I was watching an excellent lecture on TED a couple of days ago.

Al Gore’s old speechwriter, Dan Pink, talked about the science of motivation.

He started by saying, “I graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.”

Very good.

Anyway, he went on to say that extra money does not motivate creative people. It motivates people who do not need to be creative in their tasks, but with creative people it simply provides a paralysing distraction that narrows focus and concentrates the mind. It means that you don’t allow your thoughts to be lateral.

So if financial incentives don’t work, what does?

Three things:

Autonomy. Being able to do your own thing. Being in charge of your own shit. Freedom of will. Google allows its employees to spend 20% of the week working on whatever they want. This produces many great benefits for Google.

Mastery. Can you improve at what you do?

Purpose. Does what you are doing have meaning beyond the task itself?

All intrinsic motivators, unlike the extrinsic motivation of money.

Occasionally, people ask why I bother to write this blog. Up until I saw this lecture I didn’t really know. Even though I happily do it every day, there has been little or no concrete or financial benefit.

Well, it provides me with all three of those things in spades.

I can write pretty much whatever I want, I can get better at it and I can believe, however misguidedly, that it makes a miniscule positive difference to some people’s days.

I also write fiction, which provides the same three things (the third is somewhat theoretical until I get published).

I’m only pointing this out because many people who work in creative departments have told me they are lacking at least one of the three, and they are not happy about it. They are not given the chance to impose their abilities on their work, they don’t make enough ads to improve at the skill and without making anything they think is decent, their work has no purpose.

So this is just a suggestion: if you don’t have these three things in your life, find something that provides them and do it as much as you can.

As Dan says, ‘the science confirms what we know in our hearts’.

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But here’s one:

Lovely art direction: simple, clean, classic. Clever nod to Dad’s Army.

Nice concept (it took me a few seconds to notice the swastika).

And no mention of the word ‘joy’.

Here’s the print to go with the TV from yesterday.

It claims that ‘on the back of this three letter word (joy) we built a company’. Did they? Really? Interesting, because their website tells us that in 1928 ‘BMW buys the Eisenach automobile plant, where the Austin Seven was successfully produced under the name “Dixi 3/15 PS”. This vehicle is developed further, going on sale in 1929 as the BMW 3/15 PS DA 2 with a range of different bodyshells. A small car with a lot of appeal, its popularity helps the company to survive the lean years of the Depression.’ Well, I guess they were just trying to cheer people up. It was a depression after all.

It goes on to say that ‘we are the creators of emotion’. Wankers.

‘We are the guardians of ecstasy, the thrills and chills, the laughs and smiles’. Ditto.

‘No car company can rival our history, replicate our passion, our vision.’ Does this remind anyone else of the work of Arthur Kade?

‘We will make Joy smarter. We will push it, beat it break it.’ That sounds rather joyless to me, and it appears to have been written by an American, unless they really want to improve the formal appearance of ‘Joy’.

‘We will promise one thing: the most personal, cherished and human of all emotions.’ Look, you fucking idiots, that’s love, not joy.

Please, just to make my weekend a little more joyful, could the writer please stick his/her fingers into a waste disposal unit so they can’t type out any more of this ridiculous drivel.

This looks good. Book for next summer. Nolan is the British Fincher.

I’ve had the wonderful privilege of going to the movies a few times over the last few weeks.

Alas, the pleasure of these experiences has been marred somewhat by having to sit through this dreadful ad:

Why have BMW decided to put out an ad that feels 100% Mazda?

Why is the music so generically pappy?

Why is the VO simultaneously vomiticiously chuffed with itself AND deserving of no such chuffedness?

Why is it full of BMW logos, yet zero BMW-ness?

Why does it look like a corporate video for educationally subnormal children?

How can so many people have briefed, created, approved, made and run something so plainly, blatantly, stare-you-in-the-face-till-your-eyes-weep-diarrhoea obviously wrong?

I love creatives/clients/agencies that are so sure and confident of their target market that they make ads that will be incomprehensible to anyone outside that group.

Here’s an ad that perfectly illustrates this M.O.:

Of course, all right thinking people are huge Jay-Z fans and understand exactly what is going on and are flattered to be included in this communication.

For everyone else: meaningless.

(By the way, Blueprint 3 is excellent.)

Here’s some good shit to compensate.

If you click through to YouTube there are loads more. Check out the story about Scorsese getting drunk with a loaded gun when he’s told to cut Taxi Driver to an ‘R’.

When I was a kid there were loads of petrol stations (there was even one in my road), and for the most part they just sold petrol. The motorway ones sold car maintenance crap and those nice powdered-sugar travel sweets, but the city ones were places you really only went to for fuel.

Then they started to sell other things. Magazines, groceries, coffee, mobile phone top-ups, cigarettes, flowers, charcoal briquettes (nice new print ad for VW, by the way) and even booze, just in case you felt just a little too sober as you took the wheel.

They became so good at doing this that they began to make more money off the non-petrol things than the petrol. Then they started to close, after all the property market was going through the roof and those forecourts took up an awful lot of space.

And now there aren’t many left (the one in the road I grew up in disappeared years ago).

So, with that in mind, here’s another ill-thought out theory to go with the many other ones that have appeared on this blog:

Many advertising agencies are becoming like petrol stations because they are becoming less about the business of creating ads as we know them, and more about selling their clients extra services.

If you think about it, this has become a financial necessity, even if your only ambition as an agency is to stand still. The amount of cash your clients are offering for a bit of press, poster, TV and radio advertising has declined dramatically, partly because the media costs for conventional media have plummeted, and partly because costs have been transferred to other forms of advertising, many of which were not created by conventional agencies only a decade ago.

So now agencies are claiming or acquiring skills that are new to them. These skills may be closely related to ‘conventional advertising’, but they are still not enough. An UK ad agency that wants to take in tons of money in 2009 needs to provide other services, almost all of which are process services: researches, audits, projections, strategies, analyses, competitive reviews…Anything that can be generated from the usual personnel of an agency.

Or, to be more specific, the usual non-creative personnel of an agency.

Indeed, this torrent of blah does not require much input from the All-Star-wearing picky little sausages in the Creative Dept. Sure, we might be called upon to provide adcepts, or pointless fucking cannon fodder, but the new streams of income emanate from the planners and the suits.

And this might just be why, in many agencies, creativity is taking an increasingly distant back seat to the other disciplines: it’s less lucrative.

Of course, it still pays to some degree, but that degree is decreasing, and with it, the significance of the Creative Department, and the creativity of advertising in general.

So, back to the petrol station. If agencies are going to marginalise that which is their ostensible function, they will become fewer and further between. Perhaps they will disappear and become something with a new name, such as communication consultancies, leaving the places that actually produce creative work to become smaller, more specialised communication production agencies, that merge with production companies and photographic collectives to do nothing but make the finished product. I imagine that what we now know as an advertising agency will exist, but only in larger incarnations that serve to make the more pant-wetting of our clients feel a bit safer and believe they are saving money through economies of scale.

The nth degree argument of this is that WPP will go back to producing Wire and Plastic Products, perhaps as an additional service for clients that need such a thing.

And the separation of ad agency departments which have always, despite claims to the contrary, been riven by dislike, jealousy, condescension, petty squabbling and diametrically opposed perspectives on life in general, will become formalised, leading to generally increased happiness all round.

It’s enough to make you feel all warm inside.