The other day I was reading an article about the longevity of stardom. It asserted that stardom can only last for three years, after which stars can remain famous, but only as a kind of reminder of what people liked their three years of stardom.

I mentioned this to my wife, and we then considered various stars and the degree to which they reinvented themselves at the three-year mark: George Michael with three years of Wham, three years of Faith, three years of Listen Without Prejudice, then a kind of retirement; Bowie with three years of Ziggy/Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs, three years of Berlin, three years of Let’s Dance, then another kind of retirement; Eddie Murphy with three years of tyro parts like Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs, three years of superstardom (Coming to America etc.), then an enforced sabbatical imposed by making shitty films no on wanted to see, and a late-career return with three years of dressing up in fat suits.

My wife went on to say that she’d read an article that said Baby Boomers tended to stay in their jobs for twelve years, while Gen X-ers were six years, Millennials were maybe three years, and Gen Z were looking like one-and-a-half.

I assume this reduction has something to do with the grotesqueries of late-stage capitalism, as it increasingly robs us of stability and security, the better to enrich the already copiously enriched. But that aside, our attachment to jobs, and by extension, corporations, is worth examining.

When I worked at AMV BBDO I remember having a chat with Mary Wear, who told me that she and her then-partner had a policy of staying at each job no longer than three years. She then split up with her partner, who may have have then pursued his own three-year stints at Mother and Lowe before founding his own agency. Mary, however, stayed at AMV for a good few years, but with different art directors, perhaps each partnering her for something like the magical three years. So it wasn’t necessarily the agency that dictated the length of cycle. Sometimes it was the art director. 

I look back at my own career in this context and see quite a few three-year chunks: an art director, another art director, an agency I co-founded, a period of freelancing, ECDing Media Arts Lab in London, doing something similar but larger in LA, starting another agency etc.

It makes me wonder if there was some kind of natural progression to that time frame. Unlike Mary, I wasn’t conscious of making moves at the thousand-day mark, but perhaps there was a kind of corporate circadian rhythm that made me feel as if it were time to move on. Some of those changes were not by my choice, but is it possible that I was subconsciously sabotaging my circumstances, readying myself for the chrysalis and attendant reinvention?

Going back to the article my wife read, are we all leaning towards shorter stints at each place, or do we keep the timelength with which we started? There could be an arc to any situation, one that we adhere to without realising: a beginning, a middle and an end, with each new act feeling appropriate at a certain time. ‘Here comes year three. Time to start packing my parachute and putting out feelers for another position. Or to look for a new copywriter who can refresh me…’

It’s also possible that people get tired of people after a certain amount of time, and we collectively conspire to move on and be moved on. Or at least the excitement of the new is bound to fade over that time: just look at Madonna’s 3-year cycles, often starting with something provocative (the lyrics of Like a Virgin, the video for Like A Prayer, the Sex book) that echoed to faintness before she found another way to ‘shock’ us. 

Does going over the allotted time simply lead to a kind of disappointment or failure? Do you have a different timeframe that dictates your career? Do you try to jump before you’re pushed?

I need more data. I’ll add a question to wherever I end up posting this, but do feel free to comment with your own experiences…

Come on! Let’s just get it out there: older people are icky and lame. They are often covered in a layer of dust. They need help going to the loo (which is why so many smell of wee). They have no idea what Zoom, Twitter or Charli D’Amelio are. They talk about things that happened in the last century. They look at you funny when you insist on creating an 80-page deck to convince a fifth-rate director to take on your 6-second blipvert. They don’t know how to create DAOs, and they think crypto is a pyramid scheme for the terminally credulous.

But on the other side, look at the kidz: their faces are buried in their TikTok feeds instead of an old One Show annual. They have no idea how to craft anything, or what ‘craft’ is. They think ‘Create The Future Together’ is a great endline, or maybe a great strategy, or possibly a great campaign idea. They spend more time comping visuals than thinking about why they’re comping those visuals in the first place, and they think that a Cannes Bronze is actually something of value.

In short, both are making advertising worse. One is too expensive while the other is too ignorant. One is too stuck in their ways while the other flits from fad to fad. One thinks everything was better in the 1990s while the other has no idea what happened in the 1990s.

But other than the people who are 30-35, everyone is too young or too old, so maybe we should try a bit harder to make the best of both worlds rather than condemn the worst.

As luck would have it, I just read an article that might help us with that. Although the title is ‘The kind of smarts you don’t find in young people,’ it’s really an explanation of how the brains of younger and older people have separate specific abilities, both of which are essential to the creative process:

In the mid-20th century, psychologists set about finding an explanation for a great mystery. Researchers had long noted that some skills—analysis and innovation, for example—tend to rise quickly very early in life and then fall through one’s 30s and 40s. Meanwhile, one’s knack for combining complex ideas, understanding what they mean, and relating them to others rises throughout middle age and can stay high well into old age.

The two groups of skills originate in two basic types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. The first is essentially the ability to solve abstract problems; the second represents a person’s knowledge gained during a lifetime of learning. In other words, as a young adult, you can solve problems quickly; as you get older, you know which problems are worth solving. Crystallized intelligence can be the difference between an enterprise with no memory that makes lots of rookie errors and one that has deep experience—even if the company is brand new.

In a neophiliac industry like advertising, new stuff is always highly prized. From Second Life to NFTs to the latest bands, influencers and pop-ups, adland always likes to jump in first and ask questions later. Is it right to recommend the latest fashion to a client? Sometimes, but many agencies feel compelled to do that without considering or waiting for the consequences; after all, by the time you’ve done your due diligence, your new thing is longer new.

But older people are more predisposed to seeing the patterns that point to the mid- and longer-term futures of what is currently untried and untested. Sure, it’s not as whiz-bang to move slow and fix things as it is to move fast and break them, but older people have seen the fashions come and go, so they tend to have a better idea of how your current circumstances might play out in the weeks or years to come.

The point is, as a general rule, using the old to optimise the implementation of the new makes a lot of sense. Yes, that might seem like clipping the wings of the crazier ideas, but it also might mean that strategic or creative rigor is applied, leaving less chance for errors or problems further down the line. As that article says:

Companies would do well to install master teachers throughout their business. Don’t target people who pine for the “old days” in their careers and abilities. Instead, look for elders who recognize that it is healthy and normal to see some of their capabilities decline with age, and that this presents an opportunity to foster those abilities in others. Older leaders should be enthusiastic about making great teams, developing others’ ideas, sharing knowledge openly and generously, and making prudent judgments based on their own deep experience.

Obviously, doing this requires hiring or retaining more older people, and I’m fully aware that such a practice is heresy for many agencies. Even though St Luke’s recently took on my friend Mark Denton as the Oldest Intern In Advertising for a month’s placement, that was still unusual enough to be worthy of lots of ‘How’s That Ker-Azy Idea Going To Work Out???’ articles, while further agencies giving it a go seem to be thin on the ground.

But oddly enough, it’s one of the closest things I’ve seen to the ‘master teacher’ suggestion in that article. Mark’s conclusion, ably assisted by another elder statesperson, The Ad Contrarian, is that he could be a ‘Brain In A Bottle‘, a kind of Yoda, sitting in the corner of the creative department as a wisdom resource for his more callow colleagues. We saw how things worked out for a month, but what about a year? Twelve months where course corrections could be made and feedback could be taken on might well add more value than whatever a ‘Mark’ might cost. Advertising is always exhorting clients to be brave. Shouldn’t we take our own advice occasionally?

One other factor might be the fear and competition bred by the situation: young people have to use whatever edge they can to get their job, and when that happens they know that they only succeed by having their idea chosen over that of the other team on the brief. So may the best team (or the team that creates the most sellable idea) win, which means that the other team loses. That is the implication of every day in the agency.

For the older ones, you know that every raise increases the size of the target on your back and the number of knives aimed towards it. No one says no to a raise, but we all know that the higher the salary, the more you stick out to the network CFO in Manhattan, who just needs to cut costs by 8%, and can see that one easy way of doing that is to delete the names of you and your partner. What is the magic danger-number, and when does the axe-person start looking around? Nobody knows, but your career is generally spent inching closer to the guillotine, and it’s coming for us all.

So if you take those two situations and run them simultaneously, you get fear and competition instead of something that might be far more useful: collaboration. We’re taught from the start to try to be the last team standing, but an atmosphere that gets us all to try to improve each other’s work would surely be better for both the work and our mental health.

Instead we take our place on the conveyer belt, watch as the people some distance ahead fall off the end of it, and brace ourselves for that inevitability. But if the more experienced people were retained and given the chance to continue contributing to the young, that might improve the system and the advertising for everyone.

Mentors, mentees, education, growth, improvement, success.

It’s not exactly a new idea, but then sometimes the things that stand the test of time do so for a reason.

Last week I was listening to the peerless Graham Fink on his second episode of Behind The Billboard. If you haven’t had a listen yet, stop reading this now and rectify that scandalous situation. Then listen to episode 1. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Good.

Wasn’t it brilliant? There were many excellent anecdotes, but the part that really stuck with me was an almost throwaway comment at the end where Graham quoted Hugh Laurie as saying, ‘There’s no such thing as great ideas; only great execution of ideas’ (the actual quote and interview are here). Graham went on to say that there was a big difference between having ideas and getting those ideas made exactly as you want, or even better. 

He added that we never really present ideas to clients that are above 8/10, but then you go into execution, and that’s when you crank it up a few notches with great photographers, typographers or directors.

OK. There’a a lot to examine there, so let’s start with the main point; the one that says execution supersedes concept…

Many years ago I went to Watford (West Herts College) to study Copywriting and Art Direction under the great Tony Cullingham. He instills in his pupils the opinion that concept is 90% of the endeavour. The other 10% is the actual writing or art direction bit (the execution).

And he’s not alone in that thought. We’ve all heard those creative department insults: ‘Yeah, but what’s the idea?’ or ‘There’s no fucking idea’, suggesting the primacy of the conceptual underpinning, but you only have to go back to my penultimate post (and this one I wrote seven years ago on a similar theme) to see that we don’t even agree on what an ‘idea’ is. This incredibly valuable currency of the ad agency is… what exactly? 

If we go back to Hugh’s suggestion, and Graham’s agreement, it’s not that important. 

According to the winner of the Commercial of the Year at last week’s British Arrows, it’s ‘Show models dressed in Burberry jumping and dancing around a street while snowballs land on them’. You might say that fashion advertising doesn’t usually have ‘ideas’, and you’d be right, but this is undeniably a brilliant ad. It was liked, shared and awarded all over the place. It might even have sold some clothes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbmW76Cp4s8

As far as the concept went, Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of Burberry, said, ’It’s about that fearless spirit and imagination when pushing boundaries.’ That sounds like bollocks to me, but the end result, like great fashion, is all about emotion and attitude, so it makes sense to skip the logic of a conceptual foundation. This is all about execution, and the distance between ‘People dance around in a snowball shower’ and the finished ad is like the distance between a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and a Fabergé Egg.

So is the idea ever important? Well, Good Things Come To Those Who Wait, Mac vs PC, Beware Of Things Made In October and Write The Future make very effectively the argument that it is. But Burberry, Flat Eric and Whassup are equally powerful on the ‘no idea’ side of things.

So why don’t we just get it out in the open? Sometimes advertising ideas matter, and sometimes they don’t. It’s OK not to bother with a solid concept, but if you have one, great. No biggie either way.

But idea-wise, what really does matter are the thousands of little creative contributions that happen between brain and reality. Let’s stick with the Burberry example: many, many ideas happened even after someone suggested dancing around in the snow would demonstrate the fearless spirit and imagination one displays when pushing boundaries. What kind of street? How many models? What size snowballs? When do they fall? What are the dance moves? Who goes where? Who should shoot it? Who would be a good DOP? 

And those are just the basics. You’ll then have: which lens do we shoot with? How heavy should the greens be in the grade? Should we shave three frames off the end of that shot or that one? Four frames? Five? Back to three again? How far should we roll up the second dancer’s cuffs? What expression should the dancer at the back have at 1:23.06 seconds? Should the camera move this far to the left? Another inch? Three inches? Three feet?

And even then there will be another thousand questions that pivot from those answers, but you get the idea. (Yes, I said ‘idea’. That was deliberate.)

So many ideas happened to improve this ad, and yet there was no discernible ‘Watford’ idea underneath it all. Then they made something similarly idea-less a year later and it was just as loved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCbfq_-cd-g

And it was all in the execution. So Hugh and Graham were right. Kind of.

I remember having a conversation with a colleague ten years ago. He had come up with an idea for a story and he asked me if there were people who would write a book or script based on that idea. He wanted to be an ‘ideas’ guy, who just thought up basic premises, which he would then pass on to a supposed executor.

I told him that if there was something like that I was not aware of it. Sure, there are staff writers, or people who accept commissions from studios (‘We just bought the rights to this biography of Marilyn Monroe. We’ll pay you X to write the script’), but that’s not the same as ‘I just had an idea for a story. Could you spend weeks/months writing it on the off-chance someone will like it enough to buy it?’ For a start, most executional writers have their own ideas for stories, ones that they would be happy to spend hours getting just right. In addition, great ideas are so easy to find, here are 100 of them, left on my blog eight years ago by a commenter, who said ‘Shit ideas are ten a penny. The problem is, so are good ideas’.

The example I always give is, if I came up to you in 1990 and said, ‘I’ve had this idea for a book about a theme park with real dinosaurs that are brought to life by adapting and developing their genetic coding’, would you have thought, ‘Well that sounds like a massive bestseller that will become the highest-grossing film of all time’? Probably not. You’d want to see what the characters were like, how exciting the plot could be, what kind of dinosaurs there were, etc.

I could even say that a man parks his car outside a bank, and that would still require answers to questions like, what kind of car? What kind of bank? What is the man wearing? What is the weather like? Are there any passers-by? How old are they? What city are we in? What year did this take place? Any one of your answers could make the scene better or worse.

So execution is a very large proportion, of the final work.

Which brings me to the second thing Graham said: that we never really give a client any idea that is above 8/10, and usually more like a 6 or 7. And that means that’s the level of what you tell your partner, or your CD. I can tell you for sure that paragraphs of ideas are not particularly helpful. At best they can get someone to say, ‘OK, write it into a script and show me what you mean. Stress test it’. Then, in some form of execution, it can be judged with greater clarity.

There are thousands of rejected ideas for Happiness Is A Cigar Called Hamlet, Good Things Come To Those Who Wait, and Mac vs PC. There is a smaller number of ads that got made, then binned because the execution didn’t live up to people’s expectations of the idea. There are also great ideas, executed to everyone’s satisfaction that then appeared before a public that did not not give a toss. At every step of the process you are dealing with subjective interpretations of ‘funny’, ‘quick’, ‘irreverent’, ‘cool’ and hundreds of other abstract notions. The idea just gets you to the next stage of execution, where it can get better, worse or stay about the same.

Imagine you saw the script for Guinness Surfer. Could you have executed it with the same brilliance as Tom and Walt, Jonathan Glazer, Johnnie Burn, Ivan Bird etc.? Part of the buy-in from the Guinness client must have been the track record of the agency, especially the creative department. Otherwise they’d be looking at a few paragraphs about a surfer waiting for a perfect wave, and have no idea (there’s that word again) if it was going to be worth committing a giant budget to its execution.

The idea stage is where you can change anything for tuppence (your chargeable hourly rate notwithstanding). Changes in commitment are equally cheap and insignificant. A chat over a pint of beer can lead to a joke that doubles the quality of the script. Ten more ideas can appear between lunch and home time. A client’s feedback can alter the whole thing, or be argued with until the idea is better, worse or dead. Then you just go again, for no more than your hourly rate. The idea stage is where you can watch a short film to pass the time and decide that, with the addition of your client’s logo, what you are watching could be the ‘idea’.

But execution is where the rubber hits the road. It’s where the real money is spent. It’s where the commitments are made from which you cannot return. It’s what takes the most time. It’s where specialists form a team that elevates something invisible to something tangible. It’s where you can make something great or something shit, no matter whether your ‘idea’ is great or shit. 

Let’s not say one is better or worse, or more or less noble than the other. The idea is necessary to get to the execution, but the execution is absolutely necessary to make the idea any good.