Brainstorms

Monday’s post was about avoiding showing your work to idiots, but for some reason the commenters seemed keener to discuss brainstorms and exactly how fucking shit they are.

Well, you can give us your own take on this subject in the comments section, but in time honoured tradition, I’ll chuck in my two cents first:

I can only recall being in two brainstorms, about eight years apart. I think this was because the first one seemed so darn crap and annoying that it put me off doing another one for literally thousands of days.

I was a young, naive creative, so when a senior account bod asked if I’d come to a brainstorm, I agreed. After all, what would be the worst that could happen?

Well, most of the time was spent watching junior account handlers trying to come up with creative ideas. And what was that like? Well, it most closely resembled being in a monkey house, watching primates trying to make doilies with a chainsaw. It was then that I realised that good creative ideas were better when they came from people trained to do it, but that doesn’t stop people wholly unable to do it from having a go, and that’s because it’s fun. But for those of us who do it for a living, it’s also kind of depressing, like watching quadriplegics trying to tap dance.

I also felt them looking towards me, as if I, as a creative, might come up with better ideas, cutting through this festival of shit flinging with a sword swipe of genius. Unfortunately, I felt the urge to leave early and throw up in the lav.

Then, years later, some people at my agency suggested we all try to come up with some ideas together (they may not have used the ‘B’ word, but I knew where this shit was heading). Against my better judgement, I agreed. This time was slightly different because it was senior creatives and senior management. However, on this occasion it was just as depressing, but in a different way: the creatives came up with all, literally all, the ideas, while the a/c bods wrote them down and said, ‘anything else?’ in a somewhat infuriating way considering they had come up with nothing useful themselves. It was basically like having a suit in your office while you tried to work.

After a while of this, I got up and suggested that all the creatives would just get together without the a/c dudes and let them know what happened. This really annoyed said a/c dudes, but they just had to suck it up because they were a bunch of cunts and if they weren’t going to contribute, they would just have to add the word ‘shit’ to the word ‘cunts’.

No brainstorms since, however, as a freelancer, I’ll do them if asked. I just might not enjoy them.

Oh, almost forgot: it’s the damn flipchart that really gets up my fucking hooter.