If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

John Donne once said that ‘No man is an island’.

However, Nietzsche came back with: ‘The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’

Which brings us to advertising.

How are the ambitions of the individual reconciled with the needs of the group?

Fortunately, they often run together; where one succeeds, so does the other. But not always.

For the average creative, the most important thing to their salary (and therefore the size of their home, coolness of their trainers, standard of their son’s prep school, lack of arguments with their spouse etc.) is winning awards. If a copywriter wins three Gold Lions on a piece of work whose incendiary cutting edge loses the agency the account, he has done very well for himself. The agency has suffered, people might have been fired because of him, but he will be in a better position for a lucrative move elsewhere. However, if he knuckles down and produces something 7/10 that doesn’t scare the horses, then the agency keep the account, but he will personally gain nothing.

What a dilemma, eh?

Equally, if an account guy is looking to make his next move to step up to board level at another agency, he might think it’s a good idea to persuade his client to move to his prospective agency. He will have screwed his current team, but made a substantial gain for himself. He could have just kept the status quo as it was with conscientious maintenance of his agency’s client relationship, but like the copywriter above, he will have gained nothing compared to his other possible course of action.

Those are extreme examples, but I know of many smaller choices that are made daily in agencies across the world that demonstrate the same principles, but in a less significant way. For example, have you ever, as a creative, recorded your own version of a voiceover during a session that the client has paid for? Well, in that case, you wasted the client’s money to further your own career. Have you ever fibbed about changing an edit or a grade? What about moving a logo up a few point sizes for a presentation, then back down again after sign-off? Or avoiding presenting a layout that the client would love because it might harm your chances at Creative Circle?

You can also find situations where a strong play for the individual can mean a greater, unexpected benefit for the team. When Tom and Walt were making Guinness Surfer, a senior account man called them in to his office. The post had yet to be completed and it was going to cost another £250,000 to put the horses on the waves. The film already looked stunning, so the client and the account man decided between themselves that the horses were an unnecessary indulgence, so could T&W please leave the film as it was, ta very much? Well, no, they couldn’t. They said they’d resign if the horses were not added. The account man’s face went greeny-white (Tom and Walt were, deservedly, ginormous superstars of the creative firmament) and the budget for the horses was miraculously reinstated. Surfer was voted the best ad of all time, the client was quite pleased about this and the agency still retains the account now, partly based on the excellence of that commercial.

Everyone was a winner:

In an ideal world, that’s what it would be like in every situation in every agency. Unfortunately, it’s just not the case, so bear that in mind next time your collective of individuals makes like a dictionary and puts ‘I’ before ‘we’.

I’m a little underwhelmed. I like the music, but visually it feels like a somewhat whiffly verson of his Frozen video.

And miles away from his finest hour:

It’s one of those tedious diarrhoea puddles that demands the question, ‘What are these people up to?’ In this instance we are dying to know why some cookie-cutter pan-planet characters have replaced money with kindness.

‘Why? Why? WHY? Why have they done this?’ you scream as you stifle a yawn.

Well, it’s because they live in an Absolut world.

In an Absolut world, giant booze companies buck the credit crunch by spunking a million dollars business-classing an agency and crew all over the planet in the name of some kitten-weak excuse for an ‘idea’ that tries to connect vodka to something other than getting pissed.

You know you want to:

In last week’s poll 35% of respondents revealed that if they did not work in advertising, they would like to be an author.

In William Goldman’s great memoir on Hollywood Screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he laments the fact that writers end up with much less respect and money than they deserve because they rarely insist on owning their creations.

Apparently they are so bloody delighted that someone actually wants to commit their guff to celluloid that they enter a state of delerium where they can be persuaded to sign away the rights to their painstakingly realised stories and characters in perpetuity.

So when the toys are sold and the sequels are made, no one asks or pays the writer, because they don’t have to and because writers can be quite annoying people to talk to.

In the world of advertising, this shit-owning problem is equally true.

When an agency creates a great campaign or endline, they simply give it away to the client for a few pennies and the privilege of working for them for as long as they are granted such a beautiful gift. This can even happen with pitches, where the creator doesn’t work for the client at all, and yet still gives all his goodies away for the square root of fuck-all.

So when John Webster invented the Gary Lineker Walkers campaign or the No-Nonsense John Smiths campaign the clients were able to move them to AMV or TBWA without any compensation.

The same is true of directors, who sign away the ads they shoot forever, and post houses, who never see a brass farthing of any continued success their creations might have.

Perhaps that seems reasonable, after all what’s the alternative? Well, how about photographers and illustrators, who merely lease their work to the agencies for a certain period of time, but retain ownership; or actors who get repeat fees and can renegotiate their fee if they become the ‘face’ of some client.

How come they can own their output, yet agencies and production companies who, arguably, create far more valuable products, cannot?

Life’s not fair on the fairer sex; they have to go through all sorts of obvious buggers that guys don’t (menstruation and its attendant stresses; the pain of childbirth; choosing motherhood over a career; can’t piss standing up without making a frightful mess; if they’re firm then they’re lesbianic harridans; if they’re soft they’re little puddles of pointless melted marshmallow that no one takes seriously; they’re valued disproportionately for their physical appearance but if they’re unattractive then they’re dismissed for being so, etc.) but there’s one more inequality that seems less obvious…

Some women spend much of their time and money on trying to looking younger and more attractive than they might naturally be. Plastic surgery, make up, hair highlights, the gym etc. are all a bit of a chore and often quite expensive. But what are the male equivalents?

Well, I’m sorry to say that, ostensibly, laziness and indulgence can be the way forward. I know of at least two ECDs who have been promoted to that position despite their youth. So, deliberately or not, they have both grown beards. This gives them a little more age, and therefore gravitas, with which to convey their bons mots in client meetings. So, basically, they don’t have to shave, which is the exact opposite of the ladies’ careful routine of Mac and Clinique.

When I worked at AMV there was an account man, who has since left, that went about this quandary in another way: he put on weight. This filled out his face and gave him a physical presence that belied his years. Again, this is the flipside of the dietary regimes that many women seem to put themselves through to maintain an ideal poundage.

Other men make a virtue of baldness, attaining a level of seriousness and respectability merely through losing their hair, whilst simultaneously removing another grooming inconvenience and expense (the hairdresser).

Well, bollocks: life isn’t fair. Women are advantaged in other ways like…um…shit…I honestly can’t think of a good one. Sorry.

Any suggestions that don’t include being able to rub their own breasts when the mood takes them would be wonderfully edifying for the mostly male audience of this blog, including me.

Thanks in advance.

These (http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/03/29/juice-skin-packaging-by-naoto-fukasawa/) should walk it this year.

When people say ‘Keep it simple’ and ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ that’s the kind of thing they should be referring to.

(Thanks, L.)

So I rest my case about how much creatives care about effectiveness over awards.

I voted for a number one single. I’m not really sure why. Number ones don’t seem nearly as significant as they used to.

But then neither do Pencils. Or full pages in The Sun.

But they still all beat a big increase in sales.

Shhh…don’t tell the clients.

Anyway, continuing the theme of job mobility, there’s a new question of the week.

(By the way, French keyboards require you to use shift for numbers and full stops. Pourquoi?)

With all this recession-redundancy-firing type stuff, the thoughts of many creatives are turning to the wonderful world of freelance.

As it’s not something I’m that familiar with, I’ve asked a friend of mine, who has been at it since times were good, what it’s really like:

“The thing that struck me most when I first started the temporary employment thing is the similarity between freelancing qnd placementing. In both situations you arrive somewhere new, hope to get briefed quickly by people you have never met before (after all, you do want to do the best job you can and it’s no good if you’re there for a week but you only get briefed on Wednesday) and spend rather more time than you’d like doing all the necessary aclimatisations. By this I mean sorting out getting on a computer or getting your own computer going with their IT so you can print stuff out; talking to the appropriate finance people to ensure you get paid; finding out who is or isn’t worth getting to know for useful information; and ingratiating yourself enough to extend your employment, but not so much that you seem like a dreadful arselicker.

You can’t help but compare agencies by the little day-today things that they all have, like the standard of the loos, the refreshments and how much they cost, the agency pub and the attractiveness of members of the gender(s) you find attractive. I think all that novelty is one of the main benefits of this side of the fence.

Learning to read your CD’s quirks and personality in a matter of days is also a valuable skill. The more time you spend trying to read his mind, the less time you have to crack the brief.

Timing’s an odd one. Usually the time keeping’s not as important as finishing the work. Some agencies don’t mind if you work off-site (handy for taking on more than one job at once), but the ones that want you in usually want you to do a 9.30ish to 6.30ish day.

Some jobs you give more of a shit about than others, but that’s the same if you’re permanent, but if you freelance, you’d better at least look like you give a half-decent fuck, or they’re not going to ask you back. And being asked back is important because jobs don’t just drop from the sky. You will now have a second occupation trying to keep the first one going.

But in general, I prefer it. There’s less time to get bogged down in the political bullshit and you don’t have to look like a you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of whatever the corporate mission statement says. Just get in, do your job, get out and spend the next few months chasing up your payment with finance people who are never in quite the same hurry to pay you as the bank is to receive your mortgage payment.”

Thanks for that. Any other people want to add their insights, please feel free to leave a comment.

Also, I plan to do a post in the near future with all the websites of available freelancers. If you’d like me to feature yours, just send it to bwmkay at googlemail.com (sorry, I’m on a French keyboard and have no idea where they keep the ‘at’ sign. It also means I won’t update the comments as often as usual).