Collaboration? That's How NOT To Succeed As A Creative (free article).
Are you now merely a part of an ad agency "Content Engine"? I pity you.
Reportedly, Tom McElligott was a nice CW/Creative Director. You know what else he was? An absolute hard-ass when it came to approving creative. The result being: one of the best and most successful ad agencies in history.
I haven’t bookmarked any of these “new-age” takes on why being an “empathetic”, “collaborative” creative is now the path to success. I assume they mean “financial” success because that sure as shit ain’t the path to good ads.
(Above, from yesterday on Campaign [$]. Ma’am, you could NOT be MORE wrong.)
You know what creative collaboration has gotten us? Content engines. Now, human content engines, and more and more as we move into this awful future, AI content engines (below).
Mid-article break: If you care about the survival of Ad Creativity, please click here to buy a subscription. It’s $50 a year, less than $1 a week. I promise you, I will (continue to) make it worth it.
“Content” engines don’t create ideas. They create churn, smoky messes. They breakdown, parts go flying everywhere. Below, is the first Google Image result for “Content Engine”.
COPY: “Content is bigger than any one department” (unwritten: Creative Department). LOTS of different people listed. Lots of unnamed wheels and cogs in there, too. That’s because they didn’t want to leave anybody out of the “process”. Yes, you too, human marketing drone, who doesn’t even have a right hemisphere in their brain: You are an important engine part.
Again, I quote John Steinbeck from in East Of Eden:
“Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.”
Or, maybe, you’re a Sleater-Kinney fan. Carrie Brownstein said this in a Guardian interview in 2019:
“Making work by consensus…is the worst way to make art. It lacks a point of view.”
And yes, advertising is art. As the great creative silo Bill Bernbach said:
“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”
Content Engines were of course created by marketing fuckfaces. The above headline is from a 2018 Adge article. The article writer left off a word: “JOBS”.
Of course they want to break down something they can’t wrap their MBA heads around, something they simply can’t do: create creative ads.
And non-creatives don’t just want to get inside silos, they want the launch codes. That’s why so many of them are adding “content creator” or “storyteller” to their titles and bios. Go ahead, use the meaningless first one. But you are definitely not the second one.
So protect your silos, creatives! If marketing/tech/account types try to hover while you ideate, stop ideation immediately. If they want you to “share” your concepts before internal presentations, tell them “we ain’t got nothin’ yet” or “the stuff’s too rough to share right now”. Or, just directly tell them to fuck off.
Shout it out loud with me, creatives: COLLABORATION = DEFECATION! Go ahead, put it on t-shirts, sell it. Please send me my cut (50%).
POST-NOTE: The last bit of this article (including my brilliant t-shirt design) was re-edited from a post a year ago.