‘Why talented creatives are leaving your shitty agency.’
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There’s plenty to agree/disagree with in this very long year-old blog post.
I can’t be arsed to go through the whole thing, so you’re on your own.
All I can say for sure is that a couple of the comic strips are pretty funny and it’ll kill 15 minutes on the lav.
I think there’s a very obvious thing missing from that list: a shit salary.
Ever since the bean counters took over, they’re squeezing creatives’ salaries as hard as they can get away with to increase the length of Sorrell’s and Lévy’s yacht by a few inches every year.
Part of the issue is that ad creatives by nature are bright and inquisitive people. Inevitably working on certain things makes them question what they are doing, much in the same way a talented writer covering the minutiae of local news for a living.
Being an ad creative is selling your soul to the devil.
This is only because of the world we live in. Advertising for HSBC who launder drug money is a moral dilemma, as is Coke or pepsi who make people fat and unhealthy.
Selling organic carrots or craft beer would present less of a problem.
It is the overarching attack on society from corporations and the subsequent damage that makes working in advertising questionable.
David Foster Wallace said it best;
“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”
Pffft…