WHY RIGHT NOW IS SO GODDAMM AWESOME

My father was in advertising.

And when my son Felix was born 14 years ago people asked me whether I wanted him to go into the same business too.

My answer at that time was ‘probably not’.

I didn’t want to appear churlish; I enjoyed what I was doing. It was very interesting.

It’s just that it didn’t look like it was going to get any more interesting than it already was.

We’d worked with the same tools for years: press, posters, TV cinema and radio. It felt like the future was going to be more of the same. That every ad had been done. And that we were simply rearranging Lego blocks to make slightly different objects.

Scarily too, the real innovation through that period was to be found in the research companies.

They’d spent their time building up a deep understanding of the consumer and a set of metrics that meant people felt they could use a formula to create ads to sell to them.

It seemed like this conventional wisdom would only ever lead to conventional work.

Then along came an oddly named company called Google.

And soon after that something called YouTube.

Then Facebook.

And Twitter.

These things were all awesome. But not really mainstream. 

At this time there was a sub culture of cool, ‘in the know’ technorati who inhabited this murky, other-world called ‘digital’ and who all understood what the majority didn’t. The early adopters.

And there were some incredibly enlightened people in advertising companies trying to explain to marketers how the world had changed and this new stuff was going to revolutionise everything.


But they were fighting a primarily uphill battle. In the margins. With only a sliver of a budget. 

Then the gods of technology gave us 3G!

And the iPhone.

And the app store.

And boom!

The ‘late adopters’ began to play with digital things.

And love the experience.

The marketers began to pull at their agencies rather than be pushed by them.

They began to insist on innovative, creative answers to their problems using new technologies and the behaviours associated with them.

Things that had never been done before.

Until now, every day sees new technologies and platforms that offer marketers and their communications partners new ways to flex their creative muscle and delight their users.

Indeed, they have to do that. Because their consumer is now a communications expert.

Everyone is. Everyone who has a smart phone. Or a computer.

Communications today is all pervasive.

It's so much more than advertising. 


It affects everything everyone does. 

It’s the one thing that connects the whole world. 

And it’s constantly changing.

And, ergo, changing the world.

So now, when people ask me if I would be happy if my kids to go into the same industry I’m in, guess what I say?

10 sure-fire ways to get your creative department to loathe you.

Running a creative department involves a certain degree of power.

And, as Spiderman’s uncle, not to mention some bloke called Voltaire, warned: ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.

Well every now and then we creative directors have been known not to live up to that responsibility 100%.

And that doesn't exactly endear us to our staff.

I’ve spent some time asking the creative community what behaviours leave them less than enamoured of the guy in the corner office.

These are my findings:

Want to de-motivate, upset and annoy your teams? Read on...

1. On starting a new job fire half your department then restock with your own cronies. 

No one would argue hacking away dead wood is wrong. However there are invariably talented people in every creative department who simply haven’t been given the inspired leadership and encouragement they need to flourish.

Existing staff need at least to be given a chance to show what they’re capable of under someone who might actually make them shine.

There’s another behaviour related to this which is equally offensive:

Hire a new 'star team', telling your existing staff it was something you had to do because they 'just aren’t producing the goods'.

2. Form cliques.

Giving the good briefs to your mates will direct your department’s ire not only on you, but on your, soon to be unpopular chums too.

3. Don’t pay what people are worth.

Good creatives will always be able to get a job elsewhere. The reason they’re with you is because they choose to be. 

They’ll be understanding to an extent regarding things like the economic climate and account losses. But in the long term, if they don’t feel satisfied where they are they won’t stick around.

4. Allow late night and weekend work to go un-thanked.

Showing gratitude is not showing weakness.

A little recognition is the least people deserve for working above and beyond the call of duty.

If your attitude to your people is: “You’re lucky to be here. If you don’t like the way we treat people here you can sod off.” Hey, guess what? At the first opportunity, they will.

Treat them like you’re the lucky one and you’ve got a better chance of them staying.

5. Don’t fight their corner.

Creative directors have to be advocates for their teams. We have to go into battle for them, whether it’s forcing through their ads or forcing through their pay rise.

Having someone’s best interests at heart goes both ways. Don’t expect it from your creatives if they can’t expect it from you.

6. Give feedback via a third party.

Astonishingly, some creative directors apparently review work by getting a traffic man to collate work from teams allowing them to select work from the comfort of their own office.

This is lazy.

And cowardly.

And worse, doesn’t allow the teams to learn from their mistakes. 

Explaining why something isn’t right may not be easy. But it’s a massive part of the job.

7. Only expend your energy on ‘potentially award winning’ briefs.

A guaranteed way to disenfranchise a wide cross-section of your agency’s staff.

Bad for the agency. Worse for its clients.

And the truth is, you never actually know where the next award winner is coming from.

If you give each brief the same attention, you give yourself more chances of producing great work.

8. Ask more of them than you are prepared to give yourself.

If you’re not prepared to work late nights, through lunch, or over weekends or holidays don’t expect your staff to.

9. Take the best briefs for yourself.

This would appear to be the most heinous of crimes. And the worst possible reason for wanting the top job. If you haven’t got making your own ads out of your system it's better not to take it.

And the excuse that you're the only one in the agency who could possibly crack a particular brief is no excuse. If you can’t get award winning work out of your department it’s your fault, not theirs.

10. Leave.

(NB: This behaviour was mentioned well before news of my impending departure from RKCR had broken, so I’m presuming it wasn’t a personal swipe at me...)

There are a various reasons a creative director might up and leave their department: To go to another agency, because they were fired, to leave the business altogether (to retire or become a director), or to start their own business.

Of these, the first could leave a department feeling resentment toward their boss: “You chose them over me?!” 

The second could leave them feeling anger toward the agency.

The last two might elicit sadness, but hopefully not full-on loathing. It’s hard to be angry when someone wants to make a life-choice. That’s just, well, life.

And, that a creative department feels upset when their boss leaves them has to be a good sign.

If they’re all out celebrating your departure you may need to ask yourself a few serious questions.

So, that's 10 less-than-lovely behaviours.

I'd like to think that's the lot. But I suspect there may be many more.

What makes a bad ad?

It’s widely believed that to be a good creative director you need to know what makes a good ad.

But there’s something far more important you need to know:

What makes a bad one.

The spectre of mediocrity awaits advertising at every turn.

And it falls upon the creative director to ensure their agency’s shit filter remains regularly serviced, in optimum working order and pointed in the right direction.

Many hours of our days are spent preventing disasters happening.

Unforeseen disasters. Unintentional disasters.

They can occur at any time along the production chain.

But the most critical touch-point is always the first one. The first review.

Every day we’re asked to study scraps of paper filled with words and pictures and gaze into the future.

To foretell, in milliseconds, what the finished item will look like in months to come. And whether it’ll work. (Our business cards could read: Company Soothsayer.)

That’s why every time a creative director is presented with a concept a million questions bloom in their head:

Is the work on strategy?

Will it get noticed?

Has it been done before?

Will people like it?

Will it add value to the brand?

Do we have the budget to make it properly?

Do we have to time to make it properly?

Might the client be able to remove the idea and still insist it gets made?

Could research suggest some ‘improvements’ that do anything but?

What client politics would be involved in presenting it?

Etc.

Etc.

There’s no end to the possible pitfalls waiting to crucify an idea as it moves from conception to birth.

And the questions we ask on that crucial first glimpse are what dictate whether the world will be exposed to another beauty or another beast.

Approving great ads is one of the easiest and most enjoyable parts of the job.

Stopping bad ones leaving the building is one of the toughest and most important.

But the only way to stop one scuttling out the door is to recognise it for what it is or could become.

So next time your creative director pauses before giving a point of view bare this in mind: he may well be pondering on more than “Did I make that reservation at The Ivy for 1.00, or 1.30?”

Female creatives. Do we really need 'em?

There are two questions that get perennially asked in advertising:

Why aren’t there many women working in creative departments.

And, how can we redress the balance?

At RKCR we seem to have an unfair share of the female advertising workforce, 11 women. But that’s still nowhere near 50/50.

Whilst the, mostly male, creative community bemoans the dearth of female creatives, in truth they’re not doing much to change the situation.

This may be because, in their heart of hearts, they believe you don’t need to be a woman to ‘get’ women?

And it’s true, there are men who are intuitively ‘in touch with their feminine side’ and know women better than they know themselves. The fashion business is stuffed with them.

Less so the ad business.

Conventional wisdom, and the research companies, would have us believe that focus groups can tell us all what we need to know to make us experts in what women want.

If only it really were as simple as just chucking money at the problem.

Personally I love women.

I spent 15 years working with one.

Mary Wear is one of the best writers in the business. And one of the smartest women I’ve met. And she helped me create work I wouldn’t have made had I been working with another man.

We once worked on a campaign for Tampax aimed at teenage girls.

Never having been a teenage girl myself I found this a fascinating learning experience. (I’m afraid my prior knowledge of the target audience had sod all to do with worrying about their ‘emotional needs, wants and desires’.)

Having lived through that maelstrom of a life-stage herself however Mary was the best depth research group you could ask for, there in the room. And at no extra cost to the client. Added value!

During our extensive ‘insight mining’ - chatting - I’d ask her whether a sixteen year old girl would think something-or-other.

Her reply would often be: “Would they bollocks.”

Invaluable.

Mary would always say women could tell an ad aimed at them that had been written by men. As an example of what not to do she’d quote the copy of an old Tampax ad she once saw which started: “If you’re a woman or a girl who has periods…”

You don’t need girls to do work aimed at girls. You don’t need to be a woman to get inside the mind of a woman.

But the truth is that work done by the target audience offers a powerful mixture of insight linked to creativity.

And you don’t get that from research groups.

Because of those 15 years working with Mary I have a lot of time for mixed-sex teams.

They add balance.

They prevent blokes from being too blokey. And mitigate against girls being too girly.

But what about the numbers of women wanting to enter the business? Why aren’t they greater?

Though not as tough or sexist as it may have been in the past, the advertising business doesn’t take any prisoners.

And creative departments especially are high-pressure environments: It’s painful having your beautiful ideas smashed to shreds by clients and creative directors.

Then there’s having to deal with competitive colleagues, playing mind games, desperate to out-do each other.

In Dave Trott’s book Creative Mischief, he talks about why women steer clear of creative jobs. He rightly describes creative departments as playgrounds, full of boisterous piss taking and gags.

Playgrounds are fun, but they’re also where bullying happens.

We not only need to entice smart women into the business, it’s imperative we give them a reason to come back from maternity leave when they start a family.

If we’re to do that perhaps we need to look to ourselves to change rather than asking them to.

The answer, soppy though some hardened practitioners may think, is providing a nurturing and caring working environment.

A support culture rather than a blame culture.

Offering encouragement and positive feedback rather than sarcastic sniping.

Baking into the culture the freedom to fail.

I’m not saying treat women differently to men. Why not treat everyone decently?

Yes, it takes more effort. And that might be a stumbling block for some.

But it’s a simple equation:

85% of purchasing decisions are made by women.

We need clever women to help us do our jobs well.

If we don’t treat them with respect they’ll just sod off and go and do something else.

And, gentlemen, that certainly won’t help the end-of-year numbers.

The birth of a Creative Director

This piece first appeared in a book entitled Creative Director: Year Zero, published by Ihaveanidea.com

I'm posting it now on the 10th anniversary of my first day as an ECD.






My first job as a Creative Director was at Lowe London.

I’d been Group Head and Deputy Creative Director at other agencies, but Lowe was the first time I’d actually been given the opportunity to lead a department as part of a management line up.

As it happens, it wasn’t a job I went looking for.

Charles Inge hired Tony Barry and myself as a team, then promptly upped and started is own agency.

We were offered his job at that time but declined. We felt too greedy. We were getting plenty of work out and decided we hadn’t got doing our own ads out of our system.

The months went by and, as various names were floated around, we concluded we’d rather do the job ourselves than work for anyone else. So, after a quick lunch with Sir Frank, it was decided.

We were finally prepared, after years of doing our own ads, to help other people do theirs.

A pre-requisite of being a successful creative director is having the respect of your department. And that comes, in the first instance at least, from teams knowing you have plenty of experience and large body of good work behind you.

As with our parents, we need to believe our boss has all the answers. That they’ve been there, solved that problem, and probably won an award for it. Creative directors are paid for their opinion. And that’s only worth anything if it’s backed up by more than mere intuition.

Our first few weeks were a steep learning curve to say the least.

After day one I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. The pressure was relentless. Meeting after meeting in which everyone turns to you for your opinion. The level of concentration was unlike anything I had experienced.

Not only were you dealing with a dozen different projects a day, you also had to make sure the people entering your office left with a clear idea of what to do next and felt motivated to do it. No mean feat if they’d come in with something truly rubbish.

Tony and I weren’t joint CDs for long. He decided after a couple of months that he missed sitting in a quiet room doing his own thing. And there was none of that in our new job, so he left.

But I was loving it.

I was relishing the ability to have a positive influence. On creative work, on people’s careers and on the culture of a business.

My guiding principle has always been ‘treat people as you’d like to be treated yourself’. As a creative director this meant: be friendly, be respectful, expect the best of people and try and solve the problems they present you with.

The direction in which I needed to focus my energies quickly became clear.

The ‘sold first time’ rate at the agency was incredibly low at that point. The creatives were exhausted by re-brief after re-brief. They’d not had anyone fighting their corner for quite some time. (Everyone said Charles was a lovely guy but never really wanted to get his hands dirty.)

I got far more involved in projects from the moment the client brief entered the building all the way to final sign-off. This meant a load of extra meetings woven into the process.

But it worked well. Soon there was far more work being produced. And as a creative so many problems go away when one is making work.

I loved getting closer to clients. If you speak directly to the person whose problem you are trying to solve you solve it quicker. And by avoiding any mix up in communication you avoid internal arguments over any possible misinterpretation of the brief. You also learn far more about business than if you’re stuck in your office reviewing work all day.

A few months into the job Chris Thomas, my CEO, told me something rather scary that changed the way I dealt with people forever: As a member of management, never underestimate the effect you can have on people.

This is really hard to get your head round.

It’s very tempting, once you move into a managerial position, to behave the way you always have behaved. The truth is that everything’s changed. From the second you take up that job people see you differently. Every look, every word, every gesture is analysed for its subtext.

For example, you’re walking down the corridor and a young member of staff smiles brightly and wishes you ‘good morning’. However you’re deep in thought; concerned about the pitch that afternoon, the fact that one of your teams has just resigned and that a client has just shredded what would have been the best piece of work the agency had ever done. You hardly notice their greeting. You ignore it and walk on, furrow on brow, totally unaware of the potential lasting effect on them: “He didn’t even notice me, he must think I’m rubbish, someone’s told him I’m crap at my job, I’m probably about to get fired, I’m worthless.” Sounds melodramatic, but that’s the scary part. It can happen.

Treating people the way you’d like to be treated isn’t easy. It takes real effort.

But I believe it’s a vital part of the job.

And it sure helps me sleep at night.