Ben Forrest wades through the murkiness of agency communications in this latest instalment of Starting at the Bottom, from our adland newbies.
Did your parents ever tell you that Santa Claus was real? Well for as long as I remember, I knew that this was a massive fib.
Whether it was because of the books I read, the TV I watched, or simple common sense; I was very aware, from a young age, the difference between facts and complete Christmas balls.
My parents continued this pretence until I was in high school; every Christmas Eve they would make me lay down milk and cookies for Santa while telling stories of flying reindeer. As my face lit up, they knew the truth could never be revealed or my little heart would be broken and the magic of Christmas would be lost forever.
Now here's the crazy thing; I genuinely thought that my parents were the ones that didn't know Santa was a fake, they seemed so excited to tell the stories, I was under the impression that it was them who could never be told the truth or their hearts will be crushed. So I played along.
We spent nearly 10 years wildly pretending to believe in something that was quite clearly a load of rubbish, purely because each party was afraid to hurt the others feelings.
On my travels, I've noticed that in most agencies, this is the exact same mistake planners, account guys and creative's are making. For example:
The planners will write a brief that goes something like this: "Eskimos use ice for everything, currently there is no company that capitalizes on this brand lag. Sell Freezy Joe's ice to Eskimos."
The creatives, after a few days of throwing ideas around, suddenly realize why none of their ads are working. You won't be able to sell ice to Eskimos because the North Pole is full of the stuff. Now, instead of going to the planner and collaborating over what needs to change, the creatives will usually just bite their bottom lip and write an ad. The strapline will go something like this; Freezy Joe's, the "coolest" ice around!
The account person will spend some time working out how to sell this fantastic idea to Freezy Joe's and after a while he will realize that it is going to be a very hard sell due to this massive hole in the idea. However, instead of telling the creative or planner, he just bites his lip and goes for it.
Finally the ad gets rejected and everyone is pissed off at the planner for writing the wrong brief. What everyone fails to realise however, is that everyone is at fault. Part of an accounts person/planner/creative's job is to notice flaws in each others work and to say something (after all, what other benefits are there to being in a team?)
This is something that has impressed us at our current placement in Grey. Their structure consists of individual units that will work on a brief together - each unit including a member of each process stage. This way, all share responsibility, accountability and the reward for good or bad work. Nice.
So, in summing up our life right now, we have both moved to London, and are thoroughly enjoying the new placement, next we have Wieden's and after that Lean Mean. We hope this episode finds everyone well, and we'll be back in two weeks week with another SATB article.
P.S. I don't watch X factor but I think John and Edward should win, you should either vote for them or don't vote for someone else, both is good.
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