Around ten years ago I was freelancing for a company that wanted some headlines for the apps it was offering on its website. On the face of it the task was simple: take the theme of the app, find some kind of angle, then encapsulate that angle in a short headline.

But the task was actually too easy, which made it difficult.

Let me explain…

When I was an advertising nipper, I worked at the agency that produced the Economist poster campaign. In addition, the creative department sported about ten of the contributors to D&AD’s The Copy Book (basically the global copywriting Hall Of Fame). So what I’m saying is, the bar was high. In my first month I was asked to write a line for a small space ad for a push-up bra. I can’t remember how many I had to come up with before one was approved, but it was a lot, and the same went for Snickers, Sainsbury’s, The RSPCA and every other client that entrusted their advertising to AMV BBDO.

So I was never asked to write anything crap, and if I had done so, I would have faced the scorn or (worse) the disappointment of my CD. Of course I came up with plenty of rubbish, but it usually stayed on my ‘working out’ page, the one that eventually ended up in the bin.

Cut to ten years later: I’m working on this app brief and doing my best to crank out AMV-level headlines. Once I had managed to reach a standard I might refer to as B minus Economist, I turned them in and waited for the feedback. Alas, on this occasion, I was told that my lines were too good. I must have looked puzzled because the CD then gave me an example of what he was looking for: ‘This one’s about pianos,” he said. “How about ‘Tickle The Ivories’?”. 

Riiiiiight.

Now I was really confused. That’s just straightforward. And boring. And not good. But it was also what my temporary boss wanted, so I couldn’t give him my ‘good’ stuff as that would simply be rejected. I had to give him some crappy lines, but that was much easier said than done. How crap would be crap enough? How would I know? Where would I find these lines? I had been trained to write to a certain standard; maybe not quite to the level of The Copy Book, but definitely not ‘Tickle The Ivories’.

So I had a think, tried some more straightforward stuff, got maybe half right and ended that gig soon after. I then had a long stint of full time employment where I wasn’t asked to do that kind of thing, but in more recent years the same kind of request has occasionally popped up again, and I’m still lost.

I sometimes end up as the writer on the social media side of things and every time it happens I go back to trying to write ‘proper’ headlines with an idea, or a bit of wordplay; something that might adhere more firmly to the reader’s mind; something that might communicate a lot in as few words as possible. Then I discover that the CD wants a line like, ‘Find a Brighter Tomorrow’ or ‘Make sure you enjoy nothing but the best’, and I try to stop my face doing this:

I have a good go, but I’m just guessing at what kind of crap is the right kind for the brief. I have no idea if I’m hitting the right notes or playing the piano with a Wellington boot. So I get frustrated notes back from the CD, who doesn’t understand why I don’t understand. I really want to give each one what they need, but it can feel as if I’m learning a new language, one whose words are the exact opposite of the ones I’d been taught.

When CDs explain where my crappy lines have gone wrong, I take their advice with a nod and a smile, but it still leaves me none the wiser. How do you know if something is 3/10 or 4/10 (which in their mind is a 7 or 8)?

Let me be clear: I am not looking down my nose at this work, nor the people who want it – I understand that not every brief is seeking an Economist poster, circa 2003. But the general principle of trying to catch people’s attention and hold a piece of it until they decide to buy something in the category seems to be off the table. We are in blah blah land, and I have no compass. They are paying me, so I want to offer a good return on that payment (and I want the bloody task to come to an end), so there is no point in sticking to my highfalutin principles. I just have to give it my best worst shot.

Sometimes these tasks are the entire job; sometimes they’re just a small part of a larger whole, but they tend to be where my involvement comes to an end. To be good at that thing I’d have to retrain myself entirely, but the problem is that most places still want the ‘good’ work, so it’s like trying to ride two horses at once: a feisty thoroughbred and a flea-bitten old mare, bound for the glue factory.

Anyway, First World Problems and all that…

For anyone who pays my day rate but still wants rubbish, I hope I’m getting better at being worse. If I can master the art of the underwhelming headline I’ll save myself and some of my temporary bosses (and their clients) a lot of frustration. But before that happens I’ll always show them something better, then if they still want the turd, that’s up to them.

Have a listen to Dave Dye’s interview with Malcolm Venville. It’s full of great stuff, but there’s a particular detail that caught my ear: they met on a shoot that required three still images of a motorbike. That shoot lasted four weeks.

Which reminded me that advertising creativity used to be given so much time. Maybe a month for three photographs was a little extravagant, but maybe it wasn’t. It sounds like it was, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure (of course it was).

I never spent a month on one shot (I did go to Miami to take a picture of a woman who was supposed to be on a British beach. Another story for another time) but I do remember getting longer to work on briefs than I generally get today.

In 2022 everything is needed for some kind of review in two or three days, and that’s not great for great creativity.

Here’s an absolute truth about coming up with ideas: the longer you have to do it, the more ideas you can come up with, and the more ideas you come up with, the greater the chance that your best idea will improve.

Your best idea can still end up being the first one you had, but the extra time you spent trying to improve it won’t do any harm; in fact, you might come up with lots more lesser ideas that either help you hone the good one, or give you the confidence to know that, having explored other ground, the first one is still the winner.

On the side of that, you need time to develop ideas. If you come up with a cool central concept (or ‘platform’ as the uber uber ideas are now called), time will give you the opportunity to then come up with the best executional expressions of that concept. The more headlines you write, the greater the chance of your best five being great, and that goes for every executional element: stories, casting, direction, layouts, typography etc. 

And in this time of needing dozens of executions in many media, that need for time is even more pressing. You ought to multiply the time requirement by the number of executions, but instead we tend to divide it, exacerbating the problem.

The other reason you need time is that it is essential to give your subconscious a while to try to solve the problem. As Don Draper explains, when you work on an ad you have to think about the brief deeply, then forget it, then an idea will jump up in your face:

And that takes time – both the thinking deeply and the forgetting, but also watching the idea jump up, then writing it down, then talking to your partner about it, then taking on their improvement suggestions etc. Shrink those days and you don’t even give creatives enough time to do that bare minimum process. Of course we can come up with something in the truncated time frame, but McDonald’s can also come up with an entire lunch in the time it takes Le Gavroche to whip up a marinade. Speed rarely leads to quality, unless you are Usain Bolt.

Some of you may be thinking that extra days or weeks might lead to stewing on an idea, thus corrupting its original novelty value with overthinking. Or you might get bored of something good, sending it to the bottom of your list of favourites, perhaps even killing it. But I don’t think that happens much, and even if it did, you then have to show your ideas to other people, and they’ll be seeing them for the first time, replenishing the novelty value all over again. And you’d need quite a while to get bored of a really good idea/headline etc. We all like great ads from the past that we’ve seen many, many times.

I’d guess there’s a limit, and we all know that deadlines can really get your juices flowing, but as a rule, more time=better work.

Counter to this truism, the timeframe has been shrinking for decades. What used to be a week became three days, then two days, then one. Even on a big brief, a review is almost always expected within 72 hours, and you now have to spend time getting your work in presentable form, which always means a motherfucking deck, complete with some good imagery that you have to spend time finding. Add that time to the review itself and you’ve used up half a day or more prepping instead of thinking (sure, some of the prepping is executional thinking, but it’s still an overall interruption).

We’re also aware that it sometimes takes three months to write a brief, leaving just three days to answer it, and that seems insane, especially when 90% of briefs these days hardly appear to be the result of three months of stellar thinking. I was once told to hold on briefing my department while the strategy director went back and forth with her boss, improving the brief almost imperceptibly. I chose to ignore that and immediately gave my creatives what I was sure the brief would end up being. That added three valuable days to their thinking time.

Strategy departments… We want just half of one of your three months to do justice to your superlative thinking. You know it makes sense!

So why don’t we give that incredibly important part of the process the time it needs to produce excellence? You know the answer! Come on… altogether now… Money! Time is money, so a reduction to the number of chargeable hours makes the agency management happy because it makes the client happy. You charge less and, well, you get less: less time, which leads to lesser ideas. As I pointed out above, that’s a rock-solid, ocean-going, unfuckwithable, 24-carat-platinum rule.

In summary, time has been reduced and ads have become worse. Are there other reasons for the lowering of standards? Absolutely (just check this forensic dissection of client briefing from the great Mark Ritson) Does that mean the time thing isn’t a big deal? Absolutely not.

The last decade has seen the weakening of all the struts that hold up the creative process: time, money, focus, mentorship, high standards, protection, talent etc., and we’ve all seen the work get worse. Night has followed day, and here we are. I guess the question is, how much further can things fall?

Only time will tell.

Last week I wrote that post about how 85% of the Cannes Grands Prix were awarded to for-good/purpose-based/public service/charity initiatives. Then I chucked it up on LinkedIn and received a comment that made the penny drop:

Richard Russell (one of the geniuses behind Honda Grrr) said, ‘Sobering, Ben. But I doubt there are too many in the industry front line that are especially bothered. Yes, it’s rampant now, but I am amused at how we were saying pretty much the same thing in the 80s when Brignull, Abbott, Fink, Singh, etc were scooping all the big UK awards with charity ads. ‘But it’s much easier to win the big gongs with a charity ad’, everyone bleated. And they were right. Then and now. Can’t see that changing much.’

To which, after a bit of back-and-forth, I replied ‘I think this has been a sneaky way of adding the award benefits of ‘charity’ stuff to the difficulty of corporate stuff. Yes, it’s an ad for Mars, or whatever, but now it’s all about saving whales.’

This phenomenon appears to be simply the latest in the timeline of how to game Cannes:

We started with Do your normal day job of trying to sell stuff, enter the best stuff and see if it wins.

Next was Do your normal day job of trying to sell stuff, but when you send the proof in, trim off the ugly things the client wanted, such as the phone number or the address of the local dealership.

Following that was the director’s cut era: Do your normal day job, but however good the 60” or the 30” might have been, get a nice 120” to run once at a friendly cinema, or at 3am on an obscure TV channel. Then you have your epic award entry in its most wonderful form.

Then, as the worm turned with people in the C-Suite taking the Gunn Report seriously for pitch creds, so we then had Do your normal day job, but also deliberately create of ads just for awards. We all remember the ads that were pulled after clients saw them in award books but had never approved them, or ads for clients the agency didn’t even have. But in general it was agencies deliberately taking time off from the day job to specifically create the award ads.

This was exacerbated by the new need for case study videos. No matter how small or insignificant your ‘ad’, you now need to wang on about it for two minutes, usually throwing in some added bullshit for good measure: ‘Sales increased 300%!’ Yes, they went all the way from two to eight. And what is a media impression, anyway? And who counts 1.2 billion of them?

Finally we have where we are today: Do your day job, but either make it a charity ad that is supposedly a non-charity ad, or just do a charity/non-charity ad on the side of your day job.

I’m sure everyone reading this is aware that it’s much easier to to make a charity ad that people care about than it is to make a washing powder ad that people care about. Dying children or disappearing rainforests are obviously much more interesting and persuasive topics than what temperature gets your socks whiter than white.

Back in the day (not that long ago, I think) Cannes did not allow charity ads to win Grands Prix. That, incidentally, is why my old boss, Peter Souter, did not get the biggest of all prizes, despite making this all-time great ad: 

Charity vs not-charity was thought to be unfair, so charity ads were in their own ‘product’ slot, but could not get higher than a Gold. But then they added Glass Lions and White Pencils and the whole ‘For Good’ section of Cannes, along with Titanium, which, judging by this year’s winner, also allows charity entries.

At some point during all this, some bright spark twigged that you can turn a corporate ad into a charity ad just by creating/paying for an initiative that might be somewhat related to the corporation, but also (see this year’s Sheba Grand Prix winner) might not.

Actually, as I think about it, even this little twist is not new. Back in 1996, the great Flintham and Macleod produced this excellent campaign to get people to vote:

Who was the client? That’s right: late-nineties nightclub du jour, the Ministry of Sound. I guess someone there cared a lot about voting.

But now everything seems to require that little ‘for good’ bit extra. I’ve been involved in a couple of pitches over the last twelve months and I’ve noticed that the client’s brief includes the criteria upon which the agencies will be judged. It says something like ’20% Strategy, 30% Chemistry, 50% Creative’. So that’s what ad award judging is now. They’d like to see 20% Originality, 30% Concept, 20% Craft and 30% Doing Something Nice No Matter How Much Of A Load Of Old Bollocks It Might Be. 

The phrase that springs to mind is the tail wagging the dog, but it goes in both directions: juries like charity stuff, so let’s turn our corporate ads into charity ads, which then in turn get awarded by juries, so next year let’s make more of them… and the cycle continues.

I put together the following lists by looking up all the winners of the last decade then wrote down the ones I could still remember. Here are the corporate + Nice winners: Like A Girl, Womb Stories, Dumb Ways To Die, Palau Pledge, Fearless Girl, Mouldy Whopper, Meet The Superhumans, Sweetie, Lifepaint, Meet Graham, We’re The Superhumans, Boost Your Voice, The Talk, Trash Isles, Dream Crazy, New York Times (kind of fits in both lists, I think), The Tampon Book, This Is America and Courage Is Beautiful (man, Dove have been playing this card all along, haven’t they?).

On the Not Nice side we have: It’s A Tide Ad, Magic Of Flying Billboard, Epic Split, Shot On iPhone, Nothing Beats A Londoner, Next Exit McDonald’s, Whopper Detour, New York Times (kind of fits in both lists, I think), Wendy’s Keep Fortnite Fresh and You Can’t Stop Us.

(By the way: if you can be arsed to take a look back at the big winners from the last ten years you’ll see just how many of these Best of the Best awardees have faded into obscurity. It makes very clear just how ephemeral this whole enterprise really is.) 

(By the way part 2: I should really make clear that Nice ads aren’t a bad thing as such. Plenty (Meet The Superhumans etc.) are both utterly brilliant and solve a real-life client brief. The problem is the fact that this is starting become unofficially mandatory, whether that was the intention or not.)

So are we going to have to divide awards into Nice and Not Nice in future? If it seemed unfair for the washing powders to have to go up against the starving gorillas in the past, isn’t that the case now? And isn’t that especially so since this is just a little icing on the cake of what the industry really spends its time doing? 

The vast majority of ads are still ads, going about their business trying to get people to do part with their time and money for the benefit of some corporation’s bottom line. If we spend our time and attention on the Nice stuff on the side, then reward that as The Best We Can Do, then how will that make us feel about the real ads? They’ll just become a tedious interruption to our efforts to clean up the Pacific, or get senators to vote for Climate Crisis policies, or shame racists into being less racist. All noble aims, but it’s like giving the Premier League title to the team with the most Goal Of The Month winners. Defending a cross, breaking up an attack and passing to the left wing are also valuable skills.

So I’ll just put a little flag in the sand here on the 5th of July 2022 and hope I’ve just got my knickers into too much of a twist. Maybe I’m overstating the significance of a temporary fashion. Maybe the importance of the horse and pony shows that are advertising awards is not actually that big a deal. Maybe the giant glacier of Not Nice advertising will grind along regardless of who is having an angst party on top of it.

One last note on this subject that will hopefully save me having to write a whole other post: could we please just cheer the fuck up for a bit? Life’s a bit of a grind already without turning the entire industry into a ‘who can wear the least comfortable hair shirt’ contest. Even if you’re doing the Nice stuff, maybe do it with a smile, eh?