This blog is ruining your life (possibly)
Steve Harrison (see posts passim for mentions) said an interesting thing to me when he came to speak at my agency (he said more than one interesting thing but I’m only going to refer to one). He mentioned the phenomenon of weekday frequency of social media posts, i.e. many more posts occur during a working day than a weekend.
So why is that? Well, obviously we all have better things to do on the weekend than tell our friends what we’re eating or what we think of the new Muse album. But during the week it’s much harder to stop us finding even the most mundane thing so interesting that we decide to tell all our friends about it.
I’ve often thought of this blog of nothing more than a diverting manner in which to pass a few minutes, on a working day or otherwise, but I am fully aware of the way readership figures tend to slump on Friday afternoon, picking themselves up like a a coke-fuelled middle manager on Monday morning. So you’re all just killing time when you could be working, but you’re much less likely to sacrifice any of your precious leisure moments to do something so pointless.
(By the way, a few years ago I checked my analytics on Christmas Day (at that time it was an almost Pavlovian reaction to opening my laptop; now I have no idea how many people read my blog and haven’t checked my analytics for years) only to find that 100 individuals had come seeking a post or comment with which to pass the tedious hell of Yuletide.)
So what does all that tell us, other than the somewhat predictable fact you’re all bored at work but not so much on weekends? Well, I think it’s interesting that social media is just something that’s slightly more attractive than work, but much less so than the rest of your life. It’s a low-level pastime that barely competes with reading a copy of Heat in a doctor’s surgery. Its attraction is not immediate and necessary; it’s adequate and tangential, and I suspect that much of what gives it its appeal is its easy access and consumption – right there, a mere click away from that spreadsheet/catfood script/great American novel you’re ‘supposed’ to be getting on with. It’s the medium as much as the content, providing us with a simple way to dip in and out of fuck-all, every single minute of the day.
But have you ever wondered if that has anything to do with the creative dip advertising is currently still suffering? I do like those John Lewis ads, but there hasn’t been anything truly great since Gorilla, a dry patch that has coincided quite neatly with the rise of social media. In those heady Facebook-less days of the nineties and early noughties there were multiple great ads each year. Now many creatives are either surfing the net for vaguely second-hand inspiration or just killing time. Does that prevent the brain stretch that a long think about a problem in a vacuum brings on? Does it lead to earlier, less interesting answers to briefs? Or is it just one more of the many factors that have contributed to this status quo?
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I sincerely thank you for choosing to fuck up your career with a visit to at If This Is A Blog Then What’s Christmas.
I think the industry’s dry patch has more to do with recession and the fundamental shift in agency/client relationship that’s been happening for 20 years. I’m still spending 97% of my day thinking about briefs/tedious management tasks/office politics/frustrating clients, just like before the ‘rise’ of social media. And I’m still shit, too.
PS: I would *love* to be working on a cat food brief right now…
I think the decline is a result of many factors.
1. Recession.
2. Too many fucking propositions.
3. Scared clients. Probably a consequence of point one.
4. Media companies controlling what media has to be used before anybody has arrived at a fucking idea.
5. The rise of creativity in other countries. Which in turn makes us look even shitter.
But lets be honest. When we get a chance to do it well, nobody does it better.
Blogs aren’t necessarily harming the industry. Scamps current approach to blogging is quite helpful. It has my thinking about my approach to clients and work.
And 6 times out 10 so does yours. But in a around about way like Trott.
I think the best creativity comes from mad rich people or hardcore working class people.
UK advertising seems full of upper middle class people. Money lovers.
this is a bit different to what you’re saying, but generally speaking i have not become creatively richer looking at twitter.
nor blogs, really.
most of it is just as big a waste of time as TV.
(i love TV)
And when i don’t look at all the above things and get on with my job and read books, i feel much better about myself. and i’m more productive. bye now.
Has it occured to you that maybe those 100 people ended up on your blog at Christmas because your blog’s name has Christmas in it?
Or what was the question?
Maybe social media and the rest attributed to shorter attention spans, which make digging into a problem deep a teensy bit harder.
That has never occurred to me.
Interesting…
I look at your blog so that I don’t feel that my rage is unique, or at odds with the zeitgeist. There are many others, it seems, who share my axe-grinding, pathological hatred of what has happened to our business over the last few years.
You are helping me Ben. You are helping all of us.
Judit’s post made me laugh out loud. I had completely forgotten what your Blog is called (it’s just Ben’s Blog on my bookmarks). Mind you, I did check it out on Dec 25th, to stop myself from picking out my eyeballs with a walnut cracker from the wooden ‘nut selection’ bowl.
Sadly, my blog “You may as well click on this bozos – it’s October 2nd after all” has seen very little uplift today.
When do you think I can expect to see a spike Ben…?
I share your pain, AdamT. Except the one from your buttocks.
So few comments – weird.
I like to read twitter when i’m in the agency blogs taking a dump. In fact, i’m reading this post on the bogs. But not in the agency.