I'm sure they cover their billboards in brown wrapping paper, too

Got yet another email from the National Advertising Awards folks yesterday about the annual Young Creative, Interactive and Direct contest. It's a great and fun opportunity to do some blue sky work, maybe win an award, maybe even go to Cannes.

But what gets me is that, when it comes to really basic marketing, these folks have no idea what they're doing.

The email they send is a jpeg. That's it, that's all. An image, sitting in the preview pane of my Entourage. Or rather, it would be if Entourage automatically downloaded it. But as we all know, Entourage doesn't.

So what I see in my preview pane is this:

Yeah, that'll get my attention.

(So, by some stretch of the imagination, maybe I do click on "download picture." Maybe I finally see their clever creative. There's no link for me to click on, even though they apparently want me to do something. There's just NAA's clever print ad, sitting there like it's 1996.)

I tried to tell them this last year – that they needed to send something with at least some text, something designed for how email is used in this modern century, and got a nice email back saying that they valued my input. Yeah, sure.

In this day and age there's no excuse for ignoring an everyday marketing reality, something we're all aware of as users when it comes to the medium of email. NAA isn't the only organization that's guilty of wasting time, money and energy like this, but they're one that should know better.

Update on Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 9:25AM by Scott

I know that most people don't use Entourage, of course. They're on Outlook; Entourage being the sort-of Mac version. But the principle still holds. The default for the world's most popular email apps is to not automatically download images, and I'll bet that a sizable portion of the world's population has not changed this default. We've been dealing with this for our clients for years now. Would you rather have your agency design a pretty picture that makes you feel good, or an email that as many consumers as possible actually read?

when profit seems less, um, profitable

So, the major news organizations are failing. Radio, TV and newspapers are imitating deer in the headlights of an onrushing Mack truck called the Internet, when they're not slavishly copying Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Old school media doesn't know how to deal with digital, let alone Twitter and Facebook.

Um, yeah. That's what I thought, too.

I was pretty astonished to read tonight, by way of Kevin Drum, this Fast Company article about NPR's success in the U.S. Amazingly, National Public Radio has actually grown its audience significantly over the past ten years. It has massively expanded its news operations, domestically and overseas, even as every other news organization has cut staff and bureaus. And it has intelligently found ways to make its content available through new digital channels.

Even in the U.S., it seems, there's a real appetite for a public broadcaster. The BBC is the model everyone looks to, but even the CBC, despite its sometimes bizarre decisions, manages to hold a large audience in radio at least. It used to drive some of my more conservative friends nuts that Andy Barrie had the number one rated morning show in this city for such a long time, because it showed that private broadcasters aren't always able to meet the demands of the market, i.e., consumers, i.e., the public.

Now, as the article makes clear, it's not all fun and games there at NPR. They've taken some financial hits, and there are some complex business issues to be decoded around delivering NPR content over the web.

But by thinking about who their audience is, what they want, and how NPR can meet those needs, they've positioned themselves for actual success at a time when every comparable private, for-profit media organization is hemorrhaging audience, revenue and staff, unable to follow their example.

in short

By way of the alternately hemisphered Mr. Gillespie and his new Tumblr extravaganza, I pass along this presentation by a smart chap named Nick Emmel about writing the second most important thing that we do inside agencies: the brief.

It's hard to face an empty brief template and think about it as a manifesto with which you will charge up the creative and production teams (and yourself!) and get them excited about the possibilities of the project.

It's hard to not fill out the blank boxes, or cut and paste the client's words into them, or leave generic template information behind. (I know it's hard because I've seen it happen for as long as I've been working at agencies.)

It's hard to carve out the time in your stupidly busy schedule to actually think about what you need to write, because you know you can't just slap down any old thing if you're trying to inspire people, or yourself.

It's hard to give the process enough time to write it, struggle with it, and get input from an account director or creative director – especially when you're the one who's "responsible" for writing it.

It's hard to have people nitpick at something you've written for weeks after you've done the first draft, telling you what you did wrong, and "advising" you how it could be written better.

But that's what it takes. Because you don't get great creative without a great brief. It's really that simple. 

NOTE: My aim is NOT to belittle account people here. Whenever I'm asked to help out on briefs, I rediscover how brutally hard they are to write, even for someone who thinks he knows what they should say. But it is essential to understand how critical, how urgent, that little piece of paper is to the entire process.

the way I hope yesterday didn't start for you

A short post to tide you (and me) over on this long weekend... the traffic jam from Godard's Weekend. The fights, the smashed cars, the couple playing the board game in the road, the monkey and llama, the children playing, and everyone ignoring the bodies of the victims of the crash that has caused all this; the vision and distance of this remind me of Brueghel or Bosch.

Happy happy! See you Monday. (Or Tuesday, you government and bank drones.)

hey, aren't I better than this?

A follow-up to my recent post about those who want to break into the business and what they need in their books...

Assume that you've put together a kickass book. Assume that you impress a creative director. Assume that the creative director has enough budget left to hire a new junior. Assume that he/she chooses you.

You're sitting at your desk at about 11:15 on your first morning. You've had the HR info session, you've got your passcard, you've had a tour about which you remember nothing. And...

You realize that you're sitting across from the washrooms. You realize that your new computer is actually someone else's very old computer, which is nowhere near as fast or useful as the shiny MacBook you've got sitting at home. You realize that you're sitting under some pretty horrendous flourescent lights. And you remember that you're about to get paid not very much.

At this moment, it's tempting to begin to feel a little... undervalued.

Haven't you slaved over a great book? Haven't you impressed the shit out of this CD? And this is how he/she rewards you? With a view of the washroom?

Yup. Get used to it. All of the great work you've put in is only spec; for phony clients with you playing the client, account director and creative director. Through this spec work, you and your book have merely demonstrated that you are ready to learn. Nothing more.

That may sound harsh. You may be brilliant. But being able to come up with concepts and knowing how to design or write is just the first step in coming up with actual ads. There are briefs, clients, account people, production, creative partners, creative directors and more to deal with, all of whom are trying, you'll feel at some point, to destroy your work.

Your lovely view of the washroom means it's time to learn.

"if you're not on the team, you're not on the team"

My favourite set piece in The Untouchables (a film full of great set pieces) is Capone's big celebratory dinner scene, where he exhorts his minions to have what he calls enthusiasms. His own being, of course, baseball.

The menace and savagery of what follows is truly astonishing; it's one of DeNiro's best moments as an actor. But what's also truly weird about the scene is the basic truth of his lines here. How can one of the most devious criminal masterminds actually be speaking any kind of sense about how teams work? (Beyond the obvious answer that David Mamet is a genius.)

Every time I see it, however, the scene makes more and more sense. Capone has to keep his lieutenants in a delicate balance; he has to be in control, because he can't risk one of them freelancing too successfully, but he if he squashes the "individual achievements" of his men he risks making them all less effective. If he upsets the balance either way, he's dead.

Now, to paraphrase the movie's Mountie, "Mr. Capone, I do not approve of your methods." But that basic dynamic – the balance of the individual and the group – is what's happening any time a group of people need to do anything as a team. And everyone on the team needs to buy into that dynamic.

Sometimes people don't. For whatever reason they have a problem with the balance. And I don't just mean prima donnas (the subject of a later post, I'm sure); I've had a couple of creatives who when the proverbial rubber hit the road wanted me or others on the team to do things that were pretty basic to their job, like hire illustrators. While they were doing the bare minimum (or, um, less) they weren't using a lot of initative. Now, why these people chose to be unhappy with the team, or me, isn't clear to me. But the team suffered. And these two individuals had to face the harsh or beautiful truth:

You're either all the way in, or you're out. And one way or the other, they were out. (But remember, and I repeat, I strongly disavow Capone's management methods.)

All of which was brilliantly condensed by Daryl Aitken, one of the best ad people of all time, into a very simple statement, the sum total of which is the title of this post.

insert lame joke about being able to read a book by its cover here

Over the past couple of weeks I've talked to a lot of students and those keen to elbow or dropkick their way into the business. Invariably the conversation has come down to the same basic topic.

"Do I need a book? How do I put a book together? Who do I talk to about my book?"

To which I can only say, yup, and I dunno.

You can chat with creative directors all you want (assuming you can get their attention long enough to actually converse with them), goad them into pontificating, pump them for insights into the kind of eager AD or writer they're looking for, but no one's going to hire you unless they like your portolio. Which means you have to have one, a really good one.

Meaning that the really pertinent issue is putting your book together. And for that I have no easy answers.

Because putting your book together is hard. It takes time and incurs lots of self doubt. And it's never perfect.

Each piece you put in your book is a calling card. It says something very basic about you, because it's telling the CD you're talking to what you're capable of. You can Gregory Hines around it all you want – and you actually do need to talk about the work in a strong and thoughtful way – but the work is either good and interesting, or it's not. No one is looking to hire a junior art director or writer who's average.

Each piece has to be conceptual, but also brilliantly designed (if you're an AD) or written (a writer). If you think a pun is a concept, good luck flipping burgers. If you think a cool design is a concept, good luck at Kinko's. So, sweat everything you're considering putting in your book, then wait a week, and sweat everything again.

And after you take a deep breath and start calling CDs, and after you've heard each CD say something different about each piece in your book, remember this: as much as I've said that you are your book, your book is only the first step. Every CD has seen a lot of good books.

What they really remember is you – if you're really well spoken about your work. If you can speak strategically as to why you've made the choices you have. If you can be engaged in the conversation. If you can seem at least a little funny or natural, in spite of being incredibly nervous. If you can be someone they want to brainstorm with, go to client meetings with, and work with every day.

"if we took the bones out, it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?"

One of those late nights of typing on the work front, so instead of my regular wit and alleged wisdom, I offer a lesson in the dangers of using accurate language in product packaging.

the verdict (on your crappy brief to the agency)

Our friendly neighbourhood co-blogger Steve C. reports via steam-powered email about a tidbit of Massachusetts law that actually has some relevance for this thing of ours: 

"The credible evidence amounts to this: Representing a [professional woman] with disposable income and a zealous interest in litigating against [two of] her former employers, the respondent allowed the client to dictate a misguided strategy involving excessive and improper discovery requests that did not materially advance the client's cases but did generate large hourly-based fees for the respondent."

Steve wonders about the parallel responsibilities that marketers have to their clients – to wit, do you tell your client they're wrong? Do you tell them they're wasting their money, especially when they have a lot of money? And how exactly do you do tell them that?

Now, law's a far more regulated discipline than advertising, meaning that there are clear rules for dealing with this stuff, and punishments that can be levied, up to and including disbarment. But (perhaps unbelievably, to the general public) even most advertisers do have some professional scruples. (And yes, we even have a code of ethics, or two.) And however unlikely it may seem, I have been party several times to the process of saying, "Um, no, really bad idea guys."

It's pretty liberating. It's also extremely fucking terrifying.

In this business you never want to say "no" to clients. Even in as big a market as Toronto, there is a remarkably small pool of clients in pretty much every industry, and even one bad impression can rob you and your agency of vital business years down the road. Typically, conscience and capitalism don't mix well.

But in my experience, if you know something's going to tank (a spot, a site, whatever) before you even begin to brief the job, most senior ad folks will tell the client that up front. (Our Massachusetts legal friends apparently didn't do a very good job of this.)

Now, are these ad folks so noble and pure that they're willing to forego millions of dollars simply because it's ethically right?

Well, maybe. But there's a whole lot of self interest in it, too. This thing we do works best when it's in the context of a long-term relationship with the client. And relationships only work when there's a fair degree of honesty between the parties. In such a context, simply doing what you're told and executing the sure-fire loser campaign, without complaint, is a good way to get dumped. (It's called order taking and I've railed against it recently.) Good relationships have back and forth, after all, and involve messiness and agreements to disagree. This is the environment in which trust gets built and good work gets done. Plus bad relationships are doomed anyway, so you may as well get out on your ethical high horse.

This will usually happen in an email, as well as in person. It's not done lightly. And in my experience it's a pretty clear statement, without a lot of pussyfooting.

So now you've warned the client that what they want to do is a really bad idea, and a money loser. What if they still want to do it? Well, the client may take it elsewhere, knowing how low your enthusiasm is. Or they may say, we know it's bad, it's still got to happen and we want you to do it. Human nature and business being what they are, you take it and do the best you can.

And if you're lucky, the whole schmozzle leads to a better relationship with your client.

Does it always? No. Hence the terror I mentioned earlier.