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The Journey to Great Here we are at the second edition of MadisonAveNew. We got a bucket full of e-mail on the first edition and a lot of it had to do with exactly how does one get to to the point of making great advertising? Some people belly ached about their clients not knowing the dif between great advertising and grated Parmesan. But for the most part the comments were more inquisitive. A few just came right out with it. |
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| "Why bother," was their take. Personally, I found this line of reasoning the most bothersome. I've been hearing these horror stories of late. Tales of a new cadre of so-called "Slacker Management.. |
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Why aren't you teaching somewhere? -Dave S. La Jolla, CA Cal State, Channel Islands-HW |
| " Empty suits with attitude, that have been infiltrating the major agencies. "TCTC" is their code phrase on Text Messaging in MobFlash cliques. "Too Cool To Care." |
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My boss wants to pay you to come talk to our Department. Would you do it ? Daphne E, Phoenix Can I stay at your place?-HW |
| Not one single e-mail from a wannabe creative. And I was all set to pay some unproved genius a $100k a year to sit on the dunes at Zuma Beach with me, eat peeled pixie tangerines, count the passing dolphins and think twice as hard as those empty suits across the PCH on Madison Avenue. |  |
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The Creative Department just seems to be a good place to dump them, so there they are. Pimples on the ass of greatness. My advice to the 19 folks who wrote in to complain about these characters is, do your best to nutralize their influence. A potato stuck on the end of a Glock 9MM works better than a silencer I'm told by a recent rap tune. A well placed umbrella that interdicts as they race by on their way out to lunch. In other words, if your boss doesn't value greatness, you have no hope of achieving it in spite of them. Time for a new boss or a new job. Jobs are tight. However, it's not always the attitude of management that stands in the way of rising above mediocre. More often then not, the culprit is time. There's just no time to shoot a great photograph. So stock will have to do. There's not enough time to score a great track. So a needle-drop on that old Doobie Brothers B-side will have to be cool enough. Blah, blah, blah. But deep down inside we all know, that even though there is never enough time to do it right, there will always be enough time to do it over, if the client pulls the plug. Time is our most common fall guy. The great barrier to doing great work. Mr. James Brown put it best. "Money won't change you, but time will take you out." Let's spend a little time on time. After a misspent youth at Motown Records in Detroit, I returned to New York ( and a $50k pay cut) to work as an Assistant Art Director at Young & Rubicam. My wife thought I was insane and so I wound up "living" in my 2x4 office. That's how I found out how important time was to the creative process. Everybody else at Y&R had somebody to go home to. I had nobody and no home. I used to call it my "Night Shift Period." Back then, as now, creative departments pitted their art director/writer teams against each other in creative "shoot-outs." Last team standing gets to present their work to the client. These guys would work till midnight. Their phones would ring off the hook. It was the little woman. Their chain had been yanked. They were outta there. Not me. I lived at the agency, remember. I hear them go down in the elevator. 12:02am, I'm on the creep to their respective offices and cubicles. I'm checking out their campaigns. Making notes to make mine better. Next morning before they get in, I'm camped out on the creative director's doorstep. They've been swooped. Ruthless me. But that's what it takes on the Road to Great Advertising. You simply cannot accept the "not enough time" excuse. Steal time. Borrow time. Wrestle time to the ground and sit on time. But whatever you do, commit yourself to taking the time to make it great. The next roadblock to great advertising, according to our readers, is the very definition of greatness itself. What constitutes a great ad, commercial, billboard, banner, mailing piece or poster? Personally, I categorize the answer to that question as the "Car Wreck Factor." Something the audience can't bring itself to turn away from. Like Rubberneckers on the Freeways or Interstates creep past the accident scene looking for carnage, viewers, readers, users can't turn away from a great idea. Bob Shallcross and Jim Furguson at Leo Burnett knew great "Car Wreck" when they saw one. And I quote. "What's in the bag?" "Big Mac and Fries." "I'll play you for it."..."Off the expressway, over the river, off the billboard, through the window, off the wall...Nothing but net." Remember that? It aired 12 years ago this week. What else do you remember from the year 1992? Byrd, Jordan, Hancock Building, Big Mac, equals Car Wreck. In
1974 I did a commercial with an older Black lady on her hands and
Knees, scrubbing an endless hallway floor. High-speed, over-cranked,
painful slow motion move in. A young man's voice, "My mother
is something else Mr. Johnson. (scrub) She scrubs floors every night
so I can get the money to go to school. (scrub) And now you're telling
me my chemistry class may be discontinued. (scrub) My becoming a
doctor is my mother's dream. ( scrub) How am I gonna tell her what's
happening to the school (scrub). Announcer: Give Now To The United
Negro College Fund (scrub) A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste." That Black lady on her knees has raised more than $2.1 billion for the UNCF and helped graduate more than 300,000 deserving minority students from college in the past 30 years. That image at the height of the Civil Rights Movement was a Car Wreck on network television. It wasn't the first UNCF public service spot. It wasn't the last UNCF spot. But it was the one everybody remembers. "This campaign is one of the most memorable and successful advertising campaigns in our country's history," claims Peggy Conlon, President & CEO of The Advertising Council. What constitutes a great commercial? The great ones are the ones that last and last, long after they've run.
You Heard It Here First Last week we held Eric Kim, executive vice president of global marketing operations at Samsung's feet to the fire for the brand's lack luster showing at the Olympics. This week Advertising Age announced that Mr. Kim is leaving Samsung to become chief marketing officer at Intel Corp. Could it have been something we said? Ad Age also reported that Samsung is currently in the throes of a global agency review estimated at up to $700 million, with a decision expected this month. Noooo? Remember that Executive Creative Director they wanted to move to Korea, we reported on last week? Well that guy, Gregory Lee, hired recently as Samsung's chief marketing officer, is expected to take over Mr. Kim's duties. I knew I should have returned that headhunter's calls. The bad news. One of my clients has a $70 million dollar deal pending at Intel Capital. What goes around, may just come around. Where is that headhunter's number? So
Great They Make You Hate. The
moment I first saw Mikey J. moonwalk across the stage at Motown
25 I hated him. I had known him and his whole family during
my time at Motown, so it wasn't personal. I had seen the
Halston inspired MJ2.0 on MTV just like everybody
else on the planet and remember saying, "Hold up. I just saw
dude with Bianca J at Studio a few months back. Who is this fool?"
The change-up wasn't what made me a hater. It was the dance. It
wasn't a special effect. It wasn't a camera trick. I was sitting
four seats back from the stage right behind Berry Diller.
It was real. He was doing what he was doing for real. And
when he threw down that fedora, it was all over for me. I knew I
would never draw a crowd on the dance floor again. I hated Mike
for that. That's how the guys at Boston's Modernista make me feel these days. Like hating them. They are just that great at making advertising. Now everybody will tell you that Nike has that B-Ball thing locked tight. Wieden+Kennedy and "Just Do It" got game and that's a fact. But nothing they ever did made me want to trash my G4 like the "Invisible" spot Modernista did for the grand daddy of all hightops, Converse. Talk about your "Car Wreck" compellingness ( is that even a word?) This spot is a 20-car pile-up on the I-10. For one thing, there's not a product shot anywhere in the spot. Hell, there's not a player, anywhere in the spot. No limo ridin', shit talkin', drug test failin' NBA All-Star parole model anywhere. No streetball sweatin', one-on one drivin', rim slammin, gangsta rappin' realie dealie either. Nothin but a high school gym. And a pill that never stops moving at the speed of fight. I can't begin to do justice to Mos Man the spots poet narrator.It's a spot that only the first sneaker company (Converse) could put their name on. You have to see this for yourself. Take a look over here. Other Modernista work that's so great they make me hate 'em is their launch campaign for the Hummer SUV. Modernista must have done well by the brand because Mike DiGiovanni, 56, divisional marketing general manager of Hummer, was just promoted to executive director of strategic marketing for all of General Motors around the world. Modernista is the brainchild of Gary Koepke. He's the guy who got himself in so much trouble with the hip-hop community as the non-black creative director of Quincy Jone's VIBE magazine and wound up defining the look of hip-hop for years to come. His partner, Lance Jensen gave the world the "Driver's Wanted" campaign at Arnold and that's all I need to say about that gentlemen. I don't know if these two guys are so great as to make me want to hang up my ad making jones, but damn. Where did I put that potato? What
Comes First? Another
question posed by several readers who are newbies to the ad game,
is that of , "What comes first." In their minds, some traffic person
hands you a work order that says it's a print ad six columns wide
by 230 lines deep and it's due to the client on Thursday and says
"Go." That's it. I dare say, that all across America this is
exactly how the process starts. It ends when the billing department
sends out an invoice to the client and the check comes in, then
clears the agency's bank account. If you are the owner of a small
to midsized agency that's pretty much your world view of the advertising
business. Your main goal is to pay your overhead, drive down
cost and maximize profits. Anything that gets in the way of that
paradigm is considered problematic. The creative process is envariably
the thing that gets in the way. Doing great advertising is considered
"problematic" to most agency managers. That's why there is so little
of it going around. In his classic urban potboiler "Pimp," author "Iceberg Slim" (aka Robert Beck) reveals that, "The pimp game is all about cop and blow. Get a 'ho. Lose a 'ho." The same can be said about the ad game. Get accounts. Lose accounts. These are the primary concerns of agency management. Running a close third is maintaining accounts. Waaay down in the ranks is doing great work. Some agencies will even go so far as to say, "It's not great unless the client buys it." Strangly enough, when you talk to a great many clients these days you will get a completely opposite point of view. "My agency wouln't know a big idea if it busted down the door and ate their receptionist," is how one highly placed marketing executive put it to me. She and a lot more like her are becoming increasingly disgusted with the half-baked concepts that pass for "Breakthrough Creative" these days. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that so many companies are eschewing the "agency of record" standard for the "creative consortium" business model. So to answer the question, what comes first? A client who understands the leveraging power of a great advertising campaign comes first. Once that relationship is in place, greatness is bound to follow. And if it doesn't, that client should waste no time in opening the window, sticking her head out and hollering,"Next!" Stay Tuned. |
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