Here’s an interesting video:

If you’re too busy to watch it, it features Justin Timberlake explaining why he sang ‘It’s gonna be maaaay’ on a song called ‘It’s gonna be me’. In short, the odd pronunciation was much more memorable, making the song stickier and ultimately more iconic.

I’m a firm believer in the benefits of such things. They’re unnecessary, illogical, immeasurable, inexplicable, hard-to-justify catalysts for true brilliance (and N’Sync songs).

If you want some examples of how they’ve made ads better, how about the little kid with the Scottish accent who ‘conquered worlds’?

He (she?) is by far the most memorable part of a great ad. He/she made it sticky in a way that precisely none of the other lines managed to do.

But it doesn’t have to be a line read or a performance. It could be a soundtrack, like this one:

It’s weird, it’s unexpected, its anachronistic to the visuals, it makes you wonder why they chose it, and it’s very cool.

It could also be a piece of writing, such as, ’It’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love’.

People don’t write ads like that, or talk like that. Why did they put it that way? Why didn’t they say ‘two tickets to your favorite movie’? Why an oyster? Who presents things in oysters?

OK, I think I’ve made my point.

If I were higher-brow I’d have titled this post ‘Reason is not the Need’, a quote from King Lear, explaining that humans would be no different from animals if they did not need more than the fundamental necessities of life to be happy. 

We like the weird extras because something deep inside us needs them.

The tricky part is justifying them to someone who is paying for the bare necessities. Then again, that’s why you shoot the board, then have fun with some other takes. It’s why you encourage a little improv during the radio recording session. It’s why you… urgh… I can’t think of any digital examples because I don’t know any. Maybe there are some social lines that are really good, but I wonder why so many are written yet so few are awarded, or otherwise celebrated.

Anyway, see if you can add some random weirdness to your work. It’s liberating, and it’s why I gave this blog such a stupid name.

I’m sure people will try to stop you, but then you can just show them this post and they’ll almost certainly let you have all the fun you want.

Imagine this: you’re at the cusp of deciding which career path you’re going to take. A few people are making suggestions; friends, teachers, parents, friends of parents… You take a look at what various jobs might involve, match the favourites to your own skillset, and take some kind of plunge into the world of… advertising.

20+ years ago that process happened within the context of an industry that was both very similar and critically different to the 2014 version.

In broad terms, advertising used to be more of a calling. Sure, it’s never been medicine, the government, the law, or one of those other professions that could be described as an overall service to people who really need it. But despite that, there was a always a sense that the output of your daily job could be part of a continuum of culture-defining greatness. 

From the Guinness and Cinzano posters of the 1930s, through Think Small, Snowplow, Hamlet, Heineken, The Economist, Tango, Guinness, Think Different, Honda, Mac vs PC, Cadbury’s Gorilla and many others, the very best of what the industry has produced could be defined as just one rung below actual art.

People have hung great ads on their walls and in galleries; endlines and catchphrases have spread throughout society and culture, sometimes lasting for decades; and advertising has fueled other art forms, giving rise to great writers, directors and entrepreneurs.

In short, it ain’t Motown or the National Gallery, but it also ain’t accounts payable for a valve manufacturer in Gravesend.

As someone who joined the industry in the 1990s, I can tell you that I was very much under the impression that a ‘great’ ad could really fit the definition of that adjective: famous, admired and blessed with longevity. That was what we were striving to create, and we felt that with the right brief and enough hard work, it was very much possible.

I’m not sure that the same feeling exists for people who have entered advertising in the last decade.

Sure, the continuum is still continuing through John Lewis, Old Spice, Channel 4 and the occasional Nike ad, but I think it’s fair to say that, despite LinkedIn’s ridiculous overuse of the word ‘genius’, the number of current ads that are truly brilliant is vanishingly small. 

Even smaller is the proportion of great ads. We now make so many, in so many channels, that the percentage of greatness probably starts with a zero and a decimal point.

Now that we’re a couple of decades into the domination of the internet, anyone younger than 25-30, will only know a world of Facebook, Google, smartphones etc.; an online world which rarely offers us remarkable, culturally significant ads.

In this world TV has become less and less important, making it less and less likely that culturally significant advertising is inspiring people to join the industry.

Beyond that, our most prestigious awards are now reserved for purpose- or tech-based initiatives that few people in the real world ever see. Look through the list of Cannes winners and consider how many your mum would recognise (I know many are from other countries, but they still seem to be the kind of thing that made a relatively minor splash outside the industry, despite those ‘3.67 billion media impressions’).

So there’s much to disappoint, and little to inspire. That means that what used to be a calling is now closer to being, well, a job.

Which brings us to an interesting inflection point. 

Agencies are currently run by Gen X or older Millennial people, almost all of whom would have entered the industry when it was a calling, or at least more of one than it is today. We had a ton of incredible ads to aim at, and we could realistically dream of becoming part of that continuum, or creating a catchphrase for the entire country.

But like the proverbial boiling frog, we have seen that opportunity slowly ebb away. Sure, it still exists, but the more times you’re given a ‘hard working’ social post to write for ‘lower down the funnel’ the less likely you are to think that greatness is on the cards.

An older manager, indoctrinated in the idea that greatness is possible on every brief, might want to stop for a moment and think about what the new normal feels like: worse work, longer hours, lower wages and fewer opportunities to create something your taxi driver is aware of.

Asking people who exist in that reality to stay later, think harder or sacrifice parts of their life for the minuscule chance to ‘do great work’ is perverse. That’s why many younger people think of advertising as a job, albeit one that is slightly more enjoyable and fulfilling than most.

Add the crushing existence of post-2008 wage stagnation and austerity, along with the the experience of the pandemic, the knowledge that the Climate Crisis is only going to get worse, and the dawning realisation that AI is likely to make your job obsolete, and you have a colossal chunk of the workforce that cannot see advertising as a career, let alone a calling.

Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what the older generation is expecting of the younger one. 

One is in the same industry as the other, but with less hope, joy, expectation and inspiration. Management might think they are offering the same jobs they themselves started with, but unless they honestly recognise that many elements are worse, they are going to be frustrated by the reduced levels of enthusiasm.

It’s an unamusing cliche of 2024 that the younger generation ‘doesn’t want to work’ or that they expect all sorts of unrealistic perks. But if you think back to 1990s/2000s advertising, it was full of the kind of ‘perks’ money can’t buy. Imagine being given two weeks to write a TV ad, then being given half a million pounds to make it and having ten million people watch it, all with cheaper rent, better pay and an actual office.

Unless we make the industry as attractive to the new juniors as it was to us, we’re going to continue to attract less engaged staff, who will never be inclined to go the extra mile for the sake of someone’s ill-defined version of excellence.

If that seems to be a bit of a First-World problem, imagine what the industry will look like to the next generation.

At some point we have to find a way to make advertising more of a calling and less of a job. Either that or we start competing for staff with the finance department of Johnson’s Valves of Gravesend.

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.

Back before he was canceled (then won a Grammy), Louis CK had a ‘bit’ called ‘Of course… but maybe’:

“Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. For me, I always have both. I have the thing I believe, the good thing. And then there’s this thing (cue villainous gesture). And I don’t believe it…but it is there.

“It’s become a category in my brain that I call ‘of course…but maybe.’

“(For example) Of course, children who have nut allergies need to be protected. We need to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times; anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course.

“But maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die.”

You can watch it here:

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the whole clip, he gives the same treatment to military deaths and – yikes! – slavery. Despite the plummet his reputation then took, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really hold these positions, but who knows?

In that spirit, anyone who has worked in advertising for a while can probably produce their own examples. For some reason, our industry is full of strange contradictions, and yet no one seems to care enough to do anything about them (aside from this post, which is bound to sort out the entire mess by the end of the day).

For example…

Of course our work should be original and different. Of course! That’s how it stands out from the other stuff, and standing out is essential to being noticed. If no one notices your work, it doesn’t matter how good it is, so we must all endeavour to produce advertising that is nothing like the ‘content’ that surrounds it.

But maybe… But maybe we need to follow best practices, especially in digital media where we know for sure what kind of images and writing will be most successful. So for maximum effectiveness, we should use the same data as everyone else to reach the same insights as everyone else, and place our work in all the same locations as our competition and have our messaging look exactly the same as theirs.

Of course we should make sure our work is simple. Throw one tennis ball and it’s easy to catch; throw a few and its impossible to catch anything. Every communication we offer should reduce any complexity down to the kind of concision that is easy to understand and remember.

But maybe… Maybe the clients won’t think they’re getting enough work for their money unless every single thing we say to them comes in the form of a 128-slide deck presented over the course of three hours. In addition, maybe we should litter billboards with QR codes, use fifteen separate media channels, and expect punters to engage with ads that are five minutes long. Maybe?

Of course we should use a client’s money and public messaging opportunities to improve the world! Of course! Nothing makes more sense than rechanneling the ill-gotten gains of capitalism into initiatives that will benefit the marginalised and forgotten. It’s like a socioeconomic Robin Hood thing, and what could be better than that?

But maybe… But maybe purpose-based efforts are just expensive exercises in wokewashing, greenwashing and whitewashing the bad behaviour of giant corporations, allowing them to game any SEO negativity, while sending lots of money in the direction of the ad industry, who then become complicit in the deceit as they give these sneaky corporate disguises their highest awards.

See? It’s easy. I bet you can think of others:

Endless collaboration/all opinions matter equally vs Accountability and the quality of a singular vision.

Jingles are cheesy and lazy vs I still remember jingles from 30 years ago.

Only present work you want to make vs We only had one idea we we want to make but we can’t back the client into the corner with only one choice, so we’d better show three ideas, even through we don’t really like two of them.

AI is a fantastic tool for creativity vs AI is coming for the jobs of all creative people, thus destroying true creativity.

Etc.

As You Like It suggests that there are seven ages of life. With apologies to William Shakespeare I’m going to explore the seven ages of advertising creativity.

Before I start, a caveat: this is very much a generalisation. Of course people start agencies at all sorts of stages of their careers, and many people, by their own choice or otherwise, never become Creative Directors. That said, I believe there is a broad path that takes most of us from education to maturation.

So let’s begin with the first age: College. At some point you decide to pursue advertising as a career. Sure, you can start in the dispatch department and make the move from there, but you’re more likely to go to some kind of college where you’ll meet your partner and learn the basics.

The point of this age is to enjoy some time with no client comments and an infinite (theoretical) budget. Stretch your legs, make mistakes, eat Pot Noodles and try to make your parents understand why the TV ad they love is actually rubbish because it has a weak concept, and lacks originality.

Your next age is Placement, the first step into the corporate world. A real ad agency is happening around you so you have to juggle doing good work with being the kind of people the agency would like to keep around.

It’s all about converting this strange state of purgatory into an actual job, so you have to keep your eyes on the prize while you continue to eat Pot Noodles, but at least some of your new colleagues will buy you drinks in the agency bar.

From there you become a Junior. At last! A real job! Of course, you will have to do all the less glamorous briefs, but that doesn’t matter because you soon realise that a radio ad means casting, and therefore hanging out with, your favorite comedian. It also means you can order from the giant book of takeaway menus and eat/steal all the Celebrations. Hooray!

But you want to move up, and to do that you’ll need a bigger brief or two, and that means navigating the fact that more powerful creatives in your department would also like those briefs. You’re going to have to beat them at some point, and the sooner you do that, the sooner you get to move into the mystical hinterland of the Middleweight Creative.

(By the way, if you’re reading this in America, a UK middleweight creative is basically an ACD, although I suspect the American love of title promotions has very much made its way across the Atlantic.)

Middleweight is a weird place, in that you never really get formally promoted to that position. After a few years of being a junior you just declare it, then you discover that no one cares. You just keep ticking along with slightly better access to slightly better briefs.

But then you become a Senior Creative, or perhaps a CD. You now need client-facing skills that no one taught you in college. You’ve probably had a few client meetings before this stage, but you didn’t contribute much just in case a cheeky slip of the tongue lost your agency its biggest client.

You could well be ‘in charge’ of a piece of business, helping to shape it for a year or two, and you might well have younger teams working into you, so you now have to evaluate work, give feedback and try not to let the power go to your head. 

The next stage is some form of CD. In a network agency that might involve running one big piece of business or several smaller ones. In a medium agency you get all the responsibility your boss doesn’t want. In a small agency you might well be the boss.

At this point you will be looking to make enough of a name that you can make it to the next stage of being properly in charge. You might write a thought piece for Creative Review, or move to an agency where the path upwards is a little clearer. You might also stay at this age for quite a while, because unless you start your own place, you have to wait to be invited to the top table…

And there it is: the final boss (but not the final age). At this point you are either some kind of ECD/CCO, or you have launched your own agency with some pals you picked up along the way who work in the other departments.

This position can take many forms depending on the size of agency, its location and whether or not you were promoted from within or poached from somewhere else. You are now almost certainly in your 40s, and have to balance all this stuff with a more substantial family life. Good luck with that.

If you started your own place, that work/life balance will be tilted very heavily towards ‘work’ for a few years. Hopefully your agency will thrive, but the odds are not on your side. That’s why you might bounce around between senior agency jobs and optimistic start-ups. Find the one that suits you best and, like a rodeo ride atop a merciless bull, try to stay on as long as possible.

At some point you will find yourself surplus to requirements: perhaps too expensive, or merely a victim of advertising’s love of the new. You might pop back to one of those top jobs, but you might not, so what do you do with all those years between 48 and retirement?

Some people choose this point to launch that start-up, and sometimes that works, but it’s a lot of effort for middle-age, so you might try to be a consultant, or some version of a freelancer, sliding back down the mountain to do the work of a CD or senior creative. Depending on your finances, you keep it going as long as you can, while staring the industry’s ageism right in the face until you inevitably blink first and it casts you aside forever.

Whichever age you’re in, there’s always fun to be had, but you also have to earn your place. Just work hard, be nice and see where the ride takes you. Best of luck!

There’s a new John Lewis ad out:

What is there to say?

Well, as each new offering arrives with its own wider context, especially as it’s the next in a long line of ads that genuinely changed advertising, I think there’s plenty.

And now I’m going to prove it:

First, a little of that context. For the uninitiated, starting with The Long Wait in 2011 John Lewis kicked off a new UK advertising genre: the Christmas Ad. The Long Wait was so influential, every major British retailer soon felt the need to provide a massive, heartwarming 60 to 180-second commercial, often with a slow, sappy version of a famous rock song, that would see the country through what we now understand to be the Tory Austerity years.

Was the sociopolitical element really a part of it? Maybe. The previous year, John Lewis had given us the excellent More Than A Woman, so they were already heading down this path before applying it to Christmas. But the warmth with which The Long Wait was greeted gave the other supermarkets and department stores a clue to what the Great British Public wanted.

I’m not going to go into all the other epics dished out to us by Sainsbury’s, M&S, Asda etc., but The Christmas Ad soon became the UK equivalent of the Superbowl, where six months of planning and a massive budget became the norm.

The extra John Lewis context is that it remained the Granddaddy of them all: usually the best; definitely the most anticipated; but also the one with the most baggage. Raising the bar means raising expectations, so if you want to avoid hearing, ‘It’s good, but not as good as last year’, you have to up the standard and eventually attempt a kind of reinvention.

You can find them all here. They’ve done celebrities (Elton John), initiatives (The Beginner), animation (the Bear and The Hare), but mainly they’ve done sweet stories featuring a child’s relationship with something that can be turned into a toy (Moz the Monster, Monty the Penguin, Excitable Edgar etc.) and sold in the stores.

And all seemed to be going well until…

John Lewis started experiencing massive financial losses. Was it inflation? The Cost of Living Crisis? Shoplifting? All of the above?

Whatever it was, this year John Lewis put the account up for review. This article suggests that was down to putting ever-greater demands on Adam and Eve DDB, the agency that produced all that work. There were also many changes in the management of both client and agency, and that rarely helps with longevity.

Saatchi and Saatchi won the pitch, and their first Christmas work is this year’s Venus Fly Trap ad (I’m sure it has a cute name but I can’t be arsed to look it up).

To me it feels a bit like a photocopy of a John Lewis ad from ten years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s also not one of the best. Heartwarming story about a kid who sees things differently to his more conventional family? Check. Heartwarming friendly creature that can become a toy? Check. Heartwarming ending that rugpulls a seemingly sad situation? Check. The music is different, but I’m not sure how much this Andrea Bocelli cod-operatic song is going to trouble the charts, if indeed that’s an aim.

Other aims come in the form of merch sales, as The Guardian (regurgitating the press release) informs us:

Shoppable versions will be available on YouTube and Google while the ad will be linked to the widest ever range of associated merchandise including a soft toy version of Snapper the plant for £18, children’s pyjamas for £19 and venus flytrap plants for £10.

Yay! More pointless crap in the world! But that aside, I wonder if people will warm to the tenth John Lewis ad toy offering, or indeed a pair of pajamas. This Venus Fly Trap is definitely not the huggable Monty the Penguin or Moz the Monster, so I wish them luck.

On the good side, I think the strategy/message of starting your own new traditions is refreshing. M&S is actually running with the same theme, but in more of a Grinch-like way that seems to be annoying people (especially with a weird accidental burning of a ‘Palestinian flag’ despite the ad being shot in August), so a nicer, friendlier expression is a better path to take. That said, I don’t think this strategy is particularly clear: the endline says Let Your Traditions Grow, but that sounds more like Grow Your Current Traditions, rather than Create New Ones. And the emphasis seems to be 95% LOOK AT THIS GIANT FUN PLANT and 5% ‘start some new traditions’. In any case, the family go back to their old tree and only involve the troublesome fly trap again out of guilt, so where’s the new tradition?

And that’s it. Not bad, but for this client that’s a long way from what’s needed. John Lewis has to turn its fortunes around during a cost of living and inflation crisis that will have many of their customers tightening their belts. They needed a game changer, ironically one that could change the very game they themselves created, one that has settled into a cosy meeting of expectations rather than a breath of fresh air, a bolt from the blue or, heaven forbid, a paradigm-shifting shot in the arm that could send John Lewis off into a new decade of success.

The funny thing is, they did indeed let their traditions grow: one more year, one more ad and one more repetition of a formula that is now well over ten years old. In fact, after the unusual initiative of last year, there’s a palpable sense of going back to something that worked. the problem is, you can’t step into the same river twice. Things have moved on; the competition has caught up and it’s possible that the people involved may not be up to the incredible standards of the campaign’s originators, or even some of the great creatives who Let This Tradition Grow in its early years.

Like I said, it’s not bad, but that’s not quite good enough.

I saw this poster yesterday:

I have questions.

Why is the package closed and full of food when she’s clearly had to open it to make the meal?

Is Menyu a bit racist? Here in America we have a supermarket called Trader Joe’s, which recently suffered accusations of racism for the names of their ‘ethnic’ food ranges, ‘Trader Ming’s’ (Chinese), ‘Trader José’s’ (Mexican) and ‘Trader Giotto’s’ (Italian). They were actually going to change those names, but then decided not to, much to the delight of Fox News. When Fox news is on your side, maybe you should think again.

I’d never really considered it before, but ‘good’ is a bit of a limp word, isn’t it? It’s kind of like ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’; positive, but blandly so. Maybe they like it that way, as they seem to want to spread the word around their work like a flavourless jam:

I think ‘Good’ must be some kind of platform for them.

Franki Goodwin, Chief Creative Officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, said:  “It was so exciting to get our hands on this amazing range and bring the food photography to life. It’s the start of a lot of GOOD we’re going to be doing in the coming months.”

So far, so blah. Sure, one person’s branding platform is another person’s reason to yawn, but this seems pretty similar to the ‘Food To Feel Good About’ positioning that Adam and Eve launched exactly a year ago (it’s still the endline). Maybe Saatchi and Saatchi think they’ve expanded it so that it can also be used to promote the benefits of a ‘midweek quickie’.

Talking of things it’s very close to, someone else wants to tell us about how their food is ‘good’:

I think this is a recent one, so Sainsbury’s are taking the unusual step of adopting a strategy that’s almost identical to the one used for over a year by one of their competitors. How odd. Maybe New Commercial Arts knows something I don’t, but it seems pretty uninspired.

But it did make me wonder if this is just something all supermarkets are doing now, so I Googled ‘Good Morrisons’ and – knock me down with a feather! – I found that their endline from three years ago was Make Good Things Happen, which seems to be basically interchangeable with the Sainsbury’s and Waitrose strategies.

What happened to being distinctive? Different? Not boring?

Going back to Waitrose, they used to produce excellent advertising that really stood out, and was tonally consistent with their position as the more upmarket supermarket. Maybe I’ve been out of the country too long, and there’s no longer any difference between the major supermarkets, but it seems odd for Waitrose to give up their premium status to join all the other mid-market choices.

Anyway, all these ‘good’ supermarkets are merely descendants of the original (also Sainsbury’s), who used the word to establish an entirely new positioning: a supermarket that prized and promoted the quality of their food:

That line ran for over thirty years.

Will the others prove to be as good?

I seem to produce these things on an annual basis now, but they’re always worth the wait (IMHO).

A few weeks ago a creative called Ben Friend got in touch:

For the past couple of years I’ve been working with a conceptual artist called Stuart Semple sort of CDing his studio and also half-arsedly running the e-comm business that is Culture Hustle. You may or may not know how CH came about. If you don’t, here’s the story. So a few years ago Billionaire artist Anish Kapoor bought the rights to Vantablack, the most dense black material on the planet. Once he had done this he stated that no other artist would be allowed to use it. This pissed Stuart off as he believes that colour can’t be owned. As a piece of performance art he made a pinkest pink powder pigment released on the internet. He stated that it was for everyone, except Anish Kapoor. When you bought the pigment you had to sign a disclaimer that you were not AK, Were not buying on behalf of AK. It blew up so he then launched a kickstarter to fund the making of his own blackest black paint to rival the one in AK’s possession. He raised a ton of cash and made a really good black paint available to everyone. Hilariously this idea grew and that when I came in to give purpose to this accidental business and come up with new materials that are consistent with the original mischievous intent and also help Stuart with the ideas in his art practice. You can read all this and more of course but the reason I’m writing to you is to ask, would you be interested in talking to Stuart on your podcast.

How could I be anything other than intrigued?

Now that I’ve spoken to Stuart I’m a little surprised I hadn’t heard of him. In fact, it’s more likely that I had heard of him, but now that I’m getting old my memory is not what it was.

He’s definitely the ITIAPTWC interviewee with the longest Wikipedia entry, but beyond that he is insanely fascinating. From basically dying, to being managed by Uri Geller, to selling £1m of art one year only to be homeless the next… Just one of these situations would be the most interesting occurrence in my life, but he seems to attract/generate/create them on a regular basis.

And that’s because he’s a real artist. His life is his art and vice versa.

Beyond that, he’s had a lot of contact with the ad industry, and could definitely show us a thing or ten thousand about what real creativity is, as well as how to generate massive fame time and time again.

If you’d like to find out more, follow the rabbit hole of his Wikipedia page, or check out this fantastic project he created in response to Adobe ringfencing lots of their colours.

And here’s the Soundcloud link to our chat. (WordPress is currently refusing to upload the file to iTunes, so I’m going to keep trying things until I get that to happen. Apologies…)

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!