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.

Are we obsessed by awards?

At RKCR/Y&R we recently launched a web utility called the T Minus awards countdown timer: http://www.t-minuscountdown.com/

It’s website and screen saver which lists every single awards competition in the world, alongside their entry dates and the date the work has to have run by to be eligible for entry.

Did we do it because we’re obsessed with awards? Because we’re desperate to find any possible way of winning as many of the things as possible?

Nope.

Awards have always been important to the ad industry.

As a benchmark to judge our work by.

A by-product of doing great work that works.

The cherry on the effective advertising cake.

But then a few years ago a man called Donald Gunn did something that changed everything.

He decided he’d make a list of which agencies were winning the most awards. Globally.

This list became, in effect, the mother of all awards schemes.

Agencies and agency networks became focussed on getting as high up his list as possible, believing it to be a way of proving their worth.

In turn, creative people were tasked with helping their agencies get there.

The pressure for individuals to win awards to get themselves noticed and further their own careers, is now joined, palpably, by the pressure to win for ‘the greater good’.

Having to keep track of all the awards schemes that contribute points to the Gunn Report, their deadlines and their entry dates, adds exponentially to that pressure.

Awards are a fact of life.

And T Minus was consciously created to hopefully make more of that life spent doing award winning work and less worrying about when and where to enter it.

The first job justifies the means.

‘The end justifies the means.’

A phrase that’s certainly true when it comes to getting one's first job.

Someone once said to me: “It doesn’t matter what you have to do to get your first job, just get it. After that, it’s up to you. If you can’t hack it you’ll be out before you know it.”

At the beginning of my final year on the Copywriting course at Hounslow College I found myself chatting to Mary Wear.

We had both realised the same thing: Our year had twenty people in it. There were fifteen other advertising courses around the country. That year the ad industry had only about six jobs going, if that. And we wanted two of them.

We realised we had to think strategically.

If we were to beat our peers to a job we had to get out there before them.

And we knew the only way we could do that was to work harder than them.

So we teamed up.

For the next few months were at the doors waiting for the college to be opened in the morning.

And they had to kick us out to lock the place up at night.

We spent the weekends at each other’s homes with layouts covering the floors.

Soon we got a book to what we felt was a place good enough to show creative directors.

One of the reasons students chose Hounslow was its strong links with industry. It had a great placement scheme.

But Mary and I didn’t reap that benefit.

All the other teams consisted of the official art director and copywriter, from the relevant courses. We had bucked the system. We were both writers so didn’t fit into their plan and consequently the college hadn’t tried to get us placements.

So we had to get our own.

Time was running out. The academic year only had four months left to run. Then the industry would be flooded with desperate graduates.

We knew we’d need to do more than just call the Creative directors’ assistants to get in front of the people with the jobs.

So at 5.30 one snowy Sunday morning we drove round London in my old VW Beetle. We erected a tent outside the reception of each of the agencies we wanted to work at, Mary stood inside the tent and stuck our portfolio through the flaps and I took a photo of the whole scene.

We mounted black and white prints (made sneakily in the college’s darkroom) on polyboard, along with the line: ‘We’re waiting to show you our book’.

(Apologies to those who'd heard that we'd actually camped outside an agency until we'd been offered a job! Rest assured if it had come to that we'd would have done so.)

We cycled round to each agency, hand delivering the prints to the creative directors on our list.

Then we waited.

And waited.

Eventually the phone started to ring.

One call was from Barry Smith at Foote, Cone and Belding.

We went in and showed him our book.

He told us he liked our work but couldn’t hire us as they’d just made a load of people redundant.

As he led us to the lift we passed an empty office.

Without thinking we asked if we could sit in it for a while.

He looked at us suspiciously as if trying to work out why not to let us. But clearly couldn’t think of a reason.

So he said "OK". Then: “I’m not going to pay you or anything.”

“That’s fine,” we said. “We’d just be happy to have somewhere to work on our book and a phone to help us find a job elsewhere.”

“Right... Ok then... Well... Fine...” He said. Then “I’ll see if I can get you a brief to work on, but I’m not promising anything.”

We were left in, to this day, the largest office I have ever worked in. It was something you’d find in Mad Men. (We later found out that it was until recently inhabited by a victim of the recent redundancies.)

Within minutes an account man rushed in asking if we could work on a brief that was needed that day. It had been given to another team who had forgotten to work on it. “Absolutely!” we replied.

We did a load of ads and the guy came back at the end of the day, grabbed a sheaf of layouts and was off.

He came back the next morning and told us the ad was sold and we had to make it.

Later that day another account man ran in with a radio brief. We spent a couple of days writing a load of scripts then showed them to the account team.

They said “Great. Now come with us will you?”

We went downstairs to an oak panelled room in which were sitting the whole client team.

“This is Damon and Mary.” The account man said. “They’re going to present their scripts.”

That was our introduction to client presentation.

And the next day we found ourselves at the sound studio making three ads.

We worked seven days a week, even having to ‘borrow’ one of the board directors’ keys to the agency as the place used to be locked up at nine o’clock at night.

The account teams were clamouring for us to work on their projects. Because unlike many other teams we were actually in the building to brief. And sober.

True to his word Barry didn’t pay us.

But three weeks later he did offer us a job.

So we done it. We were in. We’d got our first job.

But what next?

We couldn’t bare the thought of going back to college a few months later to finish the course, tail between our legs, having failed.

There was only one thing we could think of.

Carry on working the way we had been.

And I'm afraid that in the years since then experience has shown that if the end really is worthwhile the means is inevitably going to be bloody hard work!

What do you need for a Happy Birthday?

The other day I celebrated my first ever birthday without my father being around.

Without his inevitable phone call: an hour long ramble covering all manner of issues, from popular TV shows to world politics, usually ending with a dissection of the current state of advertising.

My birthday was always a good excuse for he and I to catch up.

This year, the lack of that important element hit home.

Especially when people asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Plants? Books? An iPad2??

It made me stop and think.

And realise what I'll be asking for each year from now.

(Warning: this gets a bit soppy...)

- To see and hold the people I love.

- To experience the warmth of friendship. (Facebook’s birthday reminders do a great job of helping people feel great.)

- To be pain free. (I know. This seems random. But how many of us ever really appreciate the feeling of feeling 'nothing' I wonder? The definition of bliss.)

That’s it.

It’s the small stuff that’s important.

Only, the small stuff isn’t small at all.

It’s all that really matters.



So. What's your small stuff?

Just what have I been doing for the past 25 years?

Hard to believe it’s 25 years to the day since I got my first job.

25!

Years!!

It’s a long time.

And, as always when one reflects on time passing, it went in the blink of an eye.

But it’s not until I started contemplating the places I’ve worked, the people I’ve worked with and the projects I’ve worked on that I realised just what those 25 years actually meant.

Different challenges

Different brands.

Different people.

Different disciplines.

Different pressures.

Different environments.

Different influences.

This job is a great one if you’re in love with curiosity.

If you get excited by learning new stuff.

By experiencing new things.

And boy are there a few of those on offer at the moment.

Steve jobs said creativity is the ability to connect experiences we’ve had and synthesise new things. And that the best creative people have had more experiences or have thought about their experiences more than other people.

But hey, what does he know?



Out of curiosity I made a few ‘25 Years’ lists.

This first one is rather scary.



Things I’ve worked on

London buses
London Underground
The Daily Mail
Kahlua
Heinz
Mandate
Insignia
Rimmel
ITV
Zamoyski Vodka
Mazda
Honeywell Bull
Department of Employment
COI
The Daily Mirror
The Sunday People
Cadbury’s Wispa
Cadbury's Creme Eggs
Post Office Counters
Holsten Pils
Toshiba
Hosten Export
Children’s World
Alex Lawrie
Pearson
Lurpak
Robinson’s
Complan
Cancel the Third World Debt
Farleys
Britains toys
Ariston
Babyfresh wipes
The Sunday Express
Hi Tec Shoes
Flymo
British Airways
P&G
Club 18-30 Holidays
Visa International
Visa Delta
Burger King
Castlemaine XXXX
The Economist
RSPCA
Capital Radio
Halfords
Tampax
Prudential
Famous Grouse
Carrera Bicycles
Ikea
BT
McDougal’s
Volvo
Iams
Health Education Authority - Anti Smoking
Cow and Gate
Solar Century
Pizza Hut
Scene Magazine
Bisto
Orange
Nestle Double cream
Rowntree’s Fruit pastilles
Quality Street
Stella Artois
Heineken
Tesco
Playjam
Sure
Flora
Hellmans
Vauxhall
HSBC
Nestle Bacci
Pepperami
Surf
Electrolux
Reebok
Weetabix
Diet Coke
Sprite
Domestos
Merrill Lynch HSBC
Amnesty international
Boots
The Observer
Coca Cola
Fanta
Home Office Frank anti-drugs
Boots No7
Boots 17
Lloyds TSB
Bacardi
Bombay Sapphire
LG
Ovarian Cancer Action
Visit London
BBC
Ghd
Honey Waffles
Home Office Anti Knife Crime
Home Office Anti Teen violence
Foods Standards agency
Bank Of Scotland
Innocent
Tic Tac
Innocent drinks
COI Fire Safety
Ferrero Rocher
Land Rover
Prime Location
Oxfam


This one's a bit shorter.

Creative partners I've worked with.

Mary Wear
Tony Barry


Agencies I've work at

FCB
Gold Greenless Trott
Leagas Shafron Davis Chick
Saatchi and Saatchi
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Lowe
Mother
Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R


Creative Directors I've worked for

Barry Smith
Dave Trott
Tim Mellors
Mike Shafron
Paul Arden
Simon Dicketts
Jeremy Sinclair
James Lowther
David Abbott
Peter Souter
Charles Inge
Paul Weinberger


And finally, and most importantly...

Locations I've shot in

Barcelona
Buenos aires
Bariloche
Sao Paolo
Prague
London
Blackpool
Scottish highlands
New York
Florida
Iceland
Los Angeles
Anguilla
Christchurch
Auckland
Brisbane
Malta
Vancouver
Paris
Kuala Lumpur



So, a few experiences I guess.

Whether I've thought about them more, or can connect them better than anyone else is another matter.

Right. Now onto the next 25.

Does your business know who it is?

There are two kinds of businesses.

The ones who know who they are.

Who know who their consumers are.

What it is about their offering those consumers like.

Why they like those things.

Where they need to go in the future to succeed.

And how to get there.

They know these things intrinsically. Deeply. Inately.

These are businesses with a clear mission, purpose and values.

Being lead from the top.

By people with a singular vision.

Who are able to communicate in a compelling way, to those who work for them, why they should bother to turn up every day.

Then there’re the other kind of businesses.

The ones who aren’t so sure who they are.

Where different members of the organisation, when asked, offer up different versions of its mission.

Where people aren’t quite sure why they’re all working there, over and above the cash.

And where codes of conduct are murky enough to allow politics to seep into the fabric of the place.

Their lack of a clear, shared vision leads them to look outside their own walls for answers to profound questions.

Like what people think is good about them.

How people think they should behave.

What people think they should believe in.

Why people like their product.

These are the ones who keep the research companies going.

The businesses who don’t know who they are spend time, money and energy searching for solutions to their own problems.

Whilst the ones who do know who they are can focus on searching for problems their customers would love solutions for.

They’re the ones who innovate.

And they’re the ones people love.

Consumers and employees alike.