If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

When I started writing this entirely subjective ‘How To Put Your Portfolio Site Together’ series it began with me just wanting to tackle the ‘awards’ section. But when I started writing about that I found that it spread into the ‘work’ and ‘about’ sections, and the post was getting too long, so I split it into three posts, and, having served up the starter and main course, I now offer the dessert.

When I worked with Daryl we always had a good laugh at how people portrayed their awards in the Campaign A-List booklet (do they still do that? Campaign is such a venal rag, I have no idea if they even exist anymore. Also, they printed chunks of my blog for years without any kind of recompense or permission, so they can all go and frotter themselves in the ear). 

If an A-lister hadn’t actually won a proper prize in an award scheme but maybe got a longlist or a nomination, they might say ‘recognised by…’. If they were a bit weird, they might list a very high number with precision, like ’78 Gold, Silver or Bronze awards’. If they scored dozens with the piss-easy London International Awards, but fewer from Cannes and D&AD, they might say ‘Golds and Silvers from Cannes, D&AD and London International’.

Other people find unusual ways to say impressive things. I recall one ECD saying he was the only creative with ‘at least a nomination in press, posters, TV and radio at D&AD’. Even if that’s a bit pretzel-y, and three of them are nominations rather than Pencils, it’s still a rare boast. 

So what he did, and what you should do, is make your awards section sounds as substantial as possible. Here’s how to do that, from the bottom up:

If you have no awards, don’t have an ‘awards’ section because it will be empty. Just ignore the whole thing, or add something to your ‘about’ section that says, ‘I also find awards to be vulgar and distasteful’. If you’re just starting out, people don’t really expect you to have won stuff. It’s fine.

Next stage up is a smattering of awards in schemes no one has heard of, and maybe the odd shortlist in something bigger. That’s still pretty cool, unless you’re older (‘I’ve only had one listing in Luerzer’s Archive’ – Junior Creative, aged 54). 

If you’re older and unawarded, also avoid having an awards section, or have one and accept that people will be more likely to hire you for brand experience and/or known-yet-unawarded campaigns, like Autoglass Repair, Autoglass Replace.   

Next is several awards in known schemes, such as Cannes, D&AD, One Show and Clios (Tier One); regional things like Andys, Spikes, New York Festivals, AWARD and Campaign BIG (Tier 2, but maybe Tier One if you’re trying to get hired in that country), also category-specific things like Webby’s and respectable magazines like Creative Review and Design Week); Then the other stuff like Food and Beverage Awards, or PR Week and shit I’ve never heard of.

If you have a bunch of these you can lump them all together under an equivocal word like ‘recognised’, or do the whole ‘number’ thing, but what you DO NOT DO is start listing them one by one over the years. It just looks underwhelming and a bit thirsty.

Next stage is a list worth listing. It doesn’t have to be a Grand Prix every year, but don’t have a five year gap between prizes, or Cannes Golds all in one year, followed by Food and Beverage awards for the following six years. It makes you look like a one hit wonder. 

After that, it’s up to you. I love what my old partner Cam Blackley has done, listing every single award he’s ever won, with the Cannes Titanium and D&AD Gold alongside winners of the APAC Tambuli Awards and Sirens (whatever they are). 

My personal choice was to add the sentence ‘I’ve won dozens of awards and pitches’ to my ‘about’ section. I could list them all, but then I’d run into problems over which work I made and which I CD-ed. If you want to look me up in D&AD’s archive, I hope you won’t be disappointed. In addition, the good CD work is in the ‘work’ section with an attendant explanation.

As a little side point, I think that writing a novel that was published by Penguin and being the advertising columnist for Creative Review are more impressive than a Cannes Gold, but that’s just me. I usually get hired for some kind of writing, so I like people to be sure I can do that to a high standard.

It’s also worth saying that nobody, and I mean NOBODY checks the claims. Where are the non-D&AD stats listed? And even if you found them, why would anyone comb through every year to check the veracity of an awards claim? 

The real lesson? Just ignore all of the above and say whatever the hell you like. 

This is advertising. Just do what you do for your clients, for yourself.

If your creative portfolio is a version of you, then the ‘about’ section is, consciously or otherwise, where you lay your personality bare for all to see.

That’s because you can use it to write absolutely anything about yourself, so those choices will convey your personality as much as the work conveys your mad skillz.

Bearing that in mind, I think ‘about’ sections tend to come in four different varieties:

The first is no-nonsense, where you just get down to brass tacks about your advertising life. This is really just a more elaborate version of your resume, where you take the opportunity to simply list your agencies and the years in which you graced them with your presence.

Sometimes this is a literal list, while other times it’s written as prose, turning a list into a paragraph that’s less convenient to read, but a bit warmer. Either way, it says that you’re either very straightforward, you don’t like to write, you can’t be bothered to write, you’re intensely private, or you’re massively dyslexic and don’t want anyone to know.

Then there’s the self-referential, meta version, where you recognise that the whole thing is a bit silly, and suffuse the facts with an attempt to be an aw-shucks version of charming.

I would count my own ‘about’ section as one of those, but just to prove it’s not just me, here’s one from another creative (I’ve left his name out in case he doesn’t want to be highlighted in this post).

Cheers, I’m (full name) or just (first name), a 34 years old art director and graphic designer currently living in São Paulo, Brazil. I’m very much into branding, editorial design and branded content. Hit me up for a coffee or just to say hi. Here are some random bullet-points to make this about page a bit more personal: Firm believer that RainyMood is the best soundtrack to work. Plays Dungeons & Dragons (just like those kids from Stranger Things). Catdog-person. +3 luck when buying plane tickets.

See? The boring facts, followed by a bit of personality, but presented with post-modern self-awareness. A reflection of personality.

Talking of reflections of personality, you could try for the third type of ‘about’ section and go even further in that direction, mentioning some quite random things that are entirely unrelated to advertising. 

If you go through this deck (thanks, Loz), you’ll find the following information:

I’m an ACD Art Director, designer and hot dog enthusiast.

I love podcasts about design and architecture, all things sci-fi, cats and NBA drama.

I drink whiskey in the winter and mezcal in the summer.I’m not an asshole.

Would a recruiter care that you like architecture podcasts, hot dogs or mezcal? Probably not. Would they believe your own opinion that you’re not an asshole? Also probably not, but it’s all a bit of colour that offers a bit more than a list of agencies you’ve worked at.

Finally, and very unusually, you can just go all out and wrap your life’s work around one quirky-yet-important fact:

One thing you should know about me is that I’d pay a million dollars to go back in time to see Outkast’s 2014 tour. Every penny earned will go to my savings so that if time travel happens during my life, I’m ready.

Professionally, for the past 7 years, I’ve been leading all-star digital content teams for fashion e-commerce and entertainment brands.

Now as an Art Director, I am smashing all my experience, skills, and lifetime desires together so that by the time I finally see the most prolific rap duo of all time, I can return to direct their ads, merch, and everything in between.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Outkast in 2014, but now I really wish I had, and I like the vibe of the person who wrote that short, funny, memorable insight into their personality. Maybe that ‘about’ section is partly why its author works at Mischief@No Fixed Address…

So make your choice, write your little biography and remember the two most important things:

1. Pretty much anything goes.
2. The ‘about’ section doesn’t matter if the work sucks.

Thanks to Wix, Carbonmade and of course Squarespace, we all have a personal portfolio site.

Funnily enough, despite that fact that we are CREATIVES, who live by the core principle of originality, 90% of them are identical.

There are three sections that grace almost every site, so allow me to explain the green flags, pitfalls and workarounds that might help to maximise the ways in which you present yourself to a judgmental, hard-to-please CD.

First you have the ‘Work’ section. This is usually your front page, where various thumbnails will show off your best and brightest ads.

But behind this chirpy presentation are many fretful decisions:

But how old is too old? How obscure is too obscure? Is a so-so piece of work for a big client better than a good piece of work for a smaller client? If your best stuff is a radio campaign, how do you get a prospective CD excited enough to listen to it?

Here are some rules of thumb: the better the work, the longer it can stay on your site. Grand Prix winners can stay forever, but anything that looks VHS-era must now be retired to the knacker’s yard. 

A famous award-winner for a small client is better than something mediocre for Nike, but otherwise Nike, Apple and any other perennially award-winning client should take priority. That’s because the suggestion that you were good enough for the high standards of a great brand is a big plus, even if the actual ad is not one of their best. It also tends to mean that you were hired at a good agency, (although the number of people and places who get to add a Google logo to their list of clients does tend to dilute the prestige of working for that brand).

Any radio ads (or banners, brochures and other less fashionable media placements) must be phenomenally good to be worthy of inclusion. Even though being good at radio is very hard, CDs are less inclined to take the time to listen to it. That said, the fact that you’re including it at all would suggest to me that it must be excellent, or you wouldn’t have bothered.

Of course, we now live in the time of case studies, so you now want as many of those as possible. They do three valuable things, the first of which is to explain all the essential briefing context around your ad. Some might say that’s cheating, as you can’t be there to add the context for the lucky fucker who gets to see your 48-sheet poster, but here in 2025 the rules are different, and context is not just permitted, it’s pretty much mandatory.

The second thing they do is explain campaigns which are now too complicated to speak for themselves. Multi-channel advertising now requires an attendant paragraph that explains just how the banner ads played off the giant inflatable jar of Chicken Tonight, the SEO takeover and the T-shirt someone wore on a podcast recording. And let’s not forget the rolling counter of ‘media impressions’ that always number in the billions.

Third, and probably most important, is the fact that case studies are a relatively new addition to the ‘Work’ section, which means they indicate a degree of recency. So their absence tends to suggest you haven’t done a ‘big’ campaign in the last ten years, which might be a red flag for some CDs and/or resource managers.

What can you do if you have no case studies? Tricky. I produced a couple of campaigns ‘back in the day’ that could quite easily have sustained a juicy 2-minute explanation, but I don’t have the material or the inclination to make a case study out of them. Instead, I presented one of them as a multimedia campaign and leaned into the more unconventional case-study elements instead of the awarded press campaign.

If you feel your work isn’t strong enough to offer 8+ standalone thumbnails, you could always try another path. For example, the ‘sizzle reel’ cut of all your best bits might be the way to go, but having said that, if presented with one of those, I might smell a rat. They’re really for people with lots of great stuff, which they also make available to watch individually.

Another question is how to present work that you’ve CD-ed vs work you’ve created. As we all know, people can get their names on a piece of work just by being in the room while the grown-ups make the magic. Equally, your CD credit might be hiding the fact that you did most of the heavy lifting to elevate a junior team’s so-so idea to a Cannes Silver.

It’s really up to you and your conscience. The best thing might be to add a clear explanation, as I did with the Shot on iPhone section of my portfolio. No one really had the original idea/concept for that campaign, so the creativity came in the execution. There were three main people involved in that, but behind it there were many other creatives, account people, business affairs experts, strategists, music and production geniuses etc., all of whom made the campaign what it was. I haven’t checked all their portfolios, but it’s genuinely a campaign with many parents and midwives, so if everyone involved wants to include it, I think that’s fine.

The other thing to remember with the work section is the extent to which people are in a hurry. No one is poring over every second of everything you do, so it’s important to make things look worthy of attention at first glance.

And that’s what we’re supposed do in our day jobs, so make sure you sell your good stuff as well as you’d sell an Audi R8, a Snickers bar or a campaign to end HIV in Africa.

Best of luck!

Next: the ’About’ section…

Much of advertising in the 2020s is kind of dull.

I’m not just saying the the usual ads are more boring than they used to be. I’m also pointing out that all the advertising money that has gone to GoogleBook has added nothing to our happiness or entertainment.

But have no fear!

There is still plenty of exciting work around. The only problem is, it stays in pitch and presentation decks, seen only by a select few, most of whom couldn’t care less. That’s because it’s just there to make up the numbers, excitement-wise.

If you were to pitch a client with nothing but ‘SEO FTW!’ and ‘Slide The Zuck half your budget and let him get on with it!’, you would be met with colossal underwhelm (even though that’s what many a client will end up doing).

So you need fireworks! Whistles! Bells!

And they come in the form of activation/earned/experiential ideas that will never see the light of day.

So there’s no need to bust a gut coming up with them. Simply add your potential client’s name/product to one of these ten ‘ideas’ and you’re golden!

1. The Podcast. Despite the fact that there are already a million podcasts around, and most of us listen to maybe ten of them, in areas we’re already find fascinating, many agencies still like to suggest there might be an audience for Chicken Tonight-Cast, during which Holly Willoughby will interview various celebs about their favourite chicken tonight recipes.
2. The Museum. It could be The Museum of Unused Pots and Pans because you’re using Deliveroo so much you no longer need to cook. Or it might be The Museum of Millennial Icons because you’re bringing back the Tamagotchi. Or just the plan old Museum of Chicken Tonight, where all the best CT recipes (presented by an AI holographic Holly Willoughby) will be presented for all to see.
3. The Pop-Up. No need to take out a lease on a shop or hire an expensive exhibition space. Your idea can simply be a pop-up shop/gallery/museum (see above) that will garner acres of press and break the internet BASED ONLY ON THE SHORT-TERM NATURE OF ITS EXISTENCE.
4. The Spotify Playlist. If your product is helping sad people to be happy, why not add a happy playlist that EVERYONE WILL DEFINITELY LISTEN TO INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN CHOICES OR THE CURATED PLAYLISTS OF SPOTIFY? Campaign about sharing? Include songs by Cher. Campaign about families? We Are Family and Family Affair are right there for you to ruin.
5. Influencers. Where they’re micro, macro, unboxing or setting a challenge, influencers (or ‘cheap celebs’ as they’re otherwise known) will do anything for a fiver, and all their followers will definitely buy what they’ve been paid to flog.
6. VR/Metaverse. Of course it’s all dead as a doornail (apologies to anyone dumb enough to buy that Apple headset for three grand), but that needn’t stop you saying VR, AR, ARG or anything else that might cover up how ignored this idea will be in 2025.
7. Hashtag Challenge. Yes, the Ice Bucket went everywhere for free, so your ‘Chicken Tonight Bucket Challenge’ is bound to go just as viral. Or it would if anyone was sad enough to give a shit about it.
8. Celeb Du Jour. When I was working on Apple 10-15 years ago, Bill Murray made an appearance in every deck (I think we ended up using him approximately zero times, and that was Apple). Although those days are probably over, you can always chuck Bob Mortimer or Alison Hammond on slide 78 instead. Of course, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to do it, or they’re too expensive; you won’t be hiring them anyway.
9. Artwork. Might be a statue, might be a mural, might be an ‘immersive sculpture’ (whatever that is). Just use Midjourney to mock up an image of people looking at some giant jar of Chicken Tonight in a city square and you’re golden. Or not.
10. 10.Finally, the Massive Conventional Media Campaign You Can’t Afford. Adidas can turn a billboard into a swimming pool; Chicken Tonight cannot. Apple can buy every ad in Vogue; Curly Wurly cannot. BUT DON’T LET THAT STOP YOU! Mock up a 50m media buy. In fact, make it 100m! You are never going to do this, so the spend doesn’t matter.

And that’s it!

Impress your clients!

Use up slides!

Weep!

And, most importantly, console yourself with a podcast of chicken songs curated by Holly Willoughby in a VR experiential pop-up art space.

The last ten years have felt like someone put the entire advertising industry into a washing machine. 

The old rules have gone, and so have many of the old agencies. Raymond Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson had been alive and kicking for over a century before VML, a relative newcomer, sent them both to their graves in the space of three years.

Earlier this month, The Mill and MPC passed away (RIP).

Awards went from rewarding sales to rewarding purpose, and are now are now incorporating carbon reporting into their assessments of how good your TV commercial might be. 

And while we were getting used to Google and Facebook eating our lunch, TikTok showed up out of nowhere and started eating their lunch.

Of course, there have been many more changes, but listing them all isn’t going to help anyone.

You already know what’s happened because it’s happened to you, because of you or in spite of you.

I’m not suggesting for a minute that the current circumstances are easy, or that they’re going to get any easier, but most of you still want or need to work within those circumstances, so let’s see if there’s a way to turn the heat down from a rolling boil to a manageable simmer.

What you really need is a guide to navigating the new reality, ideally in the form of ten neat little suggestions that will allow you to make the most of where we are today, while preparing yourself for tomorrow.

1. First and most important is to understand and accept that great stuff is possible everywhere. Look at last year’s Gold winners at Cannes: Klick Health Toronto, Serviceplan Germany, Area 23… I’m not even mentioning them as new agencies that have challenged the status quo. I’m mentioning them as agencies that won with pharma work. Pharma: a forgotten, derided corner of the industry that’s now close to the top of the awards tree. Open your mind and the prizes and raises may follow.
2. Specialise. Every agency wants to be all things to all people for fear of losing any tiny crumbs of business. If you join them you’ll disappear into the fog. Instead, find your niche, be the best, and show the jacks-of-all-trades how it’s done.
3. You are your brand. You always have been. But if you can’t even advertise yourself, why would I trust you to advertise a multi-million pound company? What does that mean? Work it out. If you can’t, or don’t want to, how can you blame the industry for not needing or wanting you?
4. People hate ads more than ever. Next time you’re spamming the ‘skip ad’ button like a woodpecker on a quadruple espresso, ask yourself if people are doing the same to your ad, then work out what you would create to prevent that from happening.
5. Look after number one. That doesn’t mean screw everyone over to benefit yourself, but it does mean you should keep your eyes open. Corporations are going through churn. Be nimble, flexible and ready to react before the layoffs come for you.
6. In a digital world, be more human. You can’t avoid AI, social, streamers and all that jazz, but understand that people need warmth, craft and humanity, so learn how to provide it, then insist on it.
7. If it feels like a chore, make it feel like fun. Every brief could either seem like one more depressing encroachment on your work/life balance, or an opportunity to delve into a fascinating new corner of life. You choose.
8. Be the change you want to see in the world, or at least in the mirror. If the agency you want to work at doesn’t exist, create it. If that seems intimidatingly hard, does ten years doing a job you hate (with a P45 chaser) sound any easier?
9. Your job title is not your job. Contribute wherever you can. If you can’t see how to do that, learn.
10. Finally, you might want to leave. If you don’t like the business, or you think it’s heading in the wrong direction, no one is making you stay. Build a parachute and wait for the right moment to pull the rip cord.

Over the last few months I’ve spoken to some very good, very experienced creatives who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and gasping for air in the washing machine’s spin cycle.

Are they victims of ageism or is the industry simply moving beyond their excellence to a not-so-brave new world?

Impossible to say, but here’s the good news: there will always be a need for great ideas, great copy and great art direction. 

The bad news? There are no more Economist briefs – relatively easy opportunities to fill your shelf with Lions and Pencils. 

That means you need to familiarise yourself with post copy, Discord, Roblox, Drake vs Kendrick, and the ‘omnichannel’ intersections where all those things meet.

Because if you don’t, someone else will.

And if you find a situation that works, don’t get comfortable. The washing machine is still churning away, and it won’t be stopping anytime soon.

Despite much of the ‘AI is coming for our jobs’ doom-mongering (which is somewhat justified), I’ve begun to think that Artificial Intelligence is impacting the creative process in valuable ways that aren’t going to threaten creative jobs anytime soon.

You may have noticed that creatives have much, much more work to do these days. Campaigns that used to require TV with a bit of press, or three radio ads and a poster, are now expected to hit every touchpoint, from social, to experiential, via the aforementioned TV, press, radio and posters, along with an idea for a podcast, app, content series and all that other jazz that MUST be presented but rarely gets made.

In addition, initial ads are no longer pen-and-ink scamps. They are now fully rendered visuals, aided by Midjourney and Photoshop, which takes much more time, especially when the inevitable ‘notes’ come in. 

Scamps are now so executional, they heavily suggest that they are the finished ad, leaving them vulnerable to criticism over the colour of clothes, the degree of smile, or the amount of shadow.

And of course, there are far more stages of approval, with creative departments often consisting of several layers, before reaching several layers of ‘internal stakeholders’ (strategy, account, new biz, legal etc.) and several layers of clients. Each of these layers will need a new deck, before offering notes, requiring revisions and demanding a great deal of time and effort from the creatives who, may I remind you, never used to have to do any of that stuff.

So where does AI come in? Well, when you have to produce a lot of work, for a lot of people, through a lot of stages, in a lot of decks, you have to make decisions about how to allocate your ever-more-depleted resources of time and attention.

Sure, you’d like to take another day to hone the script, but there are Instagram Carousels waiting to be rendered, and micro-influencer write-ups on the to-do list. Turning up with a script that is now 8/10 instead of 6.5, but with zero social posts is not going to fly, so what do you do?

Before AI, the answer was ‘make it all  relatively mediocre because there isn’t enough time to improve everything, and all media options much be covered’. Now, however, the answer might be ‘Chat GPT: based on this idea, give me a write-up of how it might be expanded into micro influencer campaigns for TikTok and Snap, with ten ideas for experiential events’ (reminder: very few of which are actually getting made, but every deck must be filled). 

That leaves creative jobs safe (or safer), because a) The proper work will be better when you can buy yourself a few more hours by farming out the busywork to Open AI, and b) As far as anyone knows, the creative is doing just as much work as before, and is thus still valuable.

Sure, there are a few holes in this plot: sometimes, social ads do require ‘proper’ creativity, so you can’t always palm them off onto a computer; all AI suggestions need to be finessed/redone/messed with, which takes up valuable time; and if enough people do this, there will start to be a depressing homogeneity of solutions (although I think that ship sailed around 2015). 

That said, this is all a function of too much work for too little time, so maybe the answer ought to be addressing how that came to be the case, rather than blaming creatives for finding a creative solution to a daft problem.

I think I’ll end by saying that AI often writes functional, descriptive, box-ticking prose better than many creatives, so if it is used for those pesky deck paragraphs, maybe we all win. Taking time to craft that kind of writing is another misuse of the hours that should be dedicated to the central concept, or a TV script that will actually be seen by a consumer, so if AI can step in with some decent assistance, maybe we should thank it (slightly).

Perhaps I’m being optimistic, and like I said, I’d rather the problem didn’t exist, but here we are. Until it becomes our sworn enemy, maybe you should allow AI to become your sort-of friend.

Convenience (n): the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Effort and difficulty are, prima facie, annoying things that we all want to avoid, so the less of them, the better.

But then what? Nature abhors a vacuum, so less of something always means more of something else.

In a work context, you almost always free up that time to… fill it with more work.

AI/Slack/Zoom might make some of your tasks faster, easier and more convenient (or not, as the case may be), but that doesn’t mean you get a four-day week.

It means the time saved by those conveniences will then be used up by the kind of deck-generating busywork that we never used to think of as necessary.

No labour gets saved because it’s like a mountain with no top, or a leaky cup, into which you endlessly pour more water.

This is because we measure work in the amount of time it takes to do it, and that means you will always be required to produce 40+ hours of labour, no matter how much of that time is replaced by the wonders of AI.

So where’s the benefit to the worker? 

You might say that getting more done allows you to get ahead, but if everyone is in the same boat, no one is getting ahead of anyone else.

You might also say that you could produce things to a standard that was formerly impossible. But that’s a quality measurement, which means it’s subjective, and again, if everyone gets better, no one does.

The other loss hidden beneath the word ‘convenience’, is bound up in the Aerosmith lyric, ‘Life’s a journey, not a destination’.

When I write a column, I usually find that the process of thinking and tapping the keyboard sends me off somewhere I wasn’t quite expecting. The effort itself becomes a necessary part of process. If I want the result, I have to do the work, and that can’t happen if I just type ‘Give me 1000 words of the downside of convenience’ into Chat GPT.

The points you are reading actually developed during a half-hour conversation with my wife, and are now being honed and explored further as I write. I then leave it for a couple of days before returning to reread it all again and make further changes.

That process is enjoyable because it provides little hits of dopamine as I come to new conclusions, which expand my outlook and exercise my brain.

But that always takes time, as does kerning type perfectly, planning a new kitchen, or reading a book; all processes which offer inconvenient pleasure.

And what would I do if I could get AI etc. to complete all my work in a split second? Aside from the above point that any boss would then give me more work, I’d probably get bored.

There’s a writing truism that Fiction is Friction: every good story requires torturing the main character with increasingly difficult situations. 

Smooth sailing is dull to watch, but it’s also dull to experience. Human beings need inconvenience to pass the time. Whether it’s betting on a horse, moving house or writing ten social media headlines for 20% off a car, we need to add difficulty to our lives. It’s how we make progress, but it’s also how we stop getting bored. 

Many of us go on holidays during which we could just sit around reading, or scrolling through TikTok, but there’s only so much of that you can take before you wonder if there might be an interesting castle nearby, or decide to do a bit of scuba diving.

It’s also worth remembering that ‘convenience’ things (convenience foods, convenience stores, marriages of convenience) are never about how good something is. They express a trade-off where you get what you want quickly and easily, but that extra speed and reduced effort means there will be a compromise in quality.

If I were a more cynical person, I might think that convenience is just another capitalist hoodwink (often glorified through advertising) that seems great, but has actually made modern life worse.

It really feels like someone really put the ‘con’ into convenience, and that is the kind of thought that only appears after I do a bit of delightfully inconvenient work. 

Just 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, yes: the owners of AI make money by using a ridiculous amount of power and water to steal work from all over the internet, and has 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.

I commented that ‘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: 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.

As Rory Sutherland said, ‘When Human beings process a message, we sort of process how much effort and love has gone into the creation of this message and we pay attention to to the message accordingly. It’s costly signaling of a kind’.

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 that you like, and your own name piped on the top instead of a perfect, machine-lettered, one-size-fits-all ‘Happy Birthday’?

And what would you think about someone who dashed into M&S on the way to your house to buy a Colin The Caterpillar, versus someone who planned your perfect cake three weeks earlier?

If you have something important to say (which is how most clients 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.

Sure, AI can do what it can to disguise the convenience/lack of effort, or pretend it wasn’t responsible, but if we enter a world where it has to reveal itself for copyright reasons, we’ll know, and when we know, we won’t care as much.

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).