You can see by the poll to the right that about two thirds of people who read this blog ‘don’t like’ Campaign magazine.

I’d just like to make it clear that I have absolutely no axe to grind with Campaign. If anything, they’ve been rather nice to me over the years. For what it’s worth, I’ve been a Face To Watch, and Daryl and I were featured a few times during the launch of Lunar. In addition, this blog has often been used for ‘Best of the Blogs’ and I was told by one of their journalists that their editor used to come in and ask why they weren’t covering the issues that I was. The Campaign journalists that I have met have been very pleasant and any problems I have with the magazine are in no way personal.

But two thirds of you don’t like the organ, and neither, to be honest, do I.

I did go into some of the reasons when I was a little critical of their Creative Circle award last week, but perhaps I could give it a closer analysis.

Campaign has an easy run for two reasons: it has no competition and it’s ‘only a trade mag’. I think that has made it complacent. It has changed very little over the years and still seems to consist of the reprinting of press releases, Private View, The Diary, The league tables (my Dad used to write for Campaign and came up with the idea for doing those, by the way), the letters, various columnists, a bit of analysis and the odd feature.

Although I’m certainly not saying that it needs to reinvent itself every five minutes, the above sections are generally poor. Here is an industry whose work shifts the opinion and perspective of millions on a daily basis, whose work is as public as it is possible to be, and yet we’ll still get very little in the way of investigation, campaigning or, what I can only describe as a ‘scoop’.

This is supposed to be journalism, in all its forms. Why so toothless? It’s about as spicy as a slice of Kingsmill dipped in milk. The Diary is full of the kind of plop that Take A Break would be ashamed to run. So someone who works in advertising likes shoes? Who gives a fuck? Someone in an agency turned up to the wrong address for a pitch? Big shit. I know it’s supposed to be a bit of fun, but with that in mind, it’s remarkably dull. How about something with a bit more edge?

OK, Campaign, here’s a little secret you may not be aware of: almost all agencies are petrified of you. They whinge about how you have taken against them and shit their pants that you might have got wind of some semi-innocuous email. So why not step up to that position and give things a bit of bite? If something’s a rip-off call it a rip-off. If someone does a dull Private View do not let them do it again. If it’s been a shit year, say so.

Two thirds of people don’t like a magazine that is all about what they do for a living. Surely with better writers and a punchier remit, you could become a magazine that people love. Why can’t you be as funny as The Sun’s ‘News In Briefs’ or as forthright as Private Eye’s Ad Nauseam? How about a cartoon that offers a pithy commentary on what’s happening in the world of advertising? Accept anonymous contributions? Bring back ‘I’m Only A Punter But…’

Here are some starter articles:

The big digital cock-waving exercise of three years ago has died right down. Why? And why is digital still the ginger stepchild that gets the least attention and is the least glamorous field of advertising this side of DM?

Why can’t Brits write comedy? The funniest ads each year are American. UK ‘funny’ ads are about as amusing as cot death. Why?

Find an account move that is all about backhanders and favours for mates. Take a stand against big corporations making agencies waste 50k on a pitch they will never win.

Reprint this entire post and ask for comments.

I dunno. I just do this part time. You guys do it for a living.

Surely you want your magazine to be liked and admired by most of your readership.

You could go so much further.

Why not give it a try?

PS: I got several comments and emails suggesting that I was brave for saying something negative about Campaign. Utter bollocks. I’m right off their radar.

The sublime Logorama:

Part One.

Part Two.

(Thanks, G.)

In yesterday’s post, Gout-Legs remarked thusly:

doing it.

making it.

the craft.

it’s as important, if not, more important than the initial idea.

Of course, he’s right.

I suppose the tricky thing is that that part of the process is like trying to run an egg and spoon race across a mile of trampoline covered in HIV-infected syringes.

What I’m saying is, one wrong move and the whole thing can go tits all the way up.

To illustrate this point, I was sent the following by ‘B’ last week. It is a brilliant demonstration of how you can get almost everything exactly 100% undeniably just right, but then bugger it all up with one wrong decision:

(Thanks, W. Via Twitter.)

Before I ever wrote a book, I thought, like many people, that a plot/idea was what you really needed.

To a certain extent that’s true. I mean, you need to know what your story is otherwise you can’t write it. But I soon realised that as great as that idea might be, a book really needs a thousand more.

The idea of ‘boy goes to boarding school so he can learn to be a wizard’ could either be good or shit depending on how you do it. That ‘how you do it’ is the other thousand ideas: the characters of Harry, Voldemort, Hagrid and the others; how he gets to that school; the odd little platform at King’s Cross Station; Quidditch; the rival houses etc. etc. etc.

The idea of Quidditch is almost a book by itself. If I invented the idea of rollerball with broomsticks, I might decide to make a whole story about how it happens and all the stuff that surrounds the playing of it. JK Rowling (by the way, I’ve never read a Harry Potter book, but I did see the first two movies about ten years ago) is successful because something as inventive as that is just one of her thousand ideas.

You might have a scene where two people cross the road. What road? Which people? Are they talking? Running? Cartwheeling? The permutations are endless and you’ve got to have several ideas that you settle on just for that one tiny scene. Then you need more ideas for every other tiny scene, or big scene.

But up against the idea generation of advertising it’s a joy, partly because you’re doing it just for yourself, and partly because it’s up to you whether or not the ideas live.

Then again, you have to come up with the briefs yourself, every single time. And there’s much less collaboration, so if you don’t do it, no one does.

Over the course of a day, I like a bit of both. Swapping the pros and cons of either side can help keep you sane.

PS: I had a quick look at the ‘Best Places To Work’ supplement in the Sunday Times. I don’t recall seeing any ad agencies in there. Read into that what you will.

But it was this:

…But I did.

I just saw it on TV. Interestingly, it caught my attention because it’s obviously well shot (I have no idea who directed it but I smell Ringan).

Then it’s charmingly played and well-written.

And the end, where you find out who it’s for, is not a disappointment.

I think it’s by some anonymous worker drones at Mother.

Congrats.

Wonderful Gorillaz promo with Bruce Willis.

Real interactivity. Very impressive

(Via the excellent Denver Egotist. And thanks, K.)

Second giant football/Africa-based ad of the year (monumentally dull use of several million pounds):

UPDATE:

James Cameron on TED. Going back to yesterday’s ECD post and the comments: ‘The respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world.’

And advice to live by: ‘In whatever you’re doing, failure is an option, but fear is not.’

Today, the job of CD is very different from what it was ten years ago.

It has always been a mixture of the creative leader and the client-facing account man, but recently, in some cases, the latter appears to have grown to overcome the former.

The CDs of legend were creative mavericks whose spark of genius could take your decent effort and make it into a Pencil gathering classic. They were feared and admired, leaving the rest of the agency in their wake as they forged a path to brilliant work. Even the more even-tempered greats had an edge that would protect the end product from the wankers who would seek to damage it.

Now, many CDs have to go and hold the account team’s hand every time the ads have to be sold, just to make sure that they can get through the client intact, or less un-intact.

The financial imperative that I mentioned yesterday has now become so powerful that it rules all agency decisions. This means that the work must be sold first time (the longer it takes to sell an ad/answer a brief to the client’s satisfaction, the less money the agency makes) and more often than not, that means a capitulation of some kind. The CD is there to shield the work, but he had better not shield it too hard or he might annoy the client. Better to bend over early; after all, the end result is likely to be mediocre anyway, so why risk the cash?

So many CDs are under great pressure to avoid pissing off the client, which means that some of them have moved a little way down the scale away from ‘Creative Greatness That Took An Effort To Sell’ to ‘Creative Mediocrity That Didn’t Touch The Sides’. Of course, they want to make the best ads possible, but in many instances they do not have the power, position or backup that they used to have. As a result, ads can easily slip 10%, and it certainly feels like that is often the case.

The CD position (and I really have to emphasise that many CDs produce and foster excellent work despite the above) is supposed to be the end result of a career of creative brilliance.

Kind of odd then, that the job then requires many people to shed so much of that.

Hats off to the ones who make it work.

I was having a chat to another copywriter yesterday and we were talking about how the job has changed from the one we thought we were getting into fifteen years ago.

To the ‘kids’ out there reading this, you might wonder at how fun it all was in the mid-nineties (I believe it was ten times more fun in the years before, but hear me out).

For a start, you NEVER worked Friday afternoon. That was for drinking. You went for a boozy lunch and, as my boss at the time said, ‘If you’re going to do that, don’t come back to the agency’. Then you ended up at the Crown and Two trying to remember which day it was.

This often alternated with the visit to the cinema, also a Friday thing. But that was much more responsible because you could still be back at the agency, sober, by half three.

Football in the corridors, ping-pong on the desks, getting the account guy to take you to lunch on expenses then ordering a bottle of port when he’s in the lav. Happy times.

But I don’t see so much of that now.

Although I didn’t get into the industry expecting the specifics above, I did believe that the job was supposed to be fun. Now, as Robert Plant says on live versions of Stairway To Heaven, ‘Does anyone remember laughter?’. It feels like the larking about and the bit of extra time and money devoted to blowing off steam have all but disappeared, to be replaced by ridiculous amounts of unpaid overtime and working yet another weekend.

I appreciate that we’re in dodgy financial times but I think this is more fundamental than that.

First, the clients got wise to all the fun we were having with their cash and, quite reasonably, didn’t really see why they should be paying for it. So now they expect a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, the nobby little cunts.

Second, the other departments were always jealous of the fact that creatives could fuck about and wear whatever we wanted. So now planners dress like us and account guys, who are now in charge of all the agencies and their money, want to bring us down a peg or two. So fun is out of the window, to be replaced by ‘multiple routes’, and any prestige we had (offices, big salaries, cars etc.) has all been taken away to be replaced by the egalitarian utopia of the open plan office and the non-existent raise.

Third, no one in charge seems to care about the quality of the work anymore. It’s all about quantity instead. Pile it high, sell it cheap because you know what? Any fucker can measure the hours on a time sheet and the number of executions in a campaign. If you showed a suit or a client ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’ today they’d think you dashed it off in the loo and would then like to see fifteen other routes on the same brief, just to prove you’d been working.

So the fun, although some of it was wasteful, did create a happier workplace and (whisper it) better work. Now both are gone, but that’s fine because the bottom line is OK and the other departments feel less inadequate.

Hoo-fucking-ray!

There’s another aspect to this post that I might cover tomorrow, because that’s quite enough writing for one day.

(PS: I still enjoy my working day, but for some reason I’m not currently trapped in multiple route hell. Lucky me.)