Given that my most recent Creative Review column suggests that there is no objective way of measuring advertising quality, I thought I might take this opportunity to ironically explain why one particular ad is unarguably, totally and utterly ’great’.

The ad in question is this one for Communion from Uncommon:

So why is it good?

1. It stands out. As old Mr. Bernbach used to say, if nobody notices your advertising, everything else is immaterial. I’ll just repeat that: if nobody notices your advertising, everything else is immaterial. I mean, sure, that’s obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from watching most of the ads that slide past your consciousness as if they never happened. This stands out and it does it in two ways: it’s different to the other ads in the break (or LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook feed), and it’s different to other financial services advertising. And with that grinding rock guitar and grimy black-and-white aesthetic, it’s literally made to be noticed. Big tick.
2. It’s constantly engaging. There’s a V-sign, which is intriguing, but there’s also a list of things to which you might like to apply that gesture. What’s this all about? What’s next? Whose fingers are they? Do I agree? Who is running this ad? Is it an ad? Why is it black-and-white? So many unanswered questions to keep you interested. And those unanswered questions will provide the depth that will make people pay attention to it again the next time it appears.
3. It has a satisfying conclusion, by which I mean you don’t feel the preceding 50 seconds were gratuitous. The answer is a good one, and it makes sense. You can’t really disagree because you think about this kind of thing all the time: ‘If only I had X amount of money, I could living in a better place, and I wouldn’t have to listen to that arsehole, or get up at that time of the morning etc.’. This is ‘If only I could win the lottery’ but in a way that is attainable. Money IS freedom, and this is what that freedom will get you. You don’t open a savings account; you open the chance to move out of your parents’ house.
4. It has a great strategy. Financial services strategies are usually along the lines of ‘save for a rainy day’ or ‘feel secure with a blah blah pension’. Both of those are negative and dull. This is positive and inspiring. And great strategies are rare these days. They usually say things like ‘Live your best life with X’ or ‘Unleash your potential with Y’. Generic, forgettable, easy to ignore. Not like this, which is the opposite of those three things.
5. The branding is excellent. It’s all irreverent attitude and block capital letters. You are not going to confuse it with Prudential or Aviva. And if you’re young, and not even thinking of this category, this will be the financial services company for you. Sure, it will put some people off, but this isn’t for them, and that stance will get them bigger, more devoted fans. They’re not growing the category; they’re growing themselves, and as a challenger brand, that is an essential distinction.
6. It’s topical. People are brassic. The mismanagement of Britain’s finances by the current government has left millions tightening their belts. Fuel prices, inflation, mortgage rates… fuck all that. But what’s the solution? Communion. ‘Save Enough To Save Yourself’? Damn right. 

And that’s why this ad is great.

When I was maybe three years into my first job, a question popped into my head: ‘Am I now a middleweight?’ 

For those of you who are a little younger than me, that term is probably one you’ve only heard applied to boxing, but in the early 2000s it was the next stage up the creative ladder from ‘junior’. The stage after that was ‘senior’, then, if your agency was large enough, ‘Group Head’, then came the final level: CD.

We’ll get to the change of job titles in a second, but let’s first address that status uncertainty: the transition from junior to middleweight was not a formal promotion. You could literally declare it, and it would then be so. In practice it was only relevant if you moved jobs and you or your headhunter wanted to frame you in a more substantial way, but it felt like a big-ish deal back then.

Even when I became an agency founder in 2005, junior/middleweight creatives would regularly ask me when they would be allowed to shed the former title and emerge from a kind of creative chrysalis to become the latter. They were delighted when I told them their boss probably couldn’t care less, so they might was well just declare it there and then.

The change to ‘senior’ was harder. You’d probably need at least seven years’ experience, but as it was a slightly more substantial title, you’d also need a decent bit of work behind you. It was also a vaguely formal promotion, so it was usually up to someone else to declare it for you (again, this made more sense if you moved jobs).

Then you became the boss of some sort, with a proper job title, and that was it.

Now we obviously have many, many creative job titles, each of which requires a formal promotion. The journey from placement to junior to copywriter/art director to ACD to CD to GCD to ECD to CCO (or whatever the ladder is like in your country/agency) is a bit of a nightmare because there are no universal criteria for passing each threshold. When you’re a cub scout you know exactly what you have to do to get a Gold Arrow; when you’re a creative there is no such clarity, and it will vary from agency to agency and country to country.

I’d also suggest that the question of whether or not Pete and Mike are now ready to move from ‘copywriter and art director’ to ‘ACD’ is so ridiculously low on a CCO’s list of priorities that they probably care more about the colour of their tea. But now that each ‘band’ does have a set of duties and a suggested salary range, it’s a big deal to anyone wanting make that jump.

Talking of a set of duties, I recently received the following message from an ECD:

A CD used to be the head of the department, now they’re a senior creative, an ECD is kinda head but not really because now we have the CCOs. What next I ponder? And I also feel like my timing has been so shit, when I finally reach that elusive title that I think will see me running things, they invent another one.

Interesting point. 

When I was that aforementioned agency founder, my job title was ‘CD’, but I had friends at bigger agencies who were also CDs, despite doing a quite different job to mine. I had to deal with network relationships, P&Ls, shadow P&Ls, hiring, firing, raises, budgets, decisions about whether or not to take on an account etc. They just had to deal with the creative output of one account, and they had a boss of some sort to take any real responsibility off their hands if required.

But now the fragmentation of media means the ‘Big Agency CD’ job has changed. For a start it is now called ‘ECD’, but there are so many pieces of work in so many media to wrangle that one person can’t functionally be across everything. So you have to allow yourself to be subsumed into a team whose leader might not be readily apparent, and that can undermine any authority you might have thought you had. On top of that, there are no universal rules for how this happens, and personalities and agendas might shunt certain people forward, while others shrink back into the shadows.

So that ECD who wrote to me is right: she’s an old-fashioned ‘senior creative’ or ‘group head’, but the title of ECD – Executive Creative Director – sounds very important, and used to describe what is now the CCO (around 2002-2010 the CD title became ECD, before morphing to CCO, although in some agencies/countries the CCO is quite a different position to ECD, carrying more responsibility as a true member of the ‘C-Suite’). So the expectations for anyone in that position should be great, but again the reality depends on the agency and any arrangements that might change from account to account or project to project.

In one situation you might be the boss of bosses; in another, a cog in the machine. That’s quite a whiplash-inducing change, especially as it can happen several times in the same day, but that’s the 2023 reality, and nobody will be coming to sort it out.

In the freelance part of my career I’ve done every creative job, from copywriter to CCO, sometimes writing social lines; sometimes running and presenting major nationwide pitches. At the same time as I was covering those possibilities, I also founded an agency, wrote a blog, produced a series of podcasts, wrote a column for Creative Review and emptied the cat litter. 

To me it’s very much the current reality, and if that means occasionally biting my tongue while a less experienced CD rejects my suggestions on the way to a disastrous outcome, then so be it. It’s another skill to know when to push things and when to stand back, and that really only comes with experience. Sometimes people need to make their own mistakes because that’s the best way to learn.

It also helps to avoid being precious. If the ECD that wrote to me can gain anything useful from these circumstances it might be the understanding that losing a battle can help you win a war, and, as the old movie-making cliché goes, Nobody Knows Anything, so chasing a definitive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is futile. Just try to help make things as good as they can be but wear your beliefs lightly.

That means that the question of ‘Am I a middleweight?’ might now apply to all of us. Depending on the circumstances the answer can be ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’, and that answer might only be valid for a single response in a single moment.

Greet all that uncertainty with a winning smile, and you’ll have a much better chance of staying sane.

Good luck!

Creatively speaking this campaign is excellent:

It does everything right. It’s insightful, original, memorable, able to support hundreds of executions in any media, and could continue for years.

That’s why I’d rather it didn’t exist.

The whole premise seems to be based on pointing out reasons to fly that go beyond the usual pair of business and leisure. There’s ‘It’s not you, London, it’s me’, ‘Head meet sand’, ‘Detox of the century’, ‘Tour de French cheese’ and hundreds of others.

The problem is, it’s 2023 and finding new reasons to take a flight that you might not otherwise have taken is very much Not A Good Thing.

This article explains why, but here’s just one paragraph to make things a little clearer:

A return flight from London to San Francisco emits around 5.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) per person – more than twice the emissions produced by a family car in a year, and about half of the average carbon footprint of someone living in Britain. Even a return flight from London to Berlin emits around 0.6 tonnes CO2e – three times the emissions saved from a year of recycling.

More flights means more fuel burned, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means a hotter planet, which means we are fucked, and the people who will be most fucked most immediately are the people in the poorer parts of the world, the ones who are least prepared to bear the brunt of a UK resident’s decision to Tour de French cheese.

Like I said, the campaign is brilliant, but the better it gets, the worse it will be for all of us, including everyone who works for BA and everyone who works for the agency.

We need to stop holding up this kind of work as something to aspire to and call it out for the damage it is going to cause to life on earth. If Cannes is going to award Lions for Sustainable Development Goals while also awarding a Grand Prix for this campaign, what’s the point of any of it?

We had many years of awards for cigarette advertising, then banned it. Perhaps we should now do the same for airlines, fossil fuel companies and anyone else whose financial success jeopardises our collective future.

(Sorry, Uncommon. I generally love everything you do, but when you’re this brilliant at mass communication you should think twice before creating something that will cause so much harm to so many of us.)

While I’m on the subject of the Climate Crisis, I also wrote the following on behalf of Green The Bid, an organisation co-founded by my wife.

They are committed to bringing sustainability to advertising production, and reducing flights to shoots is a big part of that.

If you’d like to see how you can help, read on…

I remember the first time I flew for a shoot. It was back in 1998, and for some strange reason we were going to recreate a someone in a deckchair on Brighton beach by heading to Miami. I’m not sure it made sense but I was not going to argue. As a junior creative on £12000 a year, any opportunity to take a free trip abroad felt like a minor lottery win.

We ended up getting upgraded, so it was also my first experience of business class. In those pre 9/11 days, Virgin Atlantic offered on-board massage, a spacious bar area and mini personal movie players. When we landed in Miami I was in no hurry to disembark.

So I get it. Flying can be fun. Maybe not always as fun as that first trip, but certainly a lot more fun than sitting at your desk for four hours then heading out into the rain for an underwhelming lunchtime sandwich.

In the following twenty years, I flew a lot for work, and was delighted to do so, even when the departure time was early and the destination was a day’s conference in Berlin. I think that’s because everyone’s early experience of flying always starts as a vacation, so it’s hard to deprogram those endorphin-loosening cues of pleasure and excitement: airports, passports, boarding, take off, your own food, drink and endless movies… When you’re a kid that seems like the most fun you can possibly have, and then it all leads to further fun at your destination: hotels and sunshine and no homework.

So when it happens in your working life, it’s hard to ignore all that, especially when you add free booze to the situation. Sure, you’re ‘working’, but you’re also staying in a hotel, meeting interesting people and being taken for free lunches and dinners in a foreign city. Traveling is generally considered to be one of the best experiences a person can have, but the one thing that makes it even better is having some faceless corporate sugar daddy pick up the entire tab while a producer organizes everything for you.

Yes indeed: flying is very, very good, but it’s also very, very bad.

Allow me to explain why…

Picture the scene: your script has been approved, bids are in, and production suggests you’re going to be shooting in Brazil (if you’re reading this from Brazil, picture Los Angeles instead). Do you:

1. Wonder if you can buy Havaianas at the airport, look for that tube of SPF 30 and dream of your first in-flight margarita?
2. Prep yourself for the to-ing and fro-ing with finance about whether or not you’ll be flying business or premium economy?
3. Fret about the additional impact your script will now be having on the climate crisis?

I imagine 90% of you will choose some version of a), but that might be because you’re not aware that flying creates 60-90% of the emissions produced by the average advertising shoot.

So unless more people answer c), we’re going to continue doing a lot of harm, all while our minds are on casting, Cannes and yes, the occasional Cuba Libre.

‘But,’ you’re probably wondering, ‘what am I supposed to do about it? All I did was start my script with ‘Open on Ipanema at sunset…’ How can I be to blame?’ Well, joking aside, it does actually start with the locations you add to your ideas. 

Sure, you can find yourself shooting in a Prague studio because the labor rate is cheaper, or South Africa because it’s February and your commercial will appear in June, which means rainy London is out of the question. But actions have consequences, and the selection of a faraway destination over one that’s nearby might give you a chance to add to your air miles, but it will also add to the PPM of atmospheric carbon.

As this article explains, if air travel were a country it would be the sixth-biggest CO2 producer in the world, so when a casual ‘Ipanema’ on a script suddenly adds fifteen business class flights (creatives, CDs, clients, account people, production, assorted people who ‘have’ to go on what looks like it might be a quasi vacation etc.) to the planet’s emissions, it might be worth considering another destination.

And yes: I understand that life is hard and annoying, and a little business class trip to Brazil could really take the edge off some of those stresses. I also understand that this specific location might be critical to the success of your script, and that, after all, is your primary responsibility. Finally, I understand that your single excursion will only be 0.0000000003% of the final total of all global emissions, so what’s the big deal?

Let’s take those one by one: yes, life is difficult, and addressing the need to make it feel less so is something we do every day, in ways both big and small. But many of those ways fall in to the category of ‘short-term gain; long-term pain’, where the immediate pleasure creates a larger problem at some point in the future. And that’s exactly what any unnecessary air travel does. The carbon cost will be borne by everyone, long after the shoot has faded into a distant memory. Will it be worth it? That’s a subjective matter for your own conscience, but at least you can now approach that quandary from an informed position.

Then there’s the question of whether or not a flight (or fifteen) is necessary to make your commercial as good as it can be. Will the journey improve it enough to make it more effective? More impactful? More awarded? It might be impossible to know for sure, but maybe we can reframe it for you: if you agree the flights are problematic, where do you draw the line in adding something problematic to improve the commercial communication you are making on behalf of a corporation? Is promoting negative body imagery too much? What about causing depression in teenagers? Or increasing the power of a retail giant to crush a mom-and-pop competitor? Any of those might or might not be the result of your the script that comes out of your MacBook. So how far is ‘too far’ for you?

Last is the question of how much difference your flights will make in the grand old scheme of things. Well, it’s only a grand old scheme of things because it’s made up of millions and millions of smaller old schemes of things. Will setting your spot closer to home make much of a difference to the overall rise in the global temperature that will cause financial hardship, migration and death? No, but if we all think that way, the human race disappears. And besides, one action can inspire others. If you’re the only person deciding not to fly, you might feel a little exposed, but if others take your lead, and flying to shoots takes on the same stigma as, say, racism, your choice could make a real, significant, positive difference.

It’s an easy decision and very complicated one.

It could make a huge difference or a tiny one.

It’s could be a problem or an opportunity.

But the good news is that you’re an intelligent, committed person who is now armed with some useful facts. Maybe you can’t prevent this shoot, but if you bring it up this time, or talk to your CSR person, or your holding company’s CSR person, you might find that you start the ball rolling into all sorts of unexpected areas. (Pro tip: companies don’t like spending money. This is a great way to avoid spending money.)

So that’s your run-down of flights and flying and the climate and cash and your need for pleasure rubbing up against your responsibility to avert the heat-death of the world. 

I hope it hasn’t been too guilt-inducing.

If you want any advice, Green The Bid has spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking, writing and talking about this. It’s their thing, and they like nothing more than spreading the word to expand the effect. Get in touch at hello@greenthebid.earth and find out all the fantastic ways in which we can make the advertising industry more sustainable.