Dear Baby Creatives,
I mean, of course advertising movies aren’t real life. They’re movies. (If you haven’t grasped that fictional movies are fiction, you’ve got bigger issues than ad industry misconceptions.) What Women Want is a rom-com, not a documentary. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days isn’t an educational filmstrip. They’re movies, made by movie people who write scripts and are, like, “Hey, ‘Frost yourself’ sounds like a good ad campaign for a luxury good,’” and then someone else is, like, “Hell yeah, it is,” and then they high-five, and at no point through the pre-production and production and post-production process does anyone say, “That’s actually pretty stupid, y’all.”
So no, advertising movies aren’t accurate representations of the advertising industry, and they’re not supposed to be. They’re not made for the pedant sitting in the audience hissing, “But no, seriously, what the hell is Mel Gibson’s job supposed to be?” (It’s genetic — my dad is a [quasi-]retired doctor, and watching ER in the same room with him was an exercise in patience as we were given a recitation of everything George Clooney just did wrong.)
(I love you, Daddy.)
Maybe you, like I once was, are on the cusp of graduating from an advertising program and have no illusions about the size of Ben Berry’s office or the viability of “Frost yourself” as a tagline. Or maybe you’re about to graduate from a school without an ad industry-focused program, or maybe you’re breaking into advertising from a different industry, and you don’t know what to expect, but damned if What Women Want didn’t imply that a position as senior copywriter comes with a corner office and two assistants. (Officially: It does not.)
But there’s knowing a movie is going to be inaccurate, and then there’s knowing how it’s inaccurate. So if you’re curious about the how (and really, we should all be curious about the how), I’ve got your back. To wit:
A tagline is not a concept.
“No games. Just sports.” “Frost yourself.” (“Frost yourself.”) These are taglines. One of them is even a good tagline. A tagline is not a concept. Being the first to yell out a tagline like you just buzzed in on Jeopardy! doesn’t mean it’s “your campaign” — it means you came up with a tagline. And when you’ve worked it through with your creative team, developed a tone and a visual theme and a message, drawn it all out into a cohesive idea, then you have a concept. And once you’ve executed it in every medium you need to, then you have a campaign.
This is what concepting sounds like:
“But why is he a worm?” “He’s not a worm. He’s a fanciful creature that looks like a worm.”
“Can we use cuss words?” “I don’t think that’s on — Well… Maybe, I guess. We can check.”
“They’re all cats. Everyone in the agency is a cat.” “Like, animated cats?” “Nope, actual, live cats.” “I love it. …Do we have the budget for live cats?” “I don’t care.”
Ultimately, the client shot down the fanciful worm concept, we didn’t use cuss words, and we had to go with people instead of cats, although the people did have a cat, because as you might have guessed, those are all actual quotes from actual concepting sessions. Glamorous, right?
Advertising people have jobs.
You’ve almost certainly figured it out already, and have almost certainly already chosen a path as a baby copywriter or baby art director or similar, but just in case: Advertising people have specific jobs that they do. Copywriters do copy, for instance, and art directors do art. The person who did the Johnny Walker mockup is not going to be the person who wrote the Nike copy and then made storyboards. The person who manages the account is not going to be the mockup-making copywriter. And the person in charge of them both will have a job title other than “boss.”
This is actually rather pertinent, though, to job-hunting baby creatives: Advertising people have jobs, and that’s what you’re going to be hired for. If you’re proud of your skills at both copywriting and art direction, that’s great. But from an agency perspective, you being kind of good at both isn’t nearly as valuable as you being really good at one of them. Rather than trying to become… whatever Mel Gibson’s job title was, concentrating on becoming a valuable part of a creative team of people with a wide range of skills. (More on that below.)
The campaign-making process is a process.
This is something you might not be completely clear about if you’re coming into advertising from another field or a non-advertising program: Campaigns take time. (Generally, less time than you’d like.) And there’s a process. And that process doesn’t go challenge-concepting-eureka!-pitch-champagne. There will be a brief with all kinds of requirements — your CD doesn’t just say, “There’s a diamond campaign,” and you say, “On it, boss!” You’ll be working with a partner (or, potentially, several), and there will be concepting, and you’ll be asked to come up with multiple concepts, and the CD will probably kill your favorite. There will be revisions, and likely more revisions. A deck will be assembled, and it will include concept boards, and it will not include a TV spot produced in full as part of a concept that hasn’t even been approved yet. There will be a client presentation, without the full C-suite in attendance, and your creative director will probably be doing the presenting and you might not even be there. (Such is the life of a baby creative.)
Then, depending on the client’s opinion of your concept, there might be more of all of those things, or you might be ready to actually start developing the concept into a cohesive campaign. Finally.
(There is, of course, the all-important step in the RFP process where you order your creative director to get a meeting with a rockstar client in two weeks to present their executives with a campaign they didn’t ask for, and she does, and you poach them from their AOR, except that is very much not a thing at all.)
It’s not “your campaign.”
If you take one thing home from this post… you’ve wasted a lot of time reading. But if there’s only going to be the one thing, let it be this: There is no I in “team,” and while there is one in “creative team,” you should pretend there isn’t one. (“Creatve,” basically.) A concept, as noted above, comprises a million elements that come together to make it perfect, and no one person is responsible for all those elements. Merely the process of bouncing ideas off each other during a concepting session makes it a collaborative effort. If a junior account person sticks their head in and says, “Hey, had you considered blue?” they’ve made a contribution.
Whether you’ve got the entire team involved or it’s just you and a partner, you’re a we. If your concept bombs, “We fucked up.” If it did great, “Thanks! We worked really hard on it.” Sure, the two of you might end up back in one or the other’s office (realistically: cubicle) hissing, “The hedgehog was your idea!” But when you’re standing in front of anyone else, the hedgehog was our idea. And honestly, you’ll find that taking flak is easier and taking praise is more satisfying when you’ve got someone to share it with.
At my old agency, I had a card on my bulletin board that read, “My ego is not my amigo.” Guess why.
For real, though.
To be fair, I’ve never seen an advertising movie that’s completely off. They almost always have people speaking words, for instance, gathering in buildings to create work for clients, all of it taking place on planet Earth. But there are a few worthwhile messages, too.
1. You have to understand your audience in order to reach them. And you have to really, sincerely want to understand your audience in order to understand it.
2. An office assistant who’s willing to put in the work really can get called up to the big leagues and become a creative. Probably not by a misogynistic, mockup-making copywriter(?) with a nebulous job title, but get called up nonetheless. So if that’s the path you’re hoping to take as a baby creative, go for it. I believe in you.
And again, don’t forget the importance of teamwork. As Helen Hunt’s Darcy McGuire said in What Women Want, “What I learned [at BBD&O] was that any success I had was a direct result of the team of people that I work with. I know that two heads are better than one. I know that five heads are better than two.” And then a bitter dude used his head to steal an idea word-for-word from her head, and then she got fired, and that, my friends, is why we don’t take career advice from advertising movies.
XOXO,
Caperton
Former baby copywriter, now wildly successful in the industry