We’re just not good enough

The advertising industry needs to admit a harsh truth: we’re not as good at this as we used to be.

Yes, there are lots of other reasons why the work has worsened, but the reduction in talent and ability is obvious. 

I know it’s hard to separate all the strands of why ads used to be better, but allow me to remove my rose-tinted glasses and take a good long look at what has happened over the last twenty years.

In the 1990s there was much more money knocking around. Production budgets were bigger, wages were higher and margins were healthier. Gradually, for complicated political reasons that we could trace back to the deregulation of the Reagan/Thatcher years, those pools of cash have dried up to puddles.

There is still a lot of money sloshing around, but it’s now finding its way into industries like tech and gaming. So if you want to have fun and work for big brands your mates have heard of, you might now skim past the list of ad agencies and look instead to Facebook, Google, Apple and the producers of Grand Theft Auto and Call Of Duty. Your work will be seen by hundreds of millions, the wages are good and the snacks are usually top notch.

Where does that leave advertising? Fighting over the crumbs left over when the best talent has chosen a more prestigious, more significant, more creative and more lucrative job elsewhere.

We used to be able to attract the best and the brightest; people who could enjoy their job, see their stuff on TV and get well paid, while still finding the time to spend afternoons in pubs and mornings in bed.

Now we offer smaller salaries, minuscule production budgets, briefs for the kind of ads that routinely ruin your day, and the opportunity to work evenings and weekends; not because you love your job and want to do it better, but because your boss can’t afford another copywriter, so needs to get double the work out of you.

Which path would you choose? Yes, there are still good ads out there, somewhere; and yes, the salaries are still much better than 90% of jobs, but this is all relative. Things ain’t what they used to be, and in terms of motivation, attraction and fuel, shit in equals shit out.

And it doesn’t just mean the ads are worse. crucially it means that clients no longer have confidence in us producing 10/10 work. The last decade has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that your agency is unlikely to produce anything like the work that made it so cocksure in the 1990s. Every substandard ad is another nail in the coffin of trust between agency and client, so they expect less of you, give you fewer chances to prove you can do something great, give you less money to make work that will probably be 7/10, and the vicious circle spins on.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to take a good look in the mirror and ask if we’re doing everything we can to be good at our jobs and, beyond that, do we care enough to do more?

Are you a real copywriter, or did you lose a coin toss between you and your art college partner? Do you tell people you’re a writer, or do you say things like ‘We both do a bit of both’? Do you take pride in your words, or do you try to mumble them out into the world, hoping no one will notice? Do you own a copy of D&AD’s The Copy Book? Do you read it out of choice, not as if it’s homework? Do you spend hours crafting a headline, or do you knock it out as quickly as possible because ‘it’ll do’?

Are you a real art director, or did you end up in advertising because it looked like an easier way to make money than the ‘real’ art you’d prefer to create? Do you understand that your job isn’t to make things look good, but to stop people and lead them through your communication with invisible skill? Do you know who Neil Godfrey is? Do you listen to Dave Dye’s podcasts? Do you have enough knowledge to be able to fight for your decisions with convincing authority? Do you contribute to the grade, or do you sit at the back of the suite, browsing Reddit, hoping that a nod to the colourist’s questions won’t leave you exposed as hopelessly out of your depth?

I could sum up the above questions in three words: do you care? And if you don’t, it’s OK. I understand. The job isn’t what it was, and you probably can coast through 90% of it and still pick up a decent pay packet. The client is frustrating, your ECD has ‘never done anything good’, most work is shit anyway, the pub is calling…

But that path leads to an unhappy you and a worse industry. Here’s an idea: if you don’t like the job, don’t respect it, and don’t see the point in putting in the effort, why not do something else? Your three score years and ten are ticking away far too quickly to waste them doing something that gets you down.

Then again, you could literally choose to make the best of it. You could work harder, read more, ask more questions, fight your corner, learn when to use a semi colon in a headline (pretty much never) and spend a night emailing Jean-Paul Goude references to your director.

In short, you could learn to love your job, become proud of it, become proud of yourself for doing it and go to work with a spring in your step. Then, when people wonder why the ads aren’t as good as they used to be, they’ll stop thinking it’s because of you. 



Ladies leave your man at home, the club is full of ballas and they pockets full grown. And all you fellas leave your girl with her friends ’cause it’s 11: 30 and the club is the weekend.

The end of Miss America.

The reasons behind corporate-speak cackbabble.

Kind of the best website in the world.

Dress like Larry David (thanks, W).



The Mouldy Whopper

An ad campaign has broken out into the REAL WORLD! News outlets are reporting on it! Twitter is in a heightened state of stimulation! LinkedIn’s Creative Strategists are debating its merits!

And you can’t ask for more than that, can you?

Well, maybe.

Look, I get it. It passed the first test, one that almost ad ads fail at: it’s been noticed. And not just noticed, but Noticed. Like. A. Motherfucker. I haven’t been able to move for mouldy Whoppers jamming up my interweb.

And the whole reason it’s being noticed is down to a genuine dramatisation of a genuine product attribute: unlike McDonald’s burgers, the thing actually goes mouldy (eventually)! According to the news link above, Burger King…

…plans to get rid of preservatives from the burgers served in all of its restaurants this year.

By the end of 2020, it said all food items – including sandwiches, sides and desserts – will be free from artificial colours, flavours and preservatives in the US and select European countries, including Germany and the UK.

…Leading to pictures of a burger that has gone mouldy, and that’s original, different and interesting, but also gross, and stomach-turning, and off-putting. But message delivered engagingly, and understood. JOB DONE!

So why do I have a bit of a quibble here? Am I really going to pedantically burrow under its skin to see if it’s really worth all the kudos?

Of course I am!

1. Lame flex. Your burger goes mouldy after 34 days? So it fucking should. This is like Google saying ‘Don’t be evil’. A very low bar. But hey! That’s better than McDonald’s (when they eventually make good on that promise IN TEN MONTHS’ TIME).

2. This highlights how it’s taken till 2020 for them to take on this INCREDIBLE INITIATIVE! They couldn’t remove the artificial preservatives in 2008, or 2015? Slow handclap, boys and girls.

Fernando Machado, Burger King Restaurant Brands international global chief marketing officer, added: “At Burger King restaurants, we believe that real food tastes better.

“That’s why we are working hard to remove preservatives, colours and flavours from artificial sources from the food we serve in all countries around the world.”

So… you still make shitty food? Er… nice one.

3. People who go to Burger King don’t give a fuck about artificial preservatives. That’s why they go to Burger King. Do you think anyone, I mean anyone on the entire fucking planet, was thinking, ‘I do fancy the idea of a grease/MSG-laden fast food burger, but I’m kind of concerned that they might use artificial preservatives’. Of course not. If you care about that kind of thing you eat elsewhere.

4. Burger king have been letting customers experience mouldy burgers for years.

5. These pictures are disgusting. Maybe the stand-out is worth the reduced appetite appeal, but is that an inside advertising thing? I just can’t imagine your average Joe walking past these images and thinking ‘That’s clever. Burger King have taken a bit of risk there by showing us how mouldy their burgers get as a way of dramatising their new policy of removing artificial preservatives (that I didn’t know or care that they used anyway)’.

So, y’know. I’m glad there’s another brave, talked-about, seemingly-admired campaign out there just in time for Cannes the planet’s new-found love of healthy fast food.

But am I convinced? Put it this way, I’m not in a rush to visit the nearest BK’s (and yes, I am an occasional customer).



She say I care more about them “Basquiones”. Basquiats, she learnin’ a new word, it’s yacht. Blew the world up soon as I hit the club wit’ her. Too Short called, told me “I fell in love wit’ the weekend”.

The case against italicising foreign words.

Japan’s amazing lost property system.

By the way, those two links, and one or two each week come from the excellent Ann Friedman weekly mailout. It’s free, so sign up (and maybe donate occasionally). I’d plug it every week, but that would get boring, so here’s a single plug that will have to do for a while (sorry, Ann. Thanks for the links!).

Mail art (thanks, J).

Invoices of Reason (thanks, J).



Ain’t got no tears in my body, I ran out, but boy, I like it, I like it, I like it. Don’t matter how, what, when, who tries the weekend.

78 new emotions.

How to pronounce Frappuccino.

Why football is the way it currently is.

Everything you need to know about chocolate.

Hand fart:



Player give me some brew an I might just chill, but I’m the type that like to light another joint like Cypress Hill. I’m steal doobies, spit loogies when I puff on the weekend.

The past and future of punctuation.

Fiction writing in a time of Climate Crisis.

Vonnegut on the shapes of stories:

Le Tour De Pants:



Where the destination reached was the East Detention, where they whipped down me pants and looked up me bottom. So Informer, you know say Daddy me Snow me, I go blame a licky boom-boom down. ‘Tective man says see Daddy me Snow me stabbed someone down the weekend.

Rock Gods’ packages in tight trousers: a study (thanks, J).

The strange art of WikiHow.

They’ve worked out how to end traffic jams.

Mountain biking I’d rather not do.

Collecting old Nintendo games that haven’t been played and selling them for $12,000 is a thing.

Find out lots of fascinating things about ad industry salaries etc.



ITIAPTWC Episode 59 – Jean-Louis Rawlence

Jean-Louis is the Chief Strategy Officer of The Concept Bureau. (Slight aside: I wonder why job titles are sounding increasingly military.)

I asked him on the pod because ‘strategist’ is becoming a very common word in advertising-adjacent job titles. Jean-Louis is a Brand Strategist, so what does that mean, and what is a Creative Strategist, and where do their jobs cross over with that of, say, a comms planner? What do these very smart people do all day, and how does it relate to what you do all day?

We talk about all that and much more, and if you want to know about my Butterfinger Theory, and how it relates to 2020 branding, have a listen.

Here’s the iTunes link, the Soundcloud link, and the thing where you just press play on this page:

If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?
If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?
ITIAPTWC Episode 59 – Jean-Louis Rawlence
Loading
/


Mr.Wendal has freedom, a free that you and I think is dumb. Free to be without the worries of a quick to diss the weekend.

Diplo’s life.

Libido vapes.

Maurice Sendak profile.

Oscar nominated animated short:

Jarvis Cocker on the joy of vintage sweet wrappers.

Great video art.



Return of the Mack (there it is). Return of the Mack (come on). Return of the Mack (oh my God). You know that I’ll be back (here I am). Return of the Mack (once again). Return of the Mack (top of the world). Return of the Mack (watch my flow). You know that I’ll be the weekend.

John Cleese on creativity in management.

Confessions of a slaughterhouse worker.

Behind the scenes of one of Jimi’s most underrated tracks.

Amazing recreation of GTA IRL.