um, which way is the HR department?

One of the reasons that a lot of the people I work with (including me) are in advertising is that we're unemployable in any other line of work. Not because of our vast creativity or anything, but because we swear. We're messy. Some of us have been known to vent frustration by, on rare occasions, throwing objects.

In most workplaces, in most businesses, that's not acceptable. (Except here.)

The office of every client I've ever had has been a civil, dignified and tidy place. Inappropriate things are not loudly said or loudly enjoyed by large groups. There aren't outbursts of passionate venting. Foot-high piles of paper are not tolerated as a form of filing. Discourse or actions that are disrespectful are frowned on or actively punished. And that kind of civil, ordered and respectful place is just not an environment in which I can work.

And I'm not alone. I once worked with a really strong account person who got hired by the marketing department of a large finanical institution. When I talked to her a couple of months into the job, she was bordering on despair. "I can't swear. I have to watch what I say. It's torture."

She'd taken the job I think pretty much because the company would top up her salary during mat leave, something she'd obviously been planning and was now several months hence. At the same time she'd get exposure to things from the inside, something that could only help her understanding of and relationships with her clients. It had looked like a win-win. But she was having serious doubts.

"I don't know if I can make it. No one jokes. No one has an opinion. I just want to scream at them. Even the meetings are dull. They're so serious. For every meeting they make agendas and stick to them. Can you imagine?"

No, I couldn't. And neither could this organized, serious, smart marketer who thrived on the chaos, untidiness and passion of agency life. After she came back from mat leave she jumped back into an agency as soon as she could, for not quite as much money, for not quite as good benefits. But the work, and the way of working, was not negotiable for her.

my postcard copy struck a gravitic mine

I went into the client presentation today, on a small job that I'd done the writing for, thinking that I'd nailed it, but also knowing it was the kind of project that gets... well, complicated.

It's a new program for which the messaging is still getting worked out. Even as I was approving the brief, I could feel the thinking get, not muddy, but nuanced. Which is my fault of course; with those thoughts in mind it's dumb of me to approve to a brief. And yet time was short; only a few days until final files are required. If I'd pushed back on the brief I would have eaten up all the time for actually doing the work, and the client would likely have taken the work in house.

Now, I'm pretty passionate about good briefs. I'll yammer on about them repeatedly in this blog. But I'm also, I'd like to think, somewhat practical. I've seen too many creatives, even good ones, stand on principle for entirely sound but utterly futile reasons; job-ending reasons, client-switching-agencies reasons. 

So I consciously entered into this job, knowing that part of the first presentation of the work would be to talk about the target audience's needs, the messaging, and the real benefit that the client was offering. It had to happen eventually, but under the circumstances today the creative was a necessary part of the client understanding the implications of their choices.

Yes, the copy got sacrificed. But I knew it would. I wasn't defensive about, and we had a really good discussion with the clients about the real messaging. We'll make our final file date.

To me, principle only takes you so far because reality never aligns with it. I don't know that it's a test of character exactly, but at some point a Kobayashi Maru blunders into your client's neutral zone and it reveals your character. Because you simply deal with it.

concentrated evil

One of those late nights wrestling with PowerPoint for a presentation tomorrow, so I'm less than fully coherent. (Or let's say, normally coherent.) Now, I'm not the first one to point out that it's not very useful for thinking, or that's it's just not made for Macs, or for actually convincing people of anything if they're not engineers, but all of those things are so manifestly true to me at the moment that I must bore you by reminding you of the fact.

I know people who default to Excel when creating any document; they think in those key commands, even for lists and other "natural" word processing needs. And as I writer, I've come to a South Korea/North Korea kind of understanding with Word. (I really miss MacWrite II, which was 20 times smaller, faster and 99% of the time just as useful.)

I don't know anyone who thinks in PowerPoint. I'm not sure I'd want to.

It makes everything dull and uninspired. It takes really good ideas and turns them into bullet points with different kinds of bullets and indents. It turns people into robots at the very moment when they need to be inspired and passionate and creative. It's a straightjacket. A vise. A trap.

"if it's something my tailor does, why is it such a big deal for my site?"

Measurement is one of those things that everyone thinks they know and do, but few people actually seem to understand or succeed at.

I once sat in a room with a really smart client who actually said, "I can measure my TV ads in GRPs. I don't see any way I can measure any of this digital stuff."

Everyone's jaws dropped. We'd just spent an hour taking him through his brand's digital ecosystem, thinking he at least got the basics. After hearing that we quickly went back to square one. Again.

It's appalling to me that today every organization doesn't know exactly what users on their sites and other digital properties are doing. It's imperative from a response point of view. You have to know what helps, what hurts, and what's extraneous – in order to gain any efficiencies, and in order to get better against the competition. It's a basic of how smart people do their business well, from Lester Wunderman to the 37 Signals guys, in DM and in building digital apps. Know the data, test, learn from the new data, test again, learn again. And technically, you build everything from your tracking needs outward.

If your number one priority isn't wanting to know exactly what your consumer is doing when they engage with you, I suspect you're not going to last long in the business of this century.

"I'm not ignoring you, I'm empowering you"

This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen while working in an office, and maybe the most secretly wise piece of management advice ever written.

I was wandering around the offices of the GM account team for some reason, and passed the closed door and empty office of a smart account guy named Jordan Schooley. On the glass of the door he had scrawled, in one of those dry erase markers, "I'm not ignoring you, I'm empowering you."

It still makes me laugh. Today a sticky note with this quote on it claims a prized place on my wall.

And over the past couple of years it's become increasingly, sneakily smart.

Why?

Well, I'm a control freak. I admit that freely. If I could come up with all the ideas, write and art direct everything, and present it and then execute it, some dark part of me would. It's the secret voice that says to me, you know what's best so just do it. And the people who work on my team would probably not be surprised by that. (I'm sure I'll find out tomorrow.)

But I know I can't. It's not only impractical, as there are only 24 hours in a day, but it's also plain crazy. To be a control freak is to be subject to a serious delusion. In advertising, and especially in digital and direct, you have to work with a team; there's too much knowledge, experience and creativity required, and it's hard enough to find scrape up the little bits we all possess. How many lives would you have to live to become a kickass combo account supervisor/creative director/art director/writer/production person? And as much as experience, you need other people's perspectives. In brainstorming, in presenting, in executing. It's essential; it's what gives ideas life.

So we rely on teams. Our clients do, too, even though they don't always realize it. I've been finding that it's tempting for them to respond solely to the creative director, and not take what the writer or art director say as seriously as they should. That disempowers them; and a disempowered creative team can soon turn into a bad creative team.

So, I've been selectively ignoring people. Okay, not people – meeting invitations. I've been saying no or "forgetting" about meetings when I think I'm becoming an impediment to a strong team communicating with client. And if the meeting doesn't go as smoothly as I might like, fine. The team learns from it. And I've definitely learned from it.

I can't control everything. In fact, it's made me see that I actually don't want to control anything; I see my job as guiding the process and inspiring people to make their own work better. (I'm picturing the smirks on some people's faces right now. And yes, this means you.) That's the only way that good creatives grow. And if it takes me doing a little ignoring to make that happen, so be it.

Mr. Debakey's free, but he's a little bit conciliatory

Late night o' work. No coherent thoughts. Lack of finger coordination. Zero chance of interesting post. Slapping up random video for your amusement. Laugh. Please laugh.

writing in restaurants

I first bought David Mamet's Writing in Restaurants at a time when I was doing a lot of writing in (not surprisingly) restaurants and coffee shops. And it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, in terms of improving the writing I was doing in these places, but it was far more inspiring than that.

It was a call to arms for meaning. At a time when special effects were conquering movies, and were well on their way to taking over theatre as well, Mamet demanded that you as a writer concentrate on story, i.e., what happened. Description (not just flowery description but any description not demanded by the action of the story) is not only irrelevant but an impediment to the reader or viewer. It tells that person that they can not pay so much attention, that there are words and passages that don't mean as much as others.

The line that gets me to this day comes when he talks about how people (even over 20 years ago) were tending to respond to the question, "How was the movie?" with an answer along the lines of "Fantastic cinematography."

Mamet's response is, "So what? Hitler had fantastic cinematography."

To this day I am suspicious of style that calls attention to itself. I don't much like portfolios that are consistently pretty no matter what clients's work is being shown. And I think that everything can be shorter; it's better to compress and let intentions be found within the language, instead of shoved forward. That's where the poetry in Mamet's work happens. Because when it works, as it (mostly) does in the classic Alec Baldwin cameo in Glengarry Glen Ross, I think it really is poetry.

It's easy to parody the butch, tough guy quality of Mamet's writing (and as Steve points out he's even capable of parodying himself), but with Writing in Restaurants, he helped me think, for the first time, about what I was doing when I sat down with a pen and paper. He slapped (or maybe punched?) me in the face with the fact that style is empty, and that writing has to have purpose.

virtually anything you can do...

Found this link ages ago about the strategy of the Iraq war, but I can't remember who from:

In October 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his chief military and civilian subordinates for an assessment of the “Global War on Terrorism,” noting that “we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing” and asking numerous broad yet focused questions, all of which came down to the question of strategy. It took several years and still the Joint Chiefs of Staff required help from contractors—contractors—to come up with a system to measure what is clearly the most pressing security threat facing the United States in a generation. 

A profession that surrenders jurisdiction over its most basic areas of expertise, no matter what the reason, risks its own destruction.

Digging it up, it seems extremely relevant in light of the recent spate of virtual agencies that are starting up around Toronto.

I've been freelance, and I work with several freelancers now. It's not easy for freelancers to do their best work. Not because of their own abilities or intentions, but I think because there are inherent problems caused by the open-ended nature of the relationship with the agency. When your contract is ending in a matter of days or weeks, and you don't know whether it will be extended, how do you keep pushing your work? How do you build relationships with other creatives or clients?

Creatives are the obvious crux of the issue, just because so many of them work on a freelance basis, but there's also account management and production – and they're far more difficult to find and retain while freelancing. They're key to basic agency processes (so are creatives of course) but unlike creatives, these two groups are also responsible for how the agency makes money.

It's not to say that a virtual agency can't work, or do great work. But I'll be very interested in knowing how they're going to build relationships over the long term between clients and more than a few senior agency people.

My best work has come from being deeply involved with clients. And that's far harder to do when you're being brought in by the hour, and being encouraged to piss off once your defined and specific business is done.

Commitment to clients isn't virtual. It's actual. And that's any agency's most basic area of expertise.

when an idea is birthed twice

This Globe article about similar ad campaigns for different clients is interesting not because it offers insight into how two agencies can come up with the same idea, but because it can't. Short of defaulting to nasty accusations that would be difficult to prove and would likely be untrue anyway,* how the hell do you explain it?

The interviewees in the article conclude, "Hey, some ideas are just in the air" and the writer of the article doesn't seem to have much of an opinion about it either way.

Now, such a thing has never happened to me, and I can only imagine that the creatives involved are honestly mortified. My personal bias is that these "in the air" ideas tend to be okay ideas that have great or powerful executions – witness putting a "baby on board" sign on a hearse. Chances are, it's work that hasn't really been challenged as thoroughly as it could be, because it's work that could serve equally well for another client in the same category. And to me, a good ad is specific; it says something about that client that no one else can say. Can you imagine Microsoft doing Think Different or Labatt doing The Rant?

Even when it's cool and award-winning, a generalized statement that anyone can say (in other words, a cliché) is still, well...

Which makes me think that, in each case, more work could have been done.

*While individuals can be dumb enough to rip off work to make their portfolios artificially better, no agency or creative director I've ever met would think of doing such a thing, let alone allow it. It would end careers and drive away clients. No one campaign idea is worth that. No single idea is that good.

"damn it, Smithers, this isn't rocket science – it's brain surgery!"

It's not difficult, what we do. Not in the way that, say, getting the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth alive was hard. And certainly not in the way that saving an entire Antarctic expedition from certain death was hard. But that doesn't mean it's easy.

Case in point. I was in a meeting with several senior people (account, creative, strategy and media) today and we were trying to agree on an overall strategic approach for a certain proposal. There was some raising of voices (not in anger but just to be heard) because there was much interruption, and much more back and forth.

All of which was okay – more than okay, it's actually good. People with different backgrounds, experiences and thought processes shouldn't agree right out of the gate. The noise meant that people were talking with passion, saying what they meant, and not out of concern for the niceties of not hurting anyone's feelings. We were finally getting real feeling and thinking without the too-common political considerations.

And the thing is, no one in the room was wrong. It wasn't about anyone's point of view winning out over the others. It was about hashing through all the possibilities. It helped us consider all the angles. It allowed us to bring up comparables from other clients. And then we talked, seemingly in circles but not – maybe it's more accurate to say that we talked in a whirlpool, round and round until we could all come together in some common point.  

And it was more than the inevitable dynamics of group decision making – it was also about language. It took some time to figure out that several people were in actually agreement once they agreed on definitions. Definitions that different clients also have different perceptions of.

So, yes, in some ways it was maddening and frustrating, but it was a vital exercise. All the questioning strengthened our thinking, clarified our language, streamlined our purpose. (I know that sounds like I'm selling you, but it's actually true. And how many meetings that does that actually happen in?)

If that ain't brain surgery I don't know what is.