If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I often harp on here about the relative wages of creatives and their incessant slide towards those of a deformed rent boy or indolent corpse.

In the early 80s there was a copywriter called Geoff Seymour whose raise to £100k was so famous, that amount of money was then termed a ‘Seymour’.

Now, I might shock a few of you here, but £100k is what many senior creatives are on now. Hell, some are on less than that. Fuck, many are on much less than that.

But just to put that in perspective, in 1982 £100k could buy you a house that would be worth almost £1m today (house prices have gone up 824.24% since then).

That means, by one spurious measurement, senior creative wages have declined by 824% in real terms (obviously there are millions of other factors involved, but I think we can all agree that £100k today will not buy you as much as it did in 1982).

Now, I’m not going to go into whether creatives deserve to get paid anything like that, especially when nurses and firemen are on blah blah blah… that’s for another post. But, as a species, we are getting paid much less than we used to (imagine if senior creatives were generally on £1m today, with ECDs on closer to £4m. Fucking hell.)

The reasons for this are manifold, so I’m going to have an unfounded guess at a few:

1. Creatives were overpaid back in the day. Clients and agencies worked this out and tightened the screws accordingly. This makes some sense and no sense, both at the same time: a great idea could transform a client’s business, putting it on the map and increasing sales by millions, but what’s that worth? Good question. Leading us to…

2. Great creative work is unaccountable. If a product flies of the shelves after its launch, you could thank the ad, the distribution, the pricing structure, a heatwave, the retail positioning etc. The ad is very much detached from the actual process of money through the door, and if enough people think that then why pay more for a good one?

3. There’s less money sloshing around in general. Clients wised up to the profligacy of the industry that took place in the 60s-80s (and beyond), so they got procurement motherfuckers in and turned the tap off. I can’t really blame them for that. I mean, if I were paying for a helicopter shot that hit the cutting room floor I might be a little miffed. Also, I can’t speak for wages in other departments. Have they stayed high across the board or are planners and suits as fucked as we are?

4. Clients and people in charge of agencies generally care less about the brilliance of creative work these days. They don’t think it’s worth stumping up hundreds of thousands for 9/10 (not guaranteed) when they can 7.5/10 from the juniors down the corridor for a quarter of the price.

5. Massive oversupply. Creative jobs have always been tough to get because so many people want one, that’s why the exploitation system known as ‘placements’ still exists. And though there are fewer people the higher up the ladder you go, there are still far more than the industry needs, hence the relentless ageism and the need for an ‘out’. As anyone with even the slightest grasp of economics knows, increased supply pushes the price down, so until half the industry simultaneously agrees to go and do something else, the wages will continue to be fucked. The oversupply also extends to agencies themselves: with so many battling it out for any client worth a fiver or more, the margins get reduced and there is less money to pay staff, leading to even more 7/10 ads.

6. Holding companies. They, as with any publicly-listed company, have to meet certain targets to please shareholders (which could be you or me through our pension schemes). This means that money is the bottom line imperative and the chances of Omnicom/WPP etc spunking loads of cash to get better ads is tiny.

7. Much of what we do is cannon fodder bullshit. In order to sell work quickly and avoid losing money on an account, a client is often given eight routes and asked to pick a favourite. This means that around 85% of work done by you and your department is utterly pointless and ultimately worthless. It creates nothing but opportunities for people to have their arses licked a little more tenderly, and who would pay for such a thing (don’t answer that)?

8. This one is the real shitter: we don’t do ourselves any favours. Every time you do a chip shop ad you devalue what we do for a living. You give away your best shit for a pittance just for the chance to win a shiny bauble. This makes us, as a department, look pretty pathetic because none of that is related to the real money or business of advertising. Yes, I know that because of the way the system currently works, we are rewarded for meaningless awards over ads that might solve an actual business problem for a big client, but that has been fucking us over the years. Would you pay a footballer for their ability to do supercool keepy-uppy tricks on the training ground? Or a musician to play to his mates in his bedroom? Of course not, but that’s what our promotion system is mainly based on. Yes, you can win awards on proper accounts, but these are the same awards that are won for the bullshit ads: a Gold Lion is a Gold Lion, so the currency gets devalued and the proper ones start to become meaningless. Then, when they’re all meaningless, what are we supposed to do?

Suck up our shitty wages, that’s what.

Your patience is appreciated.

I subscribe to Rolling Stone Magazine.

I used to read it about 20 years ago but gave it up when movies and music, and consequently the articles about them, started getting really terrible.

Anyway, it’s really darn good again and here are a few reasons why;

Matt Taibi’s analysis/expose of the working practices of Goldman Sachs should be required reading for every sentient being on planet earth.

Here is the opening, much quoted, paragraph:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Since then, Taibi’s follow ups and his work on other subjects have given us the most pungent, forthright, rock-and-roll current affairs writing of the day. And if it’s not him contributing, the other writers and the issues they raise and report on are uniformly brilliant.

Another reason would be the current issue. Not only does it give us articles about Dennis Hopper, BP’s possible drilling in the Arctic and (if you are so inclined) Lady Gaga, it also contains a report on Timothy McChrystal, the US General in charge of Afghanistan. Well, he was in charge of Afghanistan, but then this article appeared and was thought to be so incendiary, he was relieved of his duties. Has any magazine article you’ve read lately done that?

They also have great music, TV and film reviews as well as a little bit on US sport, if it happens to be interesting to a wider audience.

The downsides are a love of U2 and a tendency to put vapid teen idols (Taylor Lautner?) on the cover, but you can ignore these minor blips.

Check it out if you get a chance (or have a nose around on their website – it’s also full of great stuff).

Food around the world.

Cronenberg on Letterman:

Blu go further:

BIG BAG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Some wanky film project from Ridley Scott.

Follow Raoul Moat on the run.

(Thanks, W.)

Will the fucking vuvuzela blend?

Fine client presentation:

(Thanks, W.)

I read about this (when was it? A week or two ago?) and kept meaning to post on it.

Anyway, someone commented on it again, reminding me that it’s worth a mention.

I think it’s interesting for Alex to stand by his principles and disrupt what must be a fairly cushy life (no client contact for the last two years) to shoot his employment position in the foot.

On one side, he’s now easily rich enough to screw up his job, but on the other, he is kissing a salary of 2m a year goodbye.

So he slagged off, directly and indirectly, the shitty principles of some of his biggest clients (he doesn’t like selling to kids or promoting things that cause obesity, something BK and Kraft happily and regularly do) until MDC, CP&B’s holding company, thought it might be a good idea for him to fuck off and stop jeopardising their client relationships.

Well, good for him. And fuck those clients for the shitty things they do. Instead of changing their immoral behaviour they grumbled that Alex should shut up and leave. Twats.

I’m with Barney from Singapore, who comments in the above link:

Anyone in advertising that has a modicum of moral fibre lays awake at night wrestling with the consequences of selling a slow, painful death to the masses. Consciousness used to be that annoying time between sleeps. Then I woke up.

Whether Alex found it easier to voice his true concerns when he became fucking loaded, or his conscience finally got the better of him, or he got fed up with the job that he had conquered so completely, I think it’s great that he’s got his out (the article mentions other top creatives who are doing the same).

Yet another Bogusky lesson for us all: if the business is working for you and your principles, fine. If not, get the fuck out and don’t look back.

UPDATE: according to info in the comments this principled stand occurred just after he got $38m from his earnout. Kind of takes the shine off things somewhat. Great ads though. Maybe the Bogusky lesson is that a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money. Although that does sound kind of familiar…

I don’t normally reference stuff that’s been on The Escape Pod Blog because it feels like I’m just lazily thieving another blog’s good, good shit.

But in this instance, I thought I’d point out their new campaign, just in case any of you don’t pop over there regularly.

All the info is in this post, but to sum up, they’ve gone through all the Tweets that mention Wheaties (a much-loved US snack) and responded to them in funny/pranky ways:

It’s a fantastic new way of using social media to create a brilliant online campaign for a massive brand.

Sorry if you are already aware of it, but if you’re not, I’m sure you’re silently mouthing the words, ‘thank you Ben’ at your screen.

But your gratitude would be misplaced: it’s Vinny who deserves your thanks.

UPDATE: if you’re looking for something to do tonight, don’t miss Dive at 9pm on BBC2 (although I assume it’ll be on iPlayer for a while afterwards).

I saw a preview and it is absolutely brilliant. Great acting, direction, script etc. Another excellent piece of drama from Dominic Savage.

(Thanks, BB.)

It’s a long way out of date.
It’s industry navel gazing.
The Tango spoof, along similar lines, was years ago.
You can see the end coming a mile off.
The track is rubbish.
The direction is poor.
I find the senseless destruction for such a shit ad somewhat depressing.

Today (Monday) I gave a talk at my old school about advertising.

It was their careers advice day thingie and they were lacking people who worked in the meeja, so I kindly volunteered to spew forth the kind of poison you find on this blog right into the ears of the young.

The oddest part of doing it was wrapping my head around when they were born – 1993ish – and remembering that Cotton Eye Joe and the best work of Ice T happened long before they were sentient.

Anyhoo, I think it would have been remiss of me to do anything other than warn them about what’s happening to the industry and suggest that they might find more fulfilling lives elsewhere.

It was pretty hard explaining the giant pustulating boil that is the Myth of Digital and the way an entire industry has fallen for a bullshit sandwich big enough to choke the monster they hid the Millennium Falcon in at the start of the Empire Strikes Back. When I remembered all that guff people were regurgitating in 2007 about how if you didn’t have plenty of digital in your book by 2010 you’d be a dead, smelly brontosaurus, I sighed so hard I broke my clavicle.

I then tried to decipher shit-but-effective versus award-winning-but-ineffective and explain how the latter still gets you the promotions and raises, and that no one has yet managed to think of a better system than that. I felt embarrassed as I did so. Lots of supposedly intelligent people work in advertising, but we seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time suggesting the opposite is true.

They also asked about how we really know about the people to whom we are advertising. I said that, in general, we were a bunch of wankers whose idea of getting into the mind of people who work outside the Circle Line is to read The Sun.

I’m not sure they left keener on the industry than when they arrived, but you never know.

Like a snowflake that has drifted unwisely into the pucker of John Prescott’s anus, advertising is somewhat ephemeral.

People dismiss news as ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’. Well, if that’s the case, most advertising can only dream of such longevity.

Although I can’t recall anyone mentioning this, I think that state of affairs explains some of the appeal of awards: if successful, your ad will live, in advertising terms, forever. In particular, the ones that result in some kind of annual (D&AD, The One Show etc.) will last as long as the book, which will be kept for all time in the offices of all right-thinking creatives. Of added benefit is the fact that we are taught from a very early age to respect books, particularly those which are big and hard.

However, the ads that feature in such publications are the world’s best 0.000000000000000038445206%. That means that the other 99.etc% of the industry’s product might as well not have existed.

Yes, I am aware that there are many perfectly valid ads that do not get into award books, but the chances of them being remembered for longer than a couple of weeks are minuscule.

So almost all of what we do exists in what I am about to name The Grey Zone.

Whether 3/10 or 8.5/10 your work will resound through the ages like the whisper of an asthmatic newt, and that might make you wonder whether or not it matters which of those marks it achieves.

The answer, I’m afraid, is: not really.

There are many reasons why the arguments and late nights that gets your ad from 5/10 to 6/10 (a 20% improvement) could cause more harm than good: you could piss off the kind of people who might want to sack you; you might neglect your home life to the extent that it causes irreparable damage; your work might not improve the response level of the ad, so you might miss the award books and the chance to say ‘I know it’s shit but it increased sales by 8.6%’, and at the end of the day 6/10 is also shit anyway.

So there’s not a lot of difference between ads in the Grey Zone, not matter where in the Zone they reside. And where they reside, without the benefit of an award jury’s perfect, indisputable verdict, is an entirely subjective evaluation.

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t try to do the best ads one can, but it might be a good idea to choose your battles and wait for the ones that really matter, otherwise you might just annoy people and use up valuable favours for no good reason.

(Thanks, W.)