Advertising. Can you achieve if you don’t believe?
A regular blog by Damon Stapleton, chief creative officer of DDB New Zealand
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” Viktor Frankl
I have had an interesting two weeks. I have judged two advertising award shows, one in New Zealand and the other in Australia. Some of the work wasn’t very good but some of it was truly amazing. Doing great work like this takes an enormous amount of time, effort and belief. You do more than is required. You do extra work because you believe something can be great. When a creative believes this, time is no longer an issue. Their belief will take them into the early hours of the morning.
I have been thinking a lot about belief lately. It’s something I write a lot about in my blog because I believe it is a vital ingredient a creative needs to succeed. You only have to look at a great piece of work to see how belief in an idea pushes a creative to give more. They are trying to do something original. They are trying to go where nobody has been. To steal from Jonathon Swift, they are trying to see the invisible.
15 Comments
“The moment you say to a creative what you do and where you work is no longer of any importance, that is the moment their mind leaves the building.”
I wish the majority of creative directors who would rather do the creative’s job than give ‘direction’ would hear this point and realise why staff retention is so low – and the work is so shit.
Interesting. Awards and belief. Therein lies the problem. When our belief is attached to metal we’re fall for the delusion.
@Sydney Creative
You’re right there are Creative Directors who don’t get that it can be unmotivating for them to work on your stuff. Most people are much better off given control and ownership.
On the other hand it could be that your CD is giving you the subtle or not-so-subtle hint that ‘you’re not getting the flavour of what we need” or “you’re not fast enough”.
The buck stops with them, so eventually, as time runs out, they have to start doing it themselves. Or get another team on it as well, which I’m sure you’d like even less.
Ignore what’s really important (hint: anything that’s not an advertising). Stay late. Make me more famous. Get trapped in this delusional industry.
Or they’re really shit managers and don’t understand that ‘direction’ is half of their title.
I’ve seen super good (and super awarded) creatives have their work ‘taken off them’ so the creative director looks like the superhero who’s here to save the day – in reality, the tweaks are so minor he might as well have changed the font from Helvetica to American Typewriter on the script.
You know who you are.
@Sydney Creative and @Bon Snott
I’m appalled to hear this kind of thing happens. In my day a creative would be fired if he wasn’t good enough, but first and foremost it was the Creative Director’s responsibility to train him up to the point he could ‘get the flavour of what we need’ or ‘be fast enough’.
If a creative isn’t quite getting it, you’ve failed as a manager.
Seems there is a whole generation of piss-weak managers who are incapable or too scared to train the next generation to be better than them. Narcissistic and a total waste of resources.
@Bon Snott – if you can’t communicate to a creative ‘the flavour of what [you] need’ or the time in which things need to happen, I’d suggest you’ve failed to progress from ‘creative’ to ‘manager’.
The best analogy I was given, very early in my ‘management’ career was from a Kiwi.
Imagine being the coach of the All Blacks. It’s half time and things are down. You’re constantly shouting at the team ‘no, not good enough,’ but for some reason there are no tries on the board. One of the team members suggests running in an east-west formation. You tell him ‘it’s hopeless. That’s shit.’
Then in a moment of frustration, five minutes before the bell, you grab the ball, run onto the field and say ‘EAST WEST FORMATION!!!’ before carrying the ball over the line and scoring the winning try yourself. You feel amazing.
The team, and the entire country look at you like you’re a piece of crap.
If you’re paid to be a coach, then coach. Don’t run.
Some interesting posts here.
Re: CD’s doing other people’s jobs for them – I guess the real question is, do you want to be a CD or an overpaid shit-kicker?
Because if you can’t direct, guess what? You’re overpaid. And replaceable.
Seriously?
It’s a shit manager that can’t inspire their team to rise to their level of expectation.
And an even shitter manager that blames everything on their staff.
Bon Snott is clearly incompetent.
Bon Snott – you sound like an awful person to work for.
@Bon Snott – You’re missing one fundamental thing. Look around adland. Most of the CD’s are in their late 20’s early 30’s and ECD’s that are in their mid 30’s. Yes they’re awarded and applauded and everything else. But they’re young, they’ve had maybe 15 years in industry, sometimes less. And they’re expected to lead. Seriously? There has to be some value in wisdom. There is no wisdom in our industry any more. It’s being shoved out. And just in case you think i’m a cantankerous bastard, I’m in my mid 30’s and I long for wisdom. I miss CD’s that earned their place because they had experience and years of learning…not because they won a Cannes and got a promotion.
I liked that. A good read indeed.
I’m not quite sure why the commentary has been hijacked into a discussion about CD’s who love their own work, but I’ve certainly worked for a few of those and only a couple were right.
Back to Damon’s article though – “Having the ideas isn’t the hard part, caring about them is”. Hallelujah! Ain’t that the truth.
And isn’t it usually the case, in a lot of places, caring about the idea kind of crumbles away as the idea progresses towards getting it made.
Death by a thousand cuts and so on. The thing is caring about the idea needs to be something everyone does. Not just the person who came up with the idea in the first place.
The best places I’ve worked were where creatives started the place up and traded on their creative reputation and the results of caring about their work.
Agree with Quality Control.
I don’t understand why certain suits / planners / people who sit between a good idea and making it happen don’t realise how wasteful and costly it is to say ‘Sorry guys, not good enough, client doesn’t like it, start again.’
Which at most decent agencies is like saying ‘We actually want something more shit.’ – unless you’re totally off brief, which is the suits / planners fault for not speaking up sooner. And it’s the suits / planners way of deflecting the blame back onto the creatives, as if their shit-house relationship and sales skills aren’t to blame for anything, it’s the creative – always the creative’s fault. Pathetic.
The agency doesn’t make more money going in again. It burns tonnes of money and burns money in staff retention and lost sleep / unproductive people. And third round is never as good as the stuff presented in the first round, no matter how much you try and justify it.
It never is. We all know that.
I think it’s time for agencies to realise why they exist again. It’s not to kiss a client’s arse and tell them everything some 22 year old GAD thinks they want to hear. It’s to create work that will challenge the client and make them see new ways of selling their old product.
Creativity by definition involves originality. And originality involves people seeing things they aren’t expecting or haven’t necessarily seen before.
And originality is scary. We should be embracing that and comforting clients with the fact they’ll be shitting their pants when they see a good idea. Because every person who touches that idea will also shit their pants – in a good way.
You’re missed.