I probably shouldn't say this out loud

Short post tonight. I'm sitting here with a thick document from our lead information architect, a user experience analysis of a site that we're about to redo. It's a really strong look at the current site's strengths and weaknesses. And it's depressing me, mostly because I don't have the attention span to work through something that thoroughly.

The care and attention that other people take with their jobs, when I'm exposed to it, just amazes the hell out of me. There's so much that has to happen in our business that is hard and detailed work, both before the creative gets to happen, and also to make the creative happen.

I guess it's handy that I'm a writer. Sitting at my desk and typing the words that pop into my head seems so unlike work that I probably shouldn't make it public, lest the people who sign my paycheque get ideas.

why would I ask for a feedbag?

When you get past the experience, the bags under the eyes and the drinking problem, there's another difference between a junior creative and a senior one.

There are a surprising number of juniors who want to hide their work until it's absolutely perfect, before they reluctantly get feedback.

Most the senior creatives I've worked with, and all the good ones I can think of, at a fairly early point in the execution process want feedback on what they're doing. They'll drop by or grab me and talk through the direction they're going, they'll take me through what they have, and where they think it's working or not. They know there's value in getting feedback earlier rather than later, before you've gone down too many blind alleys. Because at an agency, the creative is a process. With clients, account people and production, nothing is finished until it's in the consumer's hands.

Juniors seem to have wait until what they're doing is perfect before they can open up to accept "judgement." (Not that that's what feedback is, I'm just trying to guess at the psychology.) If you're new in a job, I can see how you don't want your boss seeing potential vulnerability. You don't want to be seen as asking for his ideas. You want to come to him with outstanding ideas fully formed, ready to wow clients. And I suppose there's also the tendency not to want to "bother" the creative director with, say, creative. All I can say is bother away. Even when I don't have time, I should make the time. It's my job after all.

I'm not saying you should seek input before you have an idea of where you want to go. I need to see something after all. I just don't want juniors wasting a lot of time on polishing and refining before they know it's the right direction.

Anyway, this impulse to hold things back is not a useful trait, and it's one that we try to discourage by encouraging not formal checkpoints, but informal drop-ins.

I understand the impulse. When I'm writing, I don't want anyone standing over my back, I don't anyone questioning the process I need to go through to get the necessary end result. But once I get the work to a place where my point is clear – and that point is well before I consider it polished, let alone finished – then I do want those other eyeballs. In fact I'll actively bother people until they've given me some sort of feedback, anything so I have a sense that my work is doing what I want it to do.

just because it's always teed up for you...

Direct marketing is by definition a response medium. And when I get briefed on a direct job, I’m automatically thinking about how to maximize response.

In digital, the intentions aren't so clear cut. In digital anything is possible. A kick-ass awareness campaign. A staggeringly efficient CRM campaign. A hugely succesful consumer engagment and prospecting campaign. It's all there for you...

But not even digital can do all of the above things simultaneously.

And that’s a really important thing to look out for when you're working in digital, I find. You have to be really clear about your purpose – your client, your account team, your creatives and tech people all have to be aligned on that one strategy. And that strategy should answer the question, how are you building the client’s business? 

I've had clients in the past say they wanted to do an awareness campaign with banners, but they'd measure its effectiveness by clickthroughs and number of leads generated. Not that those are bad metrics of course, but they're not the first (or even second or third) metrics I'd look at if I'm trying to broaden awareness. Inevitably, when we got briefed on that client's work, they kept assuring us, "No, this time we really want to create awareness," and so the team would go off and come up with some pretty cool ideas. And the reaction in the creative presentation would be great. And then the feedback would come, hours or days later, and it would all be couched in the language of being more effective at generating clicks. We began to feel like Charlie Brown, barreling down the field to kick the ball that Lucy promised not to pull away this time...

The finished work was never as good as it could have been for this client, because the creative always twisted as the strategy and metrics changed.

It should all come out at the brief, I know. Everything should be clear at that meeting when everyone's questions get voiced and hopefully answered. It just doesn't always happen that way.

And I don't mean to say it's all the client's fault, because agency folks can do something similar. I've had an art director get briefed on something like a landing page for registering people, and actually tell me that the page was all about registration – and then present me with page designs that buried the register now button under all sorts of cool flash and video, the fifteenth thing that a user might see. It's so easy to play, to do cool things, to offer up the latest technology. It's so easy to push your design for an email and insist on sweating over it when it hits someone's inbox as one big jpeg... forgetting of course that images don't automatically download in most people's preview panes, where your award-winning creative is instantly skipped over, its message totally lost.

In digital it's really easy to be unclear about what you want to do, because you can do it all. It's always all served up for you. It just requires the extra discipline to remind yourself that you can't do it all at once.

michael bay fans can skip this post

Since it's Friday night and the Borg is madly assimilating our Prime Minister and Governor General, and will soon start in on our finest athletes, I've decided to resurrect my already forgotten tradition of writing about non-marketing things on Friday nights. You know, things that humans actually consume with pleasure, like novels and movies.

The last half hour of appalling noise from CTV has naturally made me think of The Conversation, the whisper quiet but incredibly tense concoction that Coppola whipped up between finishing publicity for the first Godfather and starting location scouting for Godfather 2.

(Warning: if you think that Transformers is in any way a good movie, or if you're the one in the theatre who's always loudly asking, "Who's that guy?" or "Why'd he do that?" then don't bother.)

The Conversation is about an eavesdropping expert named Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman. As the movie opens, he's trying to record the conversation of a couple walking in San Francisco's Union Square. But nothing is explained, no reason is given. As things unfold you begin to think that you know what's going on, but you don't. (That's as far as I'll go.)

Hackman is brilliant; it actually makes me sad to think how much he's been wasted in the last 20 years. And other Coppola favourites appear, including Robert Duvall, Harrison Ford and John Cazale. 

But they're not the best part of The Conversation. What's best is simply how the movie is told. It happens in the way that John Stuart Mill describes poetry; it's not heard but overheard. Everything is suggestion and menace. There's almost no verbalized threat, but threats are everywhere.

It's the brilliantly suggestive editing and sound design.

It's Walter Murch.

Murch started out in film with Coppola and George Lucas and had done editing and sound design for Godfather; he was hired to do both for this film. But as shooting on The Conversation was nearing the end, Coppola was contractually obligated to start scouting for Godfather 2, and was forced to leave without shooting some key scenes. Murch was left with a bunch of film that didn't necessarily have a cohesive story any more. But in a book of interviews he did with Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations, Murch describes how he began to play, to try and tell a different story with the film he had. He was forced to become much more allusive, working with suggestion instead of exposition. The film that Coppola had intended disappeared, but fortunately for us it became something even more interesting, something far more powerful.

just one more word, it's waffer thin

Was recording a :30 radio PSA this afternoon and our voice talent, who we've worked with several times before and who is fantastic, reminded me just how fantastic she is. (Not of course literally by telling me, but by... oh, just keep reading.)

The script was too long; our client wanted to say a lot and at the last minute added three or four extra "clarifying" words that actually made the difference between a tight but doable script and one that just sounded rushed all the way through. (Surprising how small that difference is.)

So, I apologetically warned our voice talent about all this as she stepped up to the mike, and she was game. And on maybe the second take she nailed the script as it was written perfectly. That is, as perfectly as she could. Because she sounded like she'd been sped up by the sound engineer. She was rushed, and there wasn't a drop of space or emotion in it; it was clogged with words for 30 seconds solid. 

Crap.

It was the kind of thing you technically could deliver to a client and say, hey, we did everything you wanted, here you go. But in the real world you can't do that. It's just bad work with excuses, it's bad for your spirit, and in spite of the fact that you've caved on every single thing asked for, you still end up with an unhappy client.

As I stared at the board and the sound engineer thought about how dumb I was, the producer suggested losing the word in the call to action that was repeated from two lines before. At first I resisted, because I liked that particular bit of repetition and thought that there had to be some brilliant alternative. Then after a couple of bonus minutes of floundering, I realized that she was right. (Hey, the script was less than 24 hours old, and the last client changes had come through only an hour before the session. Lighten up, okay?) The repetition in the CTA was gone. Same with two wonderfully descriptive adjectives that until that moment I'd thought were vital, but were in fact just adding precious time. And this is going to sound funny, but these adjectives were long words; they were words that naturally wanted emphasis when they were read.

So, by deleting them and that repeat in the CTA – literally just three words – we actually gave our voice talent room to breathe. She nailed take after take running between 28 and 29 seconds. (Try it some time; it's got to require an internal metronome.) She repeatedly nailed the subtle but necessary inflections that gave the script not just some human feeling, but actual meaning. All it took was us (okay, me) giving her room to do her job, by extracting a few of those waffer-thin words that couldn't possibly make a difference.

That's how she reminded me just how fantastic she is.

Now, it's not an award-winning spot. It's a straight read of a serious message that needed to convey a lot of information.

It's just a nice example of the craft that actors, and specifically voice actors, possess. They have skills. They have knowledge. They can save your butt when you cross the line between too much and waaaay too much.

the Borg is less than 48 hours from Earth

Perhaps you've heard that the Olympics are coming to Vancouver. 

It's hurtling toward us at the speed of CTV programming, inexorably, hour by hour. And when it arrives it must and will assimilate all life as we know it.

Sigh.

Of course as a Canadian I'm happy for the opportunity to show the world something about who we are, and the chance to win a gold medal on our own soil. As a marketer it's an unmissable event; the attention of millions of Canadians will be focused there for days on end, and we have clients who have quite properly partnered with the Games to gain an advantage over their competitors.

It's just that personally, I'm already sick of it.

CTV's bombardment of the Superbowl the other night, and the Globe's relentless shucking, have both soured me. (In comparison, our clients' use of the Games has been relatively restrained.) In fact CTV's Olympic campaign has gone on far longer than the Games themselves. And they're prime culprits in telling me how I should feel about the Games; how proud I will be, how engaged I'll be, how Canadian I'll feel. And that's the worst kind of marketing. It's not the frequency that bothers me so much; it's the volume, and the message. Stop shouting at me, especially about what being Canadian is.

If they were being at all honest, they'd be listening to that stereotypically small Canadian voice inside them that says Canadians don't like to boast. We just like feeling quietly smug, hopefully while counting several dozen medals.

the bowl which is super, or not

I have to confess that I don't really understand the whole Superbowl ad phenomenon. Obviously any event which exalts the creativity of our product is a good thing. And the buzz can only be good for those of us who toil to make ads which air the other 364 days of the year, right?

Consider the mere build up, the foreplay to the big day. The GoDaddy spot got some 3 million views based on not be allowed to air by CBS. The Focus on the Family spot got acres of coverage for their point of view for weeks before the actual game. After all that, the real live spots can only be brilliant, right? Well, of course not. Apart from the Snickers spot with Betty White and Abe Vigoda, which actually operates on the classical model of having a campaign theme and executing good creative that delivers against it, most of the spots seemed a little sad, like simple embodiments of the brief, or carny sideshow exhibitions, or spots guaranteed to be intertubed around the world... for about five seconds.

In some ways it's a wonderful synergistic model of consumer engagement across multiple media platforms. I know all the arguments about why something this big has to be good for clients. In other ways it's not good that much of the actual value provided by the millions being spent is not found in the TV eyeballs conjured up by the media buy itself, but in the cloud of accompanying hype and discussion and linksharing. How much lasting value are companies getting out of advertising like this? How much real consumer engagement is happening after you view a few of these things? How long until clients try to find ways of getting that kind of hype at a cheaper price?

It all feels somehow, well, wrong. People talk about the spots as a commodity, like race horses or chickens bred for cockfighting. The Betty White spot is well ahead of the field, with the guys staring at the camera spot a distant second and the talking babies lagging well behind...

The only thing that matters is being funny or weird or cute or stupid enough to be passed to your friends. The clients, apart from a few obvious exceptions like Apple with the 1984 spot, get forgotten, their logos and URLs slapped on for the last few seconds as a tip of the cap to the idea that advertising is supposed to convince consumers to feel something, as a means of getting them to buy something.

Update on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 9:53AM by Scott

Okay, the Google spot is brilliant. Maybe even a little teary, in the way that the first 10 minutes of Up get you. (Or the whole of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Go see it on stage some time.) Using their core functionality to suggest how two lives come together is really powerful. When we talk about branding in this crazy new modern century of ours, Google is the case study – they built their brand purely through their usefulness to consumers. Kudos to them for bringing that to life in a traditional brand spot.

his name is earl

So, even though it's a completely different business, under completely different circumstances, this is pretty much what's it's like to get feedback about creative from people who aren't creative. Earl Pomerantz is one of those guys who's written a pantload of shows that have made comedy history. (And he's a Toronto boy to boot.) His glimpse of sympathy, maybe even insight, into the lives of the execs he was sitting with and getting feedback from is really what I'm trying to get at in this little blog.

A 19th century German playwright Friedrich Hebbel once pointed us in the right direction. He wrote, "In a good play, everyone is right."

"the committee seems impressed"

For those of us on the inside, this article in today's Toronto Star about creating a public service ad won't hold that much interest. (Except of course the natural narcissistic interest in reading about ourselves.). But it does show a pretty common situation in the process of creating and producing advertising – the client seeing the work, liking it and almost approving it, but then realizing that it's contrary to some of their larger interests.

While I feel for the creatives involved and have been in the same boat many times, I think we on the agency side tend to focus narrowly on the task we're briefed on – we have to in order to get the best work possible. We forget that most of our clients have a wide range of businesses with lots of potential for conflict, and senior approvers who see the work for the first time from totally different perspectives.

Banks are a typical example; I've tried a couple of times pitching concepts for savings accounts that one way or the other implied that credit was bad, forgetting that credit cards are called that for a reason, and are of course a fairly profitable bank product typically run by another division of the bank. Someone on your team has to go through that to know.

On the client side, they tend not to realize that we will run with the brief and strategy wherever it takes us; it's an open-ended process. They don't usually know to think ahead to the needs of senior approvers, because they don't realize that we will almost inevitably transgress into those territories. We'll push things to a black-and-white statement that actually says something about the product, because that's our job – to make the strongest possible statement of our client's offering. That tends to worry committees.

So that first creative presentation can a real eye-opener for everyone involved. That's when the reality of the product and the project becomes apparent.

maybe the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me

Was out last evening with some old comrades, a former consumer insights analyst turned capitalist, and a creative director/art director. We were acquainting ourselves with some Stella Artois and gossiping and pontificating and taking the piss out of each other. It was pleasant.

A man joined us a couple of hours in, a friend of the capitalist's. I'm usually a little leery of pals of pals under these circumstances, when the history and level of intoxication that the three of us shared isn't shared by the newcomer; it tends to skew the vibe and course of the evening. (And, okay, it's usually just too much work to deal with new people in my life. I'm becoming a cranky old bastard.) But he was funny, a prosecutor who told good stories. And he seemed to enjoy our pontification about the State of Advertising, and Where Agencies were Going, and the Old Days generally. I was warming up to him.

And then after some particularly pointed wisdom on our part, in the context of young writers and art directors who are trying to break into the business, out of the blue the newcomer said:

"You guys clearly know how to punch – and get punched – in the mouth."

We stopped dead, breaking into smiles and suddenly feeling very cool, very Don Draper.

And also a little beaten up.