Remember creative directors?
I recently read an article in one of the trade mags.
A planner was congratulating advertising on the way things are, but saying there was room for improvement.
He said it was progress that the entire team was now involved at all creative reviews.
(By ‘the entire team’ he meant the account executives, the planners, the media dept, everyone.
By ‘creative reviews’ he meant seeing all the work: every single rough, every scrap of paper.)
He was cautioning, however, that ‘the entire team’ should wait until the creative director had spoken before voicing their own opinions.
That’s very nice of him.
To allow the creative director to have an opinion, and to allow them to speak first.
But to me it represents a change in the role of creative director.
It sounds to me as if this person sees the role of creative director as little more than the head of traffic.
The job being to round up all the work and present it to every other department for them all to make a joint decision.
I don’t remember David Abbott running his agency like that.
Or John Hegarty.
Or Jeremy Sinclair.
Or Paul Arden.
Or Tim Delaney.
Or Frank Lowe.
And I can’t remember John Webster collecting up everyone’s roughs and presenting them to a committee from every department for everyone to take the decision on what should run.
I doubt that Dave Droga runs his agency that way.
The argument is probably that it’s the way a government runs.
With the whole cabinet having an input.
But is that true?
Are all the various possibilities of the brief looked at and discussed with all departments, before the final one is written?
Does the head of planning ask ‘the entire team’ if it should be a market growth brief or brand share?
Should it be current consumers or triallists?
Should it be a brand campaign or product based?
Does everyone get a say on which brief is written?
How about media?
Does the head of media submit a variety of plans for everyone in ‘the entire team’ to comment on.
Should we be doing pre-rolls on YouTube?
Or going for likes on Facebook?
Or maybe digital OOH in major conurbations?
Or small space ads in the free-sheets on the tube?
Strangely they don’t.
Why is that?
If ‘the entire team’ is capable of judging everyone’s creative work, why aren’t they capable of judging everyone’s strategic briefs and media plans?
And what about the quality of work?
Has this cabinet approach (“gang bang advertising” as David Abbott called it) resulted in more exciting work?
Or has it resulted in mass blandness and media pollution?
I think the rise of ad-blocking is your answer.
The job of this committee approach isn’t to produce better work.
It’s to make everyone feel involved.
Which is why it’s been very successful at the latter and a massive failure at the former.
Dave Trott is a consultant, author and former ad agency creative director. This article was first published on his blog
More often than not, I would concur with Trott.
ReplyUnfortunately, the creative leaders of today are not in the league of any of the luminaries he named.
These days, the title (and responsibility) of a creative director is given prematurely to inexperienced scammers whose name is among many on a shared award.
Someone has to be the adult in these meetings.
Comments like “That’s cool!”, “You gotta push it”, “Make it awesome” etc cannot be passed off as useful creative direction.
Letting the current crop of creative directors speak first is an unmerited courtesy.
And having them have the last word is definitely business suicide.
Trott is referring to a time of giants.
Has anyone spotted any resembling an Arden,Lowe,Delany, Hegarty in their workplace?
Guess not.
Could not agree more. We have people who didn’t even work as creatives, but attached their name to projects now being hailed as great creative leaders. Creatively speaking, there is nothing to learn from the current crop of agency leaders. They’re merely great at PRing themselves and supporting each other’s mediocrity at awards. Old days it was more competitive.
ReplyThis entire mess started when some of the so-called visionaries started reading in management books that everyone in a company is and should be creative.
I interpreted that as everyone should be creative within their own discipline and job role…..a suit should be creative at putting a brief together, a planner at hammering out a sharp strategy, a media buyer at uhhh, buying media.
But sadly the morons among us (who greatly outnumber the sane) took the statement literally…..which is to say that everyone should have a hand in the creative product.
Then again, looking at the dismal state of CCOs who have been appointed solely due their scam awards, who can blame management for roping in everyone to do their job?
ReplyHegarty, Delaney, Lowe, Shabaz
The ad agency equivalent of Milligan, Cleese, Everett, Sessions
ReplyScary thought for creative directors when ‘the entire team’ inputs into crafting the strategy/ or CB. In the current era of ‘so called specialists’, we do a damn fine job contradicting ourselves with committee led decisions
ReplyAbbott, Lowe, Delaney etc owned the agencies they worked in.
The new age creative directors are a bunch of scared salary men and women.
By all accounts, they are extremely relieved that the whole agency gets together to review their staff’s ideas. That way they take no responsibility for what gets pushed forward to the client….plus they’re secretly happy they don’t have to do their job.
Their only real responsibility seems to be to host the ‘creative councils’ where pro-active and scam projects are discussed and reviewed. And to keep schtum when they get caught scamming.
ReplyDave Trott is a badass. Totally worthy of an opinion piece. Nice read too.
ReplyThanks Dave for telling it like it is. Their are too few creative leaders today and that may be due to in one part to the Giants not wanting to work for the big 4 agency Holding companies.
ReplyIt’s well known MD’s appoint CD’s and fire them too. And there are very few good ones out there, but they are so hard and expensive, to get rid of. Plus it sends out bad vibes to clients.
So this is the cycle of Networks instead: an MD hires a new CD that sticks to his guns and grows business by presenting good work, and gains the ear of everyone in the office. The MD who is useless gets jealous and loses face, as its now pointed out that no one in his department really does anything apart from cover his ass.
The MD, who is no better than a head of new business or second hand car salesman puts word into Regional HR that CD is difficult. CD gets removed, and new one put in, now the MD discovers a new breed of puppet CD’s that do as they are told and can be fired every 18 months to keep costs down and never put the MD in a bad light.
Creating good work and selling it to clients is difficult, not many people know how to do this anymore, so everyone sits around a table and points out whats wrong with the work, instead of putting objectives on the wall and working out whats good about it first.
That slight change in your process, will change your agency. Figure out what client objectives the work achieves first, before pointing out those it doesn’t. Anyone can do that.
Reply“…an MD hires a new CD that sticks to his guns and grows business by presenting good work, and gains the ear of everyone in the office.”
Is this the plot of your next fiction novella?
ReplyI do see DT’s point but sometimes you also have to see things from the POV of the other side.
Over the last 10-15 years, what have ECDs/CCOs done to earn the confidence of their CEO/MD? They have done nothing but devalue the business with their focus on scams to win awards.
While this has inflated their salaries and titles, it has also resulted in a bunch of agencies that have been decimated due to this misdirected energy.
This is what gives the management the grounds to interfere as much as they want to in the ECDs business. And one way of doing it is this mantra of letting everyone dictate the creative output.
I attended a digital workshop some time back where they made a stunning announcement:
THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM IS THE ROOM, they said.
I think the smartest person in the room is the person who comes up with great ideas, but few people agree with that.
Anyway, most of the participants in my group had different roles and varying degrees of experience….and since the room was the smartest one, we came up with a solution that was unbelievably bland and stupid. Yay.
ReplyI think Dave is right, the creative directors need to be allowed to do their job.
Developing work takes time and so the team need to give the guys the time and space to develop and explore.
That said, nothing is in a vacuum and it needs people who listen and trust those around them so that when you do all come together, it’s about making it better rather than dragging it down.
I love sharing my thoughts with my creative colleagues before anything is written down so we can all get to a place we’re genuinely excited about. By the same token, I appreciate it when they ask for my opinion on stuff. It doesn’t matter if they end up going a different direction because I know they’ve heard it and will have a reason for not doing it … I trust them and they trust me.
The gang bang is exhausting and ego filled. Letting the creative director do their job makes the whole adventure far more enjoyable both in the development and in the execution. The bigger issue – as someone raised earlier – is what is the quality of creative director out there these days, but that’s something I can ask about certain individuals in every department within the marketing profession.
Reply“None of us is as good as all of us”
ReplyHave your say