Credit Where Credit Might Not Be Due
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One of the consequences of the proliferation of media channels is that many people now seem to be responsible for any celebrated piece of work.
There are now several creatives, creative directors, GCDs, ECDs and CCOs attached to any multimedia project.
Having been involved with several of these projects, I can tell you that creative involvement can range from coming up with the idea and closely shepherding every element of the execution to just being in the room while others added the good stuff (or even making suggestions that make the work worse).
But from the outside everyone gets the same amount of credit, so how can you tell who did what, and therefore who to hire?
I’d suggest that it’s now impossible.
Back in the pre-digital times you had one team of a copywriter and an art director, and if a good piece of work had their name on it, you could be pretty confident that it was good because of what they did. Even more specifically, the writer almost certainly did the writing, and the art director, y’know, directed the art, so if you liked the copy, and you wanted to hire the person who did it, you just had to put two and two together.
Sure, sometimes the AD/client/planner would come up with the endline, but in general, the credits were accurate.
The CD element might be a bit of a wildcard, possibly contributing something critical, but sometimes knowing little-to-nothing about the project. That said, their reputation would be made on the basis of the entire agency’s output, not just a single commercial.
But as the 2000s wore on, campaigns needed the help of a separate digital agency, with its own creatives and CDs. Later on they might need another experiential agency to add to the numbers. Later still, most of those jobs came under the roof of a single agency, but a campaign might still require several teams so that the TV creatives didn’t have to write all the social post copy while they were concentrating on the edit.
And that’s where we are now.
Have a look at any multimedia award winner of the last few years and you’ll have no idea who really did the amazing/difficult/original part of the campaign.
For example, have a look at the credits for Moldy Whopper. Three agencies from three countries supplied three art directors, two copywriters, one senior art director, two Group Creative Directors, an Executive Creative Director, and Executive Design Director, two Chief Creative Officers and two Global Chief Creative Officers.
Who had the original thought, ‘Let’s show a mouldy Whopper’? And who was in charge of producing the final image? Those would be the two people I’d like to hire, but I have no idea which of those people really did what.
Maybe they all did a lot of essential things, but unless you were on the project, I think you’d find it hard to tell who did what. So if you want to hire the people who really were behind one of the most awarded campaigns of recent years, you might end up picking the wrong ones.
In all fairness, when I’ve been involved in one of those campaigns, everyone credited did a lot of work, but if I wanted to hire the person who was actually responsible for the original concept, I’d have a lot of trouble narrowing down the list.
I also think it’s fair enough for all the credited creatives to put the ad in their portfolios. If they spent six months working on the final design of the digital part of the campaign that started with a statue, then what are they supposed to do? Leave a big six-month hole in their career even though they worked their arses off?
Ideally, people would be completely honest in their portfolios, but let’s not be naive; we work in advertising, so we spend all day making things look as impressive as possible. If we massage the hell out of all the stats in the case study video, why would we downplay our involvement in a piece of work?
Back in the mid-2000s a friend of mine created a critical part of a Cannes Grand Prix-winning, globally famous campaign. To be nice to a junior team, they asked them to do a bit of writing on the work (to be fair, I suppose that is real, helpful creativity), but then that junior team were responsible for sorting out the award entry, and magically found that their names were credited ahead of those of my friend.
I’m going to guess that many mistaken hirings have happened, with many a disappointed CCO finding themselves with the ‘guy who happened to be in the room’, rather than the ‘girl who wrote the entire script but had the credit stolen from them’.
So the credit system is now open to a lot of abuse, but you can just add that to all the shitty things that have happened to the industry in the last fifteen years.
My favourite version of this was when a colleague of mine (the planner on a fairly famous campaign for an orange coloured, financially minded broadsheet) overheard a CD we both worked with take credit for the campaign.
He gently asked him where he was in the briefing, as he’d led it. (It turns out he’d help mock up some banners).
Yep, I’ve been screwed over numerous times… it seems Cannes/awards are basically just won by people who are ruthless, or egotistical enough to force their names on something, and remove the originators. Kinda like dating apps (and I count LinkedIn as one now! Or at least similar, job wise); the showiest, most BS person stands out the most. And people are afraid to stand up for themselves because there are (genuine) repercussions when you do. People are stealing credit, livelihoods, and life/career opportunities. Shame on them, and frankly I hope they all wake up in a cold sweat someday (in their Teslas). A$$holes. I don’t know the solution, but outing those who steal credit would be a start. Everyone knows who some of them are, but the silence is deafening. Says it all.
*Maybe removed the ECD and CD crediting system. Like you said, they’re judged on the performance of the agency as a whole. They can find their own way to be credited. (In cold hard cash.)
The number of people who put the campaign in their portfolio when they only worked on the case study, is truly disappointing.