If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

To be clear, this is not a post that’s just crapping on AI for the sake of it.

To all the AI fanboys: I understand that it’s great for medical stuff, summarising things and creating low-quality creativity that needs human help to be halfway decent.

(Also: the owners of AI make their money by using a ridiculous amount of power and water to steal work from all over the internet, and have yet to convince Wall Street that it’s going to be profitable.)

But let’s put all that aside. This is about AI creating ads.

The other day I was reading a LinkedIn post about the German National Tourist Board creating an ad presented by an AI ‘influencer’ that will show you some artificially images of Germany in a creepily robotic and soulless manner.

My comment: ‘If Germany can’t be bothered to make a real ad, why should I be bothered to make a real visit?’. 

I hadn’t really thought that through 100%, but as I gave it more consideration the penny dropped a little further: AI is intrinsically about doing things faster, at lower cost and with less effort.

That all sounds great if you’re the one making the stuff. However, if you’re the one receiving it, you will be aware that someone somewhere thought you weren’t worth the time and effort to make something with craft, cost, care and consideration.

Imagine it’s your birthday. Would you prefer a generic store-bought cake, or one that someone had taken the time to make properly, with the exact ingredients you like, and your own name piped on the top instead of a perfect, machine-lettered, one-size-fits-all ‘Happy Birthday’?

If you have something important to say (which is how most clients tend to think of their communications), then saying it cheaply and quickly seems a bit odd, as if you don’t value it after all. 

Whereas the use of craft, time, effort, thought, consideration and expense intrinsically implies that the message really matters.

It’s a little like digital vs traditional media. A little box on Facebook feels ephemeral and valueless; here today, gone later today. But a billboard or a TV ad feels more like somebody, somewhere gave a proper shit about what they wanted to say, suggesting that you should give a similar shit in return.

The whole point of AI is to crank out quantity as cheaply as possibly. Yes, eventually the quality will improve, but as long as we know that what we are being served is AI-generated, we will know that the people responsible just didn’t care that much about what they were saying.

Messages come to us in two ways: style and content. Even if the latter is brilliant, the former can always drag it down. 

Convenience and cheapness have their place, but the value people will take from our work will only be equal to the value we put into it.

I just finished watching Mad Men for the third time. The first followed the initial annual-ish release of seasons, with the second and third times both inhaled all in one go, over a month or two.

Before I dive into some elements that might relate to the advertising industry in 2024, may I just make one thing clear: Mad Men is the best TV show in the history of the medium. 

Over 92 episodes it is perfectly written, constructed, paced, acted, directed, photographed, designed and hairdressed. That’s over 4000 minutes of utter brilliance, something no Hollywood director ever achieved.

Sure, some of you are shaking your heads, muttering ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Grange Hill’, but I’ve watched them all, and Mad Men is clearly the best.

(By the way, I wrote a post about the show back in May 2015. I had attended a Writer’s Guild event where the creators answered questions. It was fun.)

If you watched it when if first appeared, 10-15 years ago, you were probably struck by how little the business has fundamentally changed. Sure, we no longer drink or smoke that much, but the frustrations of client relationships, what to do when the CD presents their own work over that of their teams, and the CFO hanging himself in his office are situations we’ve all witnessed many, many times.

On this occasion I was struck by some of the ways in which it relates to today’s industry.

Towards the end of the show there’s a plotline about installing a computer in order to for the agency to appear more modern. The creatives are suspicious while others are concerned that it will take people’s jobs away. When it was written, around 2013, the current form of AI was a mere pipe dream, but now it’s been installed in every agency, making creatives suspicious and making others concerned that it will take people’s jobs away.

There’s also an interesting story where Peggy organises a stunt whereby two women are paid to pretend to fight over who gets to buy the last ham in the store. Look! It’s a preview of the experiential/stunt advertising which is now so prevalent. Don was not happy with this turn of events, as he felt it made the agency look cheap and sensationalist. He was right. In many instances he would also be right today.

Did they cover ‘purpose’? Kind of. Mad Men was set at a time when casual racism and sexism was not only a regular occurrence, it was also celebrated. Giving a crap about coral reefs or unrealistic body images was not on the cards. That said, when his agency lost Lucky Strike, Don wrote an open letter, published in the New York Times, setting out his new policy of declining tobacco accounts. It then bites him on the arse as other potential clients fear suffering the same treatment (a fate which did not befall AMV BBDO when it made an identical declaration). So perhaps Mad Men predicted the drive to purpose, and what seems to be the backlash that has followed. In the end, money always talks. Purpose was all well and good when it was the shortest path to an award, but juries now seem to be suffering from a degree of Mother Theresa fatigue.

One more big difference between then and now is the admission of fallibility. There are several moments where Don reminds clients that, when it comes to his work, there are no guarantees of success. That kind of self-aware ‘we’ll do our best’ is in stark contrast to the data-driven dross of today. Click-through rates, likes, followers and other meaningless KPIs now rule the industry, as if guarantees can be guaranteed. A return to the explicit admission that we are all taking a chance might not be a bad thing.

So I’ll repeat: it’s brilliant. Watch it again. There’s much to learn and much to entertain, and if it encourages you to keep a bottle of Smirnoff in the office, that’s fine by me.

For decades advertising had a very clear brass ring. Despite the prestige afforded press, posters and radio, TV was the real toppermost of the poppermost.

(There’s a reason why some teams suffered the withering insult ‘Yeah, but they can’t do TV’, yet no one ever insulted a great TV creative by saying, ‘Yeah, but they can’t do press/posters/radio.)

It was the most famous, the most expensive and the coolest medium. If you told someone you worked in advertising they might ask if they’d seen anything you’d done. What they meant was anything you’d done on TV.

Of course we cared about the best work in the other media, but the public thought that TV ads mattered about a thousand times more than anything else we did. 

It was almost like telling your mum you were on TV. If you were watching your favourite show, your ad might appear right in the middle of it, giving your work a kind of adjacent version of fame. When you made a TV commercial you hired a real director, cast real actors and closed down real streets. That was usually more fun than picking a font or making sure the headline of your DPS didn’t disappear down the gutter.

So yeah, it was the best part of the job.

In many ways it still is, but that superiority has been severely diluted in recent years.

First off, we now make lots of filmed entertainment that most people don’t see. There’s no point telling your mum you did that TikTok aimed at people who groom their dogs in West Lancashire, or that Instagram influencer campaign for cheese-lovers in Gravesend.

But second, and more problematically, the award medium of the moment probably isn’t TV.

It might be long-form online advertising, like one of the Dove experiments or Like a Girl. It might be a statue, like Fearless Girl or Project 84. There’s a good chance it’s some kind of stunt, like Lost Class or Whopper Freakout. And finally it might well be something ‘experiential’, like Burger King x Stevenage or Long Live The Prince.

So the classic, unchallenged brass ring is now a bunch of vaguer, more disparate rings, made out of a wide variety of semi-precious metals and questionable alloys.

So what? Well, awards are still the most direct route to raises and promotions, so creative people like to win them. In addition, agencies like to boast about them, so CEOs and chairpeople also like to win them. Furthermore, if Cannes is anything to go by, they’re becoming increasingly important to clients, so they also like to win them.

For better or worse, awards matter, and when a bunch of clever people want to win metal animal heads and stubby bits of wood, they find all sorts of new and unusual ways to make that happen.

First we had Pre-Scam (1960s-90s), the name I’m giving to the era before proper scam. In those charmingly innocent days you might enter a 2-minute version of your TV ad by running it once at 3am in an obscure fleapit, or trim the phone number off the entry proof to make it look better. Cheating, but not to the extent that anyone was that bothered.

Then we had Proper Fucking Scam (2000s), where people literally made ads up that had never even run, and sometimes even made up the client, and sometimes even pretended Nike was their client (true story. Quick aside: I just tried to find a record of that story online because I know it happened, but I can’t find any evidence of it. I think it was DDB Dubai, and Chat GPT has confirmed that, but then Chat GPT does lie occasionally. If you remember it happening and have a link, please pass it on). Fun times, but they had to end. Creatives were given an inch, but they took a mile, and things got too ridiculous to sustain (that said, it’s still kind of happening now).

Then the 2010s brought The Eventy Thing That Needs A 2-Minute Explanation. Crazy. Now everything needs a 2-minute explanation, even posters, and that explanation better have stats, TikTok clips of people very genuinely talking about the campaign totally unprompted, and a flurry of possibly-genuine tweets covering the whole screen. 

I get it. Digital advertising needs context, and indeed explanation. But when the digital people got to essentially write an ad for their ad, the whole industry wanted in, and the Case Study became its own art form. 

So how did that lead to TV being dethroned? 

Well, a weird digital thing which requires an explanation will be judged almost entirely on that explanation. The jury will have to take your word for those ‘3.2 billion media impressions’ or ‘+673% spontaneous recall’. TV, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide. Sure, it still (insanely) gets to add an explanation, but the jury will also watch and judge the actual ad, so it had better be good.

In addition, most TV advertising is still more expensive than, say, a statue, so if you want to win a Cannes Grand Prix (or six), it makes more sense to take the experiential route. If you tell people you won eight Cannes Golds, those people tend not to ask if any were for Creative Use of Data, Audience Under 25,000. The congrats will be the same is if they were all for Something Normal People Can Understand.

Lastly, The Titanium Lion, probably the most prestigious award in advertising, was designed to be about ‘shaking the whole thing up and doing something so completely unprecedented and unexpected that it would startle people’ That is much easier to do when you are using an entirely new medium or area, which makes it tricky for a straight-down-the-line 2024 TV ad to conquer. Human beings tend to prefer taking the path of least resistance, so if you want to win the biggest prize in the industry, it probably makes more sense to do a Roblox takeover or paint Nelson’s Column pink (for some reason that will make sense in the case study: Barbie, feminism, phalluses etc).

TV has also lost prestige because production has become cheaper. Not that producing things costs less than it used to; the ‘cheaper’ comes from the fact that much filmed advertising now takes the form of social ads with a budget of a few thousand Dollars/Euros/Pounds. Quicker, smaller, lower quality, seen by fewer people. That’s now most of the audio/visual in the world. It’s less respectable, so we respect it less. 

And TV has been callously dismissed for over a decade now. It’s ‘old hat’, ‘a dying medium’, ‘shite’ etc. The neophilia of the ad industry means that the new media options are always considered to be better than the older ones, so now we all need portfolios with 360 campaigns lest we be thought of as out-of-touch dinosaurs. That vibe has of course translated to how the medium is viewed in award judging.

There’s a still a big place at the table for TV commercials – even if they’re just silly old 30-second things that entertain millions of people and get them to buy lots of stuff – but they are no longer at the top of the tree. 

I think that matters because TV (along with press, posters and radio) is now tainted with a vibe of being obsolete, unless of course it involves some sort of extension of the medium.

But all the traditional media channels are still capable of greatness. They just have a harder job convincing the industry that they still matter as much as the shinier, newer options.

And if that isn’t a very long metaphor for the over-40s who are still in the industry, then I don’t know what is (winky emoji).

Every now and again people ask me if they can write a post for the blog. Usually it’s because they would like to say something to a slightly larger audience than LinkedIn might offer. In this case, that makes complete sense.

Nick Bell, Cannes Grand Prix winner when it was much harder to do, feels quite rightly that the official end to Patrick Collister’s career should not pass without some sort of substantial recognition of who he was/is and what he did for the UK ad industry.

I entirely agree. I have been fortunate enough to find myself in Patrick’s orbit on several occasions. The first was when I was back at Watford College and he was in charge at Ogilvy. He set us a brief then generously hosted the entire course as we presented our work to him. The next time was a few years later when he ran a kind of career course from his country house. All the AMV BBDO creative juniors attended, and I still remember substantial parts of what he said over 25 years later. Most recently he asked me to judge the Caples awards, and was again a most generous, wise and committed organiser of the judges’ diverse opinions.

I’m leaving out a tonne of stuff about his brilliant work (which you can find here), but without further ado, I’d like to hand you over to Nick, who has written a far better tribute than I ever could…

A few days ago, I saw a post on LinkedIn from Patrick Collister.

It featured a photo of Patrick’s old zip-up portfolio and some of his awards on a skip.

Alongside this photo, Patrick said goodbye to his advertising career.

I started to write a ‘comment’ but soon realised it would be a hell of a long one.

So thank you, Ben, for posting this on your blog.

Patrick, my apologies for being late to the party but I want to add my name to the considerable list of those whose lives you have touched in significant ways.

When I were a young lad writing mailers for Maxpax (remember them?) and Rank Xerox for £4k a year at Wunderman Direct Marketing, I dreamed of writing great ads.

Luckily for me, a stairway at Greater London House took me directly to the Young & Rubicam creative department where I befriended some of the young creatives (Paul Burke, Dave Bell, step forward) and sought help to improve my impoverished portfolio.

I’ve never forgotten that the person who gave me most time and help was more senior and established.

I had been set a brief for Mother’s Pride bread by Nick Wray at GGT and you agreed to look at my work.

Because Mother’s Pride was a wrapped loaf, I had chosen a strategy of hygiene.

‘Hands up all those who like to squeeze a loaf before they buy it’ accompanied by a visual of lots of grubby raised hands was one of my offerings.

You helped me improve my work.

‘How many germs come with the wheatgerm?’ you wrote.

And then one day you asked me to pop up to see you.

You had an idea about the young Jackie and Bobby Charlton playing football in the back streets of Ashington then hungrily devouring a tea of sandwiches made with Mother’s Pride.

Your thought was ‘Millions of little Britons grow up great with Mother’s Pride’.

I was amazed and humbled too that you had carried on thinking about my brief when you already carried a lot of your own responsibility at Y&R.

And in that moment also, you taught me the power of the emotional over the purely rational.

You set me briefs yourself.

Y&R held the Royal Marines account and you gave me the brief to write a double page colour magazine ad recruiting for the elite Marines.

I was nervous as hell.

I wrote dozens of ideas – most of them useless, I’m sure.

But when I showed you my efforts, your eyes lit up at one.

I’d read an article which suggested that, such was the rivalry between the Parachute Regiment (the Paratroopers) and The Royal Marines, the real Falklands War took place on the ships to the islands.

I’d scamped a long copy ad consisting of mugshots of Paratroopers with quotes from them testifying to the pre-eminence of the Marines.

The headline I’d written was ‘A few Paras on what it takes to be a Royal Marine’.

You couldn’t have been more generous in your praise of the ad.

You championed it.

You showed it around Y&R.

I even tasted a couple of weeks of minor celebrity as I heard a whisper in the agency bar – ‘That’s the kid who wrote the Royal Marines ad’.

And you presented the ad to the Royal Marines client.

You probably didn’t realise what this experience meant to me.

Or the belief it filled me with.

Just a couple of years ago, you emailed me.

You had been rooting through your loft and had come across a yellowing copy of the original layout.

You told me that had the client had the balls to run the ad, I would have picked up my first Campaign Press awards.

Sometime after I moved on from Greater London House, I saw an ad campaign on telly.

It featured little boys and girls eating Heinz Baked Beans and growing up to be Ian Botham and Steve Davis amongst others.

And sure enough, the campaign line was ‘Millions of little Britons have grown up great knowing Beanz Meanz Heinz’.

Clever you!

But then your cleverness was seldom in doubt.

‘Accrington Stanley’. ‘The French adore Le Piat d’Or’.

You’ve written some great work, Patrick.

We have always stayed in touch throughout the years.

You were kind enough to invite me at one stage to join you at Ogilvy where you were ECD.

I would have loved that but the timing wasn’t right for me.

And then, irony of ironies, in 2003 you and I were the last two candidates vying to be elected President of D&AD.

A vote was to be held amongst our peers in the industry and so I was surprised to receive a letter from you a few days ahead of the vote congratulating me on being elected and telling me what a good President I would make.

It was a classy and generous gesture in an industry not always distinguished by class and generosity.

It was also typical of you.

(I have the email you sent me when you had seen the NHS recruitment film I wrote.)

In your post, you mention the Sigmoid Curve and the need to keep reinventing yourself.

I’m currently and excitedly on that curve so if you fancy that coffee or beer we’re overdue, it’d be great to see you and to natter.

In the meantime, all the very best Patrick.

Besides writing wonderful advertising throughout your career, the sheer weight of generous, admiring and loving comments in response to your post testifies to your selflessness and quality.

Nick.

Here’s an interesting video:

If you’re too busy to watch it, it features Justin Timberlake explaining why he sang ‘It’s gonna be maaaay’ on a song called ‘It’s gonna be me’. In short, the odd pronunciation was much more memorable, making the song stickier and ultimately more iconic.

I’m a firm believer in the benefits of such things. They’re unnecessary, illogical, immeasurable, inexplicable, hard-to-justify catalysts for true brilliance (and N’Sync songs).

If you want some examples of how they’ve made ads better, how about the little kid with the Scottish accent who ‘conquered worlds’?

He (she?) is by far the most memorable part of a great ad. He/she made it sticky in a way that precisely none of the other lines managed to do.

But it doesn’t have to be a line read or a performance. It could be a soundtrack, like this one:

It’s weird, it’s unexpected, its anachronistic to the visuals, it makes you wonder why they chose it, and it’s very cool.

It could also be a piece of writing, such as, ’It’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love’.

People don’t write ads like that, or talk like that. Why did they put it that way? Why didn’t they say ‘two tickets to your favorite movie’? Why an oyster? Who presents things in oysters?

OK, I think I’ve made my point.

If I were higher-brow I’d have titled this post ‘Reason is not the Need’, a quote from King Lear, explaining that humans would be no different from animals if they did not need more than the fundamental necessities of life to be happy. 

We like the weird extras because something deep inside us needs them.

The tricky part is justifying them to someone who is paying for the bare necessities. Then again, that’s why you shoot the board, then have fun with some other takes. It’s why you encourage a little improv during the radio recording session. It’s why you… urgh… I can’t think of any digital examples because I don’t know any. Maybe there are some social lines that are really good, but I wonder why so many are written yet so few are awarded, or otherwise celebrated.

Anyway, see if you can add some random weirdness to your work. It’s liberating, and it’s why I gave this blog such a stupid name.

I’m sure people will try to stop you, but then you can just show them this post and they’ll almost certainly let you have all the fun you want.

Imagine this: you’re at the cusp of deciding which career path you’re going to take. A few people are making suggestions; friends, teachers, parents, friends of parents… You take a look at what various jobs might involve, match the favourites to your own skillset, and take some kind of plunge into the world of… advertising.

20+ years ago that process happened within the context of an industry that was both very similar and critically different to the 2014 version.

In broad terms, advertising used to be more of a calling. Sure, it’s never been medicine, the government, the law, or one of those other professions that could be described as an overall service to people who really need it. But despite that, there was a always a sense that the output of your daily job could be part of a continuum of culture-defining greatness. 

From the Guinness and Cinzano posters of the 1930s, through Think Small, Snowplow, Hamlet, Heineken, The Economist, Tango, Guinness, Think Different, Honda, Mac vs PC, Cadbury’s Gorilla and many others, the very best of what the industry has produced could be defined as just one rung below actual art.

People have hung great ads on their walls and in galleries; endlines and catchphrases have spread throughout society and culture, sometimes lasting for decades; and advertising has fueled other art forms, giving rise to great writers, directors and entrepreneurs.

In short, it ain’t Motown or the National Gallery, but it also ain’t accounts payable for a valve manufacturer in Gravesend.

As someone who joined the industry in the 1990s, I can tell you that I was very much under the impression that a ‘great’ ad could really fit the definition of that adjective: famous, admired and blessed with longevity. That was what we were striving to create, and we felt that with the right brief and enough hard work, it was very much possible.

I’m not sure that the same feeling exists for people who have entered advertising in the last decade.

Sure, the continuum is still continuing through John Lewis, Old Spice, Channel 4 and the occasional Nike ad, but I think it’s fair to say that, despite LinkedIn’s ridiculous overuse of the word ‘genius’, the number of current ads that are truly brilliant is vanishingly small. 

Even smaller is the proportion of great ads. We now make so many, in so many channels, that the percentage of greatness probably starts with a zero and a decimal point.

Now that we’re a couple of decades into the domination of the internet, anyone younger than 25-30, will only know a world of Facebook, Google, smartphones etc.; an online world which rarely offers us remarkable, culturally significant ads.

In this world TV has become less and less important, making it less and less likely that culturally significant advertising is inspiring people to join the industry.

Beyond that, our most prestigious awards are now reserved for purpose- or tech-based initiatives that few people in the real world ever see. Look through the list of Cannes winners and consider how many your mum would recognise (I know many are from other countries, but they still seem to be the kind of thing that made a relatively minor splash outside the industry, despite those ‘3.67 billion media impressions’).

So there’s much to disappoint, and little to inspire. That means that what used to be a calling is now closer to being, well, a job.

Which brings us to an interesting inflection point. 

Agencies are currently run by Gen X or older Millennial people, almost all of whom would have entered the industry when it was a calling, or at least more of one than it is today. We had a ton of incredible ads to aim at, and we could realistically dream of becoming part of that continuum, or creating a catchphrase for the entire country.

But like the proverbial boiling frog, we have seen that opportunity slowly ebb away. Sure, it still exists, but the more times you’re given a ‘hard working’ social post to write for ‘lower down the funnel’ the less likely you are to think that greatness is on the cards.

An older manager, indoctrinated in the idea that greatness is possible on every brief, might want to stop for a moment and think about what the new normal feels like: worse work, longer hours, lower wages and fewer opportunities to create something your taxi driver is aware of.

Asking people who exist in that reality to stay later, think harder or sacrifice parts of their life for the minuscule chance to ‘do great work’ is perverse. That’s why many younger people think of advertising as a job, albeit one that is slightly more enjoyable and fulfilling than most.

Add the crushing existence of post-2008 wage stagnation and austerity, along with the the experience of the pandemic, the knowledge that the Climate Crisis is only going to get worse, and the dawning realisation that AI is likely to make your job obsolete, and you have a colossal chunk of the workforce that cannot see advertising as a career, let alone a calling.

Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what the older generation is expecting of the younger one. 

One is in the same industry as the other, but with less hope, joy, expectation and inspiration. Management might think they are offering the same jobs they themselves started with, but unless they honestly recognise that many elements are worse, they are going to be frustrated by the reduced levels of enthusiasm.

It’s an unamusing cliche of 2024 that the younger generation ‘doesn’t want to work’ or that they expect all sorts of unrealistic perks. But if you think back to 1990s/2000s advertising, it was full of the kind of ‘perks’ money can’t buy. Imagine being given two weeks to write a TV ad, then being given half a million pounds to make it and having ten million people watch it, all with cheaper rent, better pay and an actual office.

Unless we make the industry as attractive to the new juniors as it was to us, we’re going to continue to attract less engaged staff, who will never be inclined to go the extra mile for the sake of someone’s ill-defined version of excellence.

If that seems to be a bit of a First-World problem, imagine what the industry will look like to the next generation.

At some point we have to find a way to make advertising more of a calling and less of a job. Either that or we start competing for staff with the finance department of Johnson’s Valves of Gravesend.

One of the consequences of the proliferation of media channels is that many people now seem to be responsible for any celebrated piece of work.

There are now several creatives, creative directors, GCDs, ECDs and CCOs attached to any multimedia project.

Having been involved with several of these projects, I can tell you that creative involvement can range from coming up with the idea and closely shepherding every element of the execution to just being in the room while others added the good stuff (or even making suggestions that make the work worse).

But from the outside everyone gets the same amount of credit, so how can you tell who did what, and therefore who to hire?

I’d suggest that it’s now impossible.

Back in the pre-digital times you had one team of a copywriter and an art director, and if a good piece of work had their name on it, you could be pretty confident that it was good because of what they did. Even more specifically, the writer almost certainly did the writing, and the art director, y’know, directed the art, so if you liked the copy, and you wanted to hire the person who did it, you just had to put two and two together.

Sure, sometimes the AD/client/planner would come up with the endline, but in general, the credits were accurate. 

The CD element might be a bit of a wildcard, possibly contributing something critical, but sometimes knowing little-to-nothing about the project. That said, their reputation would be made on the basis of the entire agency’s output, not just a single commercial.

But as the 2000s wore on, campaigns needed the help of a separate digital agency, with its own creatives and CDs. Later on they might need another experiential agency to add to the numbers. Later still, most of those jobs came under the roof of a single agency, but a campaign might still require several teams so that the TV creatives didn’t have to write all the social post copy while they were concentrating on the edit.

And that’s where we are now. 

Have a look at any multimedia award winner of the last few years and you’ll have no idea who really did the amazing/difficult/original part of the campaign.

For example, have a look at the credits for Moldy Whopper. Three agencies from three countries supplied three art directors, two copywriters, one senior art director, two Group Creative Directors, an Executive Creative Director, and Executive Design Director, two Chief Creative Officers and two Global Chief Creative Officers.

Who had the original thought, ‘Let’s show a mouldy Whopper’? And who was in charge of producing the final image? Those would be the two people I’d like to hire, but I have no idea which of those people really did what.

Maybe they all did a lot of essential things, but unless you were on the project, I think you’d find it hard to tell who did what. So if you want to hire the people who really were behind one of the most awarded campaigns of recent years, you might end up picking the wrong ones.

In all fairness, when I’ve been involved in one of those campaigns, everyone credited did a lot of work, but if I wanted to hire the person who was actually responsible for the original concept, I’d have a lot of trouble narrowing down the list.

I also think it’s fair enough for all the credited creatives to put the ad in their portfolios. If they spent six months working on the final design of the digital part of the campaign that started with a statue, then what are they supposed to do? Leave a big six-month hole in their career even though they worked their arses off?

Ideally, people would be completely honest in their portfolios, but let’s not be naive; we work in advertising, so we spend all day making things look as impressive as possible. If we massage the hell out of all the stats in the case study video, why would we downplay our involvement in a piece of work? 

Back in the mid-2000s a friend of mine created a critical part of a Cannes Grand Prix-winning, globally famous campaign. To be nice to a junior team, they asked them to do a bit of writing on the work (to be fair, I suppose that is real, helpful creativity), but then that junior team were responsible for sorting out the award entry, and magically found that their names were credited ahead of those of my friend. 

I’m going to guess that many mistaken hirings have happened, with many a disappointed CCO finding themselves with the ‘guy who happened to be in the room’, rather than the ‘girl who wrote the entire script but had the credit stolen from them’.

So the credit system is now open to a lot of abuse, but you can just add that to all the shitty things that have happened to the industry in the last fifteen years.

Back before he was canceled (then won a Grammy), Louis CK had a ‘bit’ called ‘Of course… but maybe’:

“Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. For me, I always have both. I have the thing I believe, the good thing. And then there’s this thing (cue villainous gesture). And I don’t believe it…but it is there.

“It’s become a category in my brain that I call ‘of course…but maybe.’

“(For example) Of course, children who have nut allergies need to be protected. We need to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times; anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course.

“But maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die.”

You can watch it here:

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the whole clip, he gives the same treatment to military deaths and – yikes! – slavery. Despite the plummet his reputation then took, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really hold these positions, but who knows?

In that spirit, anyone who has worked in advertising for a while can probably produce their own examples. For some reason, our industry is full of strange contradictions, and yet no one seems to care enough to do anything about them (aside from this post, which is bound to sort out the entire mess by the end of the day).

For example…

Of course our work should be original and different. Of course! That’s how it stands out from the other stuff, and standing out is essential to being noticed. If no one notices your work, it doesn’t matter how good it is, so we must all endeavour to produce advertising that is nothing like the ‘content’ that surrounds it.

But maybe… But maybe we need to follow best practices, especially in digital media where we know for sure what kind of images and writing will be most successful. So for maximum effectiveness, we should use the same data as everyone else to reach the same insights as everyone else, and place our work in all the same locations as our competition and have our messaging look exactly the same as theirs.

Of course we should make sure our work is simple. Throw one tennis ball and it’s easy to catch; throw a few and its impossible to catch anything. Every communication we offer should reduce any complexity down to the kind of concision that is easy to understand and remember.

But maybe… Maybe the clients won’t think they’re getting enough work for their money unless every single thing we say to them comes in the form of a 128-slide deck presented over the course of three hours. In addition, maybe we should litter billboards with QR codes, use fifteen separate media channels, and expect punters to engage with ads that are five minutes long. Maybe?

Of course we should use a client’s money and public messaging opportunities to improve the world! Of course! Nothing makes more sense than rechanneling the ill-gotten gains of capitalism into initiatives that will benefit the marginalised and forgotten. It’s like a socioeconomic Robin Hood thing, and what could be better than that?

But maybe… But maybe purpose-based efforts are just expensive exercises in wokewashing, greenwashing and whitewashing the bad behaviour of giant corporations, allowing them to game any SEO negativity, while sending lots of money in the direction of the ad industry, who then become complicit in the deceit as they give these sneaky corporate disguises their highest awards.

See? It’s easy. I bet you can think of others:

Endless collaboration/all opinions matter equally vs Accountability and the quality of a singular vision.

Jingles are cheesy and lazy vs I still remember jingles from 30 years ago.

Only present work you want to make vs We only had one idea we we want to make but we can’t back the client into the corner with only one choice, so we’d better show three ideas, even through we don’t really like two of them.

AI is a fantastic tool for creativity vs AI is coming for the jobs of all creative people, thus destroying true creativity.

Etc.

As You Like It suggests that there are seven ages of life. With apologies to William Shakespeare I’m going to explore the seven ages of advertising creativity.

Before I start, a caveat: this is very much a generalisation. Of course people start agencies at all sorts of stages of their careers, and many people, by their own choice or otherwise, never become Creative Directors. That said, I believe there is a broad path that takes most of us from education to maturation.

So let’s begin with the first age: College. At some point you decide to pursue advertising as a career. Sure, you can start in the dispatch department and make the move from there, but you’re more likely to go to some kind of college where you’ll meet your partner and learn the basics.

The point of this age is to enjoy some time with no client comments and an infinite (theoretical) budget. Stretch your legs, make mistakes, eat Pot Noodles and try to make your parents understand why the TV ad they love is actually rubbish because it has a weak concept, and lacks originality.

Your next age is Placement, the first step into the corporate world. A real ad agency is happening around you so you have to juggle doing good work with being the kind of people the agency would like to keep around.

It’s all about converting this strange state of purgatory into an actual job, so you have to keep your eyes on the prize while you continue to eat Pot Noodles, but at least some of your new colleagues will buy you drinks in the agency bar.

From there you become a Junior. At last! A real job! Of course, you will have to do all the less glamorous briefs, but that doesn’t matter because you soon realise that a radio ad means casting, and therefore hanging out with, your favorite comedian. It also means you can order from the giant book of takeaway menus and eat/steal all the Celebrations. Hooray!

But you want to move up, and to do that you’ll need a bigger brief or two, and that means navigating the fact that more powerful creatives in your department would also like those briefs. You’re going to have to beat them at some point, and the sooner you do that, the sooner you get to move into the mystical hinterland of the Middleweight Creative.

(By the way, if you’re reading this in America, a UK middleweight creative is basically an ACD, although I suspect the American love of title promotions has very much made its way across the Atlantic.)

Middleweight is a weird place, in that you never really get formally promoted to that position. After a few years of being a junior you just declare it, then you discover that no one cares. You just keep ticking along with slightly better access to slightly better briefs.

But then you become a Senior Creative, or perhaps a CD. You now need client-facing skills that no one taught you in college. You’ve probably had a few client meetings before this stage, but you didn’t contribute much just in case a cheeky slip of the tongue lost your agency its biggest client.

You could well be ‘in charge’ of a piece of business, helping to shape it for a year or two, and you might well have younger teams working into you, so you now have to evaluate work, give feedback and try not to let the power go to your head. 

The next stage is some form of CD. In a network agency that might involve running one big piece of business or several smaller ones. In a medium agency you get all the responsibility your boss doesn’t want. In a small agency you might well be the boss.

At this point you will be looking to make enough of a name that you can make it to the next stage of being properly in charge. You might write a thought piece for Creative Review, or move to an agency where the path upwards is a little clearer. You might also stay at this age for quite a while, because unless you start your own place, you have to wait to be invited to the top table…

And there it is: the final boss (but not the final age). At this point you are either some kind of ECD/CCO, or you have launched your own agency with some pals you picked up along the way who work in the other departments.

This position can take many forms depending on the size of agency, its location and whether or not you were promoted from within or poached from somewhere else. You are now almost certainly in your 40s, and have to balance all this stuff with a more substantial family life. Good luck with that.

If you started your own place, that work/life balance will be tilted very heavily towards ‘work’ for a few years. Hopefully your agency will thrive, but the odds are not on your side. That’s why you might bounce around between senior agency jobs and optimistic start-ups. Find the one that suits you best and, like a rodeo ride atop a merciless bull, try to stay on as long as possible.

At some point you will find yourself surplus to requirements: perhaps too expensive, or merely a victim of advertising’s love of the new. You might pop back to one of those top jobs, but you might not, so what do you do with all those years between 48 and retirement?

Some people choose this point to launch that start-up, and sometimes that works, but it’s a lot of effort for middle-age, so you might try to be a consultant, or some version of a freelancer, sliding back down the mountain to do the work of a CD or senior creative. Depending on your finances, you keep it going as long as you can, while staring the industry’s ageism right in the face until you inevitably blink first and it casts you aside forever.

Whichever age you’re in, there’s always fun to be had, but you also have to earn your place. Just work hard, be nice and see where the ride takes you. Best of luck!

There’s a new John Lewis ad out:

What is there to say?

Well, as each new offering arrives with its own wider context, especially as it’s the next in a long line of ads that genuinely changed advertising, I think there’s plenty.

And now I’m going to prove it:

First, a little of that context. For the uninitiated, starting with The Long Wait in 2011 John Lewis kicked off a new UK advertising genre: the Christmas Ad. The Long Wait was so influential, every major British retailer soon felt the need to provide a massive, heartwarming 60 to 180-second commercial, often with a slow, sappy version of a famous rock song, that would see the country through what we now understand to be the Tory Austerity years.

Was the sociopolitical element really a part of it? Maybe. The previous year, John Lewis had given us the excellent More Than A Woman, so they were already heading down this path before applying it to Christmas. But the warmth with which The Long Wait was greeted gave the other supermarkets and department stores a clue to what the Great British Public wanted.

I’m not going to go into all the other epics dished out to us by Sainsbury’s, M&S, Asda etc., but The Christmas Ad soon became the UK equivalent of the Superbowl, where six months of planning and a massive budget became the norm.

The extra John Lewis context is that it remained the Granddaddy of them all: usually the best; definitely the most anticipated; but also the one with the most baggage. Raising the bar means raising expectations, so if you want to avoid hearing, ‘It’s good, but not as good as last year’, you have to up the standard and eventually attempt a kind of reinvention.

You can find them all here. They’ve done celebrities (Elton John), initiatives (The Beginner), animation (the Bear and The Hare), but mainly they’ve done sweet stories featuring a child’s relationship with something that can be turned into a toy (Moz the Monster, Monty the Penguin, Excitable Edgar etc.) and sold in the stores.

And all seemed to be going well until…

John Lewis started experiencing massive financial losses. Was it inflation? The Cost of Living Crisis? Shoplifting? All of the above?

Whatever it was, this year John Lewis put the account up for review. This article suggests that was down to putting ever-greater demands on Adam and Eve DDB, the agency that produced all that work. There were also many changes in the management of both client and agency, and that rarely helps with longevity.

Saatchi and Saatchi won the pitch, and their first Christmas work is this year’s Venus Fly Trap ad (I’m sure it has a cute name but I can’t be arsed to look it up).

To me it feels a bit like a photocopy of a John Lewis ad from ten years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s also not one of the best. Heartwarming story about a kid who sees things differently to his more conventional family? Check. Heartwarming friendly creature that can become a toy? Check. Heartwarming ending that rugpulls a seemingly sad situation? Check. The music is different, but I’m not sure how much this Andrea Bocelli cod-operatic song is going to trouble the charts, if indeed that’s an aim.

Other aims come in the form of merch sales, as The Guardian (regurgitating the press release) informs us:

Shoppable versions will be available on YouTube and Google while the ad will be linked to the widest ever range of associated merchandise including a soft toy version of Snapper the plant for £18, children’s pyjamas for £19 and venus flytrap plants for £10.

Yay! More pointless crap in the world! But that aside, I wonder if people will warm to the tenth John Lewis ad toy offering, or indeed a pair of pajamas. This Venus Fly Trap is definitely not the huggable Monty the Penguin or Moz the Monster, so I wish them luck.

On the good side, I think the strategy/message of starting your own new traditions is refreshing. M&S is actually running with the same theme, but in more of a Grinch-like way that seems to be annoying people (especially with a weird accidental burning of a ‘Palestinian flag’ despite the ad being shot in August), so a nicer, friendlier expression is a better path to take. That said, I don’t think this strategy is particularly clear: the endline says Let Your Traditions Grow, but that sounds more like Grow Your Current Traditions, rather than Create New Ones. And the emphasis seems to be 95% LOOK AT THIS GIANT FUN PLANT and 5% ‘start some new traditions’. In any case, the family go back to their old tree and only involve the troublesome fly trap again out of guilt, so where’s the new tradition?

And that’s it. Not bad, but for this client that’s a long way from what’s needed. John Lewis has to turn its fortunes around during a cost of living and inflation crisis that will have many of their customers tightening their belts. They needed a game changer, ironically one that could change the very game they themselves created, one that has settled into a cosy meeting of expectations rather than a breath of fresh air, a bolt from the blue or, heaven forbid, a paradigm-shifting shot in the arm that could send John Lewis off into a new decade of success.

The funny thing is, they did indeed let their traditions grow: one more year, one more ad and one more repetition of a formula that is now well over ten years old. In fact, after the unusual initiative of last year, there’s a palpable sense of going back to something that worked. the problem is, you can’t step into the same river twice. Things have moved on; the competition has caught up and it’s possible that the people involved may not be up to the incredible standards of the campaign’s originators, or even some of the great creatives who Let This Tradition Grow in its early years.

Like I said, it’s not bad, but that’s not quite good enough.