If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Right. Let’s sort this fucking thing out once and for all.

I don’t know how it happened, but this blog is often thought to be a bad-tempered whinge about the things that aren’t quite tickety-boo in the world of advertising.

Well, yes, I suppose that is sometimes the case, but I get the impression that my motives may be somewhat unclear.

For the avoidance of doubt, it might be worth pointing out that, in theory, I love advertising. Anyone in the industry who knows me well will tell you that I’m a massive ad geek, a nerdy twat with a depressingly encyclopedic knowledge of the best work of the last twenty years and beyond.

So when I write about the state of the industry in negative terms, it’s not because I’ve always thought advertising to be a soulless and superficial way to spend your career, or because I want the industry to come to an end. I just think it’s sliding off in the wrong direction, heading for a big old swimming pool of the runs.

I would dearly love there to be a brilliant ad made every day. If that were the case I would put it up and rim it senseless. You might be surprised to know that I actually lean in the direction of being more positive than I really feel, but that’s because the good stuff needs all the support it can get. However, there’s no point talking up the bad stuff, the results of advertising’s turn for the worse. That would only help (in a tiny way) to legitimise the direction in which things are going.

And I am 100% certain they are going in the wrong direction (apologies if you’ve heard any of this before, but I’m still fucked off because things still aren’t getting any better):

Ads are worse than they used to be: 2010 is the third straight year without a truly great ad from any UK agency. The UK has yet to produce a piece of digital or integrated work for a commercial client to match the great stuff produced by agencies from USA, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia or many other countries around the world. The UK hasn’t won a TV advertising Pencil since 2008 and has never won a Titanium or integrated Grand Prix. The facts speak for themselves, so you can feel free to disagree, but you will be pissing into quite a strong wind.

The love of money is the root of all shite: the efficient use of every single pound appears to be the sole motivator for practically everything produced by this industry. Yes, I am fully aware that advertising is a business, but it is a business that makes a product which is difficult to fully quantify. Does your ad need a helicopter shot or a cherry-picker? Three days of editing or four? A shoot in Morocco or Prague? When the pound is king, the cheaper choice will be made, whether or not it is the best or most appropriate solution. This extends to the employment of creatives: why hire a good, experienced senior team when you can get three mediocre junior teams for the same price? Most clients and agency management neither know nor care about the difference between good and great, and they certainly don’t want to pay for it. And that’s not to say that ads have to be expensive to be good, but they have to be creative, and that can involve a tricky sell, one that might strain the client relationship, jeopardising that kick-back to the holding company. I know of at least one massive UK agency where the account management department are explicitly instructed to sell the easy route and not the one which might require greater client persuasion. That way the agency makes more money and the client relationship stays nice and smooth, but the work is unlikely to be anything other than blah, and that’s been proven time and time again.

Which kind of leads to some sort of point about the overall motivation of the industry: if anything has made its shit-steaming, vomit-scented presence felt over the last ten years, it’s the influence of the holding company. Almost all the significant UK agencies are owned by a much larger company that likes profits – lots and lots of profits – and in these straitened times that financial imperative is even greater because these companies are owned by shareholders and the only thing any of them want is more money. Whether a massive pension group or your granny, almost everyone who invests in a business does so to increase the amount of their investment. Further down their list of priorities comes employee happiness and much, much further than that, a decent showing at Cannes. So the buck stops with people whose only motivation is a buck, and it is extremely unlikely that anyone in the chain of power is motivated by anything else (yes, I realise that this is a somewhat grey area with a few exceptions – we’re not toiling in sweatshops with no toilet breaks just yet – but the generalisation holds). Then we have the start-ups, none of which claims to have great creativity as their raison d’etre. Even if they believed they would put great ads before anything else they would never be so dumb as to say that publicly; after all, it might put off a client who would like some motherfucking ROI, thank you very much.

Then there’s the other money factor, which dictates that companies much squeeze as much work as possible out of the lowest number of employees. I can’t remember when this crept up on us, but in many agencies, if you agree to work for them, you agree to do so during whichever late nights and weekends they believe they require. It makes perfect sense: why pay for another employee when you can get another 20 hours a week out of your current workforce for nothing? Now, don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against working long hours to improve the creative work – most good creatives will want to put in long hours just to make sure their work is as good as it can be – but all too often it’s a grim exercise in generating quantity to make sure the client gets enough routes to choose from. I think there’s a simple test: if the creatives want to do the extra work, the work is good; if they are dragged in moaning, the work is shit, or worse – mediocre.

I believe that the money factor is the start point of a vicious circle that is causing serious and irreparable damage to the industry.

As I’ve pointed out before, a salary in the low six-figures was not uncommon in the creative departments of the mid-eighties. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find that a similar amount is similarly prevalent and possibly less so. In 2010, one very large UK agency has a department with only one team on over £100,000, and they have serious CD responsibilities. Again, I’ve pointed this out before, but £100,000 could buy you 800% more property in the mid-eighties than it can today, so in effect advertising creatives have had an 800% pay cut.

I’m not asking you to cry for anyone on that wage, not when nurses and teachers are on less than a quarter of that, but the good salary has been a factor in attracting talented people who might otherwise work in other countries or industries. The worse the potential remuneration, the worse the calibre of employee, especially when (see above) they won’t be attracted by the non-existent opportunity to do good work.

By putting itself in this position, the advertising in the UK is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Ads used to be great, so people liked and respected the industry (to a degree) via its output. If there are fewer people to make that great work, less great work gets made and the industry becomes still less attractive, then the quality of people who want to work in advertising in future will be worse, and so on…and so on…

The way in which the business is now set up, agencies make a lot more money than they used to from behind the scenes bullshit such as strategic audits and research analyses. This is where the Rise of the Planner is gaining momentum at the expense of the Creative. The creative work is both less important and less lucrative, leaving a gap for the planners to have close and constant contact with clients, allowing them to syphon off much client cash for wiffly toss that verges on the completely fucking useless. Of course, the management are keen to encourage this because it keeps the client’s money in the agency, but to the detriment of the end product, which becomes marginalised and forgotten.

But isn’t this just a microcosm of what has happened to the UK since the seventies? During that decade we stopped manufacturing actual physical products and became a country of service industries, of which advertising has been a significant and successful example. But let’s take it a stage further: advertising now produces a lower quality product (and, I believe, a lower quantity product. Have you seen how many old ads are being repeated at the moment?), while the number of internal wankathons increases. Will that not continue to devalue the industry as a whole? Surely someone will eventually turn around and realise we have million-pound strategies producing tuppence ha’penny work.

Is there any other evidence for this malaise? Well, I find it odd that people and organisations that have a cast-iron history of producing brilliance have not done so for a while. Think of your favourite director, creative or agency and name something they’ve done in the last few years that is up there with their best work.

See? Almost impossible. But that can’t be a coincidence. How did so many people lose their mojo at exactly the same time? Are people being given less time? Money? Trust? Respect? Are they having their work scrutinised and picked apart by the bean counters more significantly and regularly? Are the easy-sell scripts leaving the great directors to fight over far less top-drawer material? Is the marginalisation of creatives (and Creative Directors) leaving those post-production battles lost before they’ve even been fought?

Whatever the reasons, and there are probably many, the end results are undeniable. The best people are not allowed to work at their best. You are not being allowed to work at your best and that, ladies and gentlemen, is fucking insane.

But do people really care? I know of a creative team who have gained a D&AD nomination in the both of the last two years, but thay have yet to buy themselves an Annual to see their achievements immortalised. Partly it’s a question of money (couldn’t D&AD give away copies to the nominated people who make an annual possible?), but more than that, it’s a question of giving a fuck. Twenty or thirty years ago, aspiring creatives would live off baked beans to save the money for their Annual. They revered the work and wanted to emulate and surpass it. No longer.

When I was starting out there were many ‘star’ teams, pairs of people who produced award-winning brilliance in various media year after year. Now such people either do not exist or their significance and fame has been greatly reduced. It’s another part of the vicious circle: without shining examples to look up to, the younger generation of creatives are less motivated to be committed to the cause. Yet another benefit (being celebrated for great work) has disappeared, making the job still less attractive. Young creatives are paid less to produce worse work that fewer people care about. How can that lead anywhere except down a spiral to somewhere even worse?

And on that point, if they are less inclined to care, how can we expect them to put in the effort required to be even better? Being a great creative takes a lot of work, but also a lot of self-motivated learning. No one can make you take copywriting and art direction improvement classes; you have to want to do that yourself, but for the reasons above, fewer people want to. And that’s yet another reason why the work will get worse, spinning us round the vicious circle ever faster.

I know, I know, I know that the job is still enjoyable, that it still beats cleaning paraplegics’ genitalia for a living, that it’s relatively well paid versus the work you have to put in. I’m fully aware that it’s a bit of a cushy gig that can, on its good days be awesome, fun, stimulating, exciting and fulfilling.

I also know that this problem is far from exclusive to the advertising industry. Journalism, TV and film production and many other of the media jobs have also been humped dry by the money men, lowering standards and raising disaffection.

But that doesn’t mean it’s OK.

The above couple of thousand words have been said before on this blog. Chances are you’ve read them before. God knows, you might have nodded in reluctant agreement. But nothing’s changed. The work continues on its downward slide. The whinges of ITIABTWC are coming true, day in and day out, in your very office. In America, great creatives are leaving their agencies to start their own shops that they can mould to a form that gives them the chance to scratch that creative itch a little harder, and finally, with Richard Flintham’s departure from Fallon, the same thing is starting to happen here.

I don’t know a single UK creative who is happier with his working circumstances than he was a few years (or a decade) back. On the other hand, I do know more and more who have left their jobs, either to emigrate from the country or the industry. And these are good, clever people. The brain drain is happening right fucking now, and the industry only has itself to blame.

But what can you do about it?

Well, there’s the rub: almost certainly nothing, except find work that satisfies you. That might mean setting up your own place. It might mean finding something different to do. It might mean staying in the industry and doing whatever you can to make sure a beacon of creativity still shines through the fug of mediocrity, hoping that one day things will turn and diamonds are again prized above excrement.

Become the change you want to see in the world (© Mahatma Gandhi). Go, find your smile (© City Slickers).

Or sit in the toilet until it fills up with so much shit that it chokes the life out of you, leaving you an anonymous, ordure-ridden corpse, forever to be forgotten as just another citizen of Planet Earth who let the bastards grind him down.

It’s up to you (smiley face made out of punctuation).