The unspoken scale of distaste
If you are a member of a film crew you can work for different rates. Overall, pop promos pay least, then movies, then ads pay the most (of course, there is a lot of grey area here, with people happy to drop their prices for projects they like).
I’ve known that for many years but it wasn’t until yesterday that I wondered why.
We all seem to accept that advertising ought to pay the most because a) There’s supposedly loads of money sloshing around, and b) you have to compensate people for lowering themselves to do it. Even amongst the people in advertising, the people who have chosen and accepted this career to one extent or another, it makes perfect sense that paying someone to help someone else sell something should be compensated more substantially.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to film crews. The rest of us are (theoretically) paid more than our counterparts in other jobs. For example, an advertising art director is paid better than one of a similar standard who works in magazines, but why is that?
Ultimately, salaries are determined by free market forces. If you want someone to do a job then you have to pay them what they wish to earn to do it. There are a lot of non-advertising jobs out there that people in advertising could do, but one of the reasons they don’t do those other jobs is because advertising pays better. Why does advertising pay better? Because an element of the perception of the job is that it is in some way unattractive.
Let’s be honest here: most of us who work in advertising are aware that is is thought of at the upper end of the shame scale. For whatever reason, hawking stuff for other companies is considered by most of the population to be a somewhat tawdry and shallow use of one’s time. Whereas making a pop promo, creating a magazine and lighting a movie are considered to be much closer to ‘art’, and therefore more of a privilege to do, and so less worthy of shame and financial compensation for that shame.
So it seems that there is an unspoken scale of distaste that we are all complicit in. We all accept things as they are, but rarely consciously recognise what it says about us.
There is no real better or worse, or right or wrong about any of this, but the fact that society (including us) has made the decision it has made means we now operate under a yoke of negativity that permeates the whole industry. I’ll bet that many of you consider many parts of your job fun, particularly when compared with working in a call centre, but there’s a cloud hanging over it all that says it’s somehow making up for the fact that you work in an industry that is generally disrespected and disliked.
You might be one of the people who has absolutely no problem with working in advertising, and are in fact very proud of what you do, but you’d still have to be aware of where the job sits in society and what it means.
Having worked in advertising for 16 years I’ve gone through all sorts of different feelings about it, from chest-thumping pride and blinding love to soul-crushing shame and excrement-scented distaste. I’m now very happy with what I do for a living, partly because of the client I work for, partly because of the fantastic people I work with, partly because of the wonderful advertising people I have met, but there’s still that lingering odour that I just can’t quite seem to escape…
And I bet you can smell it too.
Ben, about the shame…
I was reading a stress statistic recently and PR people were “wining” the second place (after pilots), ad people were somewhere around 5th or 6th. Most people in our office have medical problems – anemia, hypertension, back pain, jaw pain, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems. And considering that the future of the business is somewhere between Video rentals and Newspaper publishing it will become a true deadly occupation so they will need to pay us even more before we die 🙂
*sigh*
Advertising people are well paid because the best of them can, in a single day, change the fortunes of a company forever. A good car salesman might be able to sell two or three cars in a day; a good copywriter could sell hundreds. That’s a skill worth paying highly for and that fact used to be very well recognised. There is nothing shameful or even embarrassing about working in advertising. Those who claim we sell people things they don’t want are idiots – and people who buy things they don’t want can only be described as morons.
Maybe it was different 25 years ago, when agencies made ads that people really loved. Ads they would talk about down the pub. I’ll have to ask Dave about that…
Personally, I feel no shame about what I do. Granted, it’s part of the huge military-industrial complex that we all live in. But it is what it is. I just wish that, once in a while, I could make someone smile for a few seconds. But most of my clients are financial services, so not much chance of that. (Some of you are thinking: “he should feel more shame than the rest of us!” Maybe you’re right, but I don’t. Just an all-pervading air of disappointment.)
@ Original Richard H „But most of my clients are financial services, so not much chance of that.“ – Tell me about it! 🙂 Hey, we could be working for pharmaceutical companies that bribe doctors – now that will be shame
Stop reading The Guardian Ben, that’ll solve the problem right there.
Apparently, contrary to appearances, it is not actually mandatory to read The Guardian if you support Arsenal.
It used to be all balanced out by being fun and the ads being good. Now it’s not and they aren’t.
@Dave: I think it is mandatory. If I stop doing either I’ll be frogmarched out of NW1.
MikeH: I think you’re right about great copywriters, but that’s the top of the tree. I’d be surprised if many make much of difference beyond what’s expected. But then most aren’t allowed to really spread their wings and do what’s best. The homogenisation and globalisation of much of the work leaves very little space to shine. That was far rarer in the past. Generic pap (see tomorrow’s post) does none of us any favours.
We’re scum because we polute peoples lives. We constantly nag at them, and they hate us for it and they are right to hate us. We keep working for the 1% of ads that are a joy to watch and make us want to watch again and again, but often for whatever reason we can’t make the joy to watch adverts.
Plus the fact that this industry seems liberally sprinkled with wankers, oh jesus why are we doing this, we could be out there creating something beautiful and making this world a better place for the brief gnats fart of time that we are here but we don’t because of that fucking mortgage we got and that family that seems bleeds us emotionally and financially and i’d leave them, i bloody would, but i’m not as cruel as my father to just walk out on them to follow his dream to be a dancer on a cruise ship, and it was a stupid idea, he was 46 for fucks sake, who’s going to take a dancer on at that age, especially when he’s never done a days dance training in his life.
Where was i? oh yes advertising is for wankers but then all other industries are wankers too so let’s just stop dreaming of this better life and accept the gruel.
As a copywriter I have to stay the standard of writers I’ve met and worked with is much, much higher in advertising than it is in journalism.
Being a copywriter means you have to write exclusively for the client. But if you’re a journalist you can stick in references, puns and even write stories that interest you all day long. You don’t even have to be any good at English, because a sub will spot your mistakes and correct them for you.
I’m sure if you’re of a certain age, the words of Bill Hicks have at some point bounced around your bean. But he was telling a joke and that world is long gone.
If you do other stuff then view your work in advertising as patronage – a system that’s been around for hundreds of years.
But you have to leave if you hate what you do. At the very least because you won’t be able to do it very well. You’ll be a hack.
It’s not quite true that you have to pay people more to do distasteful jobs – for example, binmen and abattoir workers are not well paid. Then again, maybe those trades have no ‘arty end’.
I think we can draw a parallel with banking here.
People think all bankers are twats who earn vast amounts of money. They delight in sneering at them while secretly, shamefully wishing that they were working at JPMorgan and paying off their mortgage with their Christmas bonus.
People think all advertisers are twats who have vast amounts of fun at work. They ooze condecension, while secretly wishing that their job didn’t involve working in an atmosphere more formal than a Victorian nunnery.
Any sort of negative generalisation about someone else’s profession is always predicated on a toxic mixture of ignorance and jealously.
Apart from when talking about Estate Agents, who are all cunts.
@Butterbean.
“…working in an atmosphere more formal than a Victorian nunnery.”
Do you work at McCann’s or Ogilvy?
Scamp: the better pay example is based on what the alternative might be (advertising AD compared to magazine AD).
If you can only get a job as a bin man or abattoir worker (and who’s to say they don’t enjoy their jobs to a certain extent?) then your options are likely to be just as ‘distasteful’.
@Original Richard H
I’m at Foxtons.
I’m happy with what I do. I think all this angst about working in advertising is misplaced. My friend, who is an A.D. on a very well-known and respected magazine, is very jealous of the creative freedom I have. Two of my other friends who are teachers, are jealous about the money I earn. I know management consultants, lawyers, lecturers, a nurse, a house-husband, several housewives and a PA to a really miserable accountant, and none of them berate themselves about what they do, quite as much as we do. And I don’t give a fuck about how happy a bin man is, I’m just happy I chose to do a job I knew I would like. One where there isn’t an ever-pervasive smell of decay and moulder [insert joke here].
I don’t know any estate agents because I am too self-satisfied to even try.
How come your mate has no creative freedom?
I also have no angst. I wonder why it exists, generally speaking.
In general, I find people are very interested in my job and nobody has ever responded to it in a negative way.
He works on a stylish magazine which usually sits on the shelf near Harpers and underneath Barely Legal, where the look and feel is denoted by a Global A.D. To make the US & UK versions ‘synergistic’, you basically have to copy and adapt what the US version does. But instead of an in-depth interview with George Clooney, you get happy hour with Danny Dyer. And the centre spread isn’t Jessica Alba, it’s Jessie Wallace.
I used to angst. But now I occasionally angst at my overall lack of angst.
People are paid whatever someone is willing to pay them. A lot of people in apparently art-ier jobs are just expecting a bigger deferred pay-off down the line. A promo director hoping to move into features for example. The fact we can make a more direct conversion from ideas to cash seems a bit more open and honest. Well, open anyway.
Mister de Botton, may go some way to attempting to answering that question. He thinks that there is a dominating emotion in the UK today and that is envy.
http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html
wow. if you don’t like your job. move.
if you think advertising is evil or any different to the film industry, novel industry, (insert any industry) then you won’t last long in any job.
the reason crews get paid more for ad work is because it’s intermittent and short term. it has nothing to do with selling your soul to ‘the man’.
‘the man’ is everywhere. and he’s watching you. put your cock away.