A Copywriter Writes

Getting Life Experience or, Watching TV Is Part Of The Job

My first (creative) partner was a girl in my ad school during my third year doing a Bachelor of Communications at AUT.

She was great, we did a lot of interesting work together.

There was one thing about her that I found odd.

She didn’t watch television.

Her family didn’t have one. She was raised like this. Instead of watching TV, she’d pursue hobbies like dancing, which is all well and good because she was an excellent dancer.

And her parents took her to different countries when she was little, so she was well travelled. Phenomenally so.

But she didn’t watch television.

And to me, this left a gap in her thinking.

Sometimes, I would suggest an angle we could explore or lines we could use based on popular culture originating from a TV show, and she would come back to me; expressionless.

I think there was one time I mentioned a TV character like Captain Planet.

“Who?”

“Captain Planet. You know, the Planeteers? Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart? Go, Planet?”

“Nope. Are you sure people know who that is?”

“Are you serious?!” 

Good advertising messages stem from insights. Insights about the product, where it’s made, how to use it, the people that use it, an so on.

The best advertising messages stem from life insights. Aspects of daily living that transcend language, age and gender boundaries.

And the best way to come up with these life insights is to experience life.

If you’re disconnected somehow, you’re not going to reach those crucial truths you need.

In a way, this means to travel; see different people and cultures and view life from a unique perspective.

In a more realistic way, this means to branch out from what you already do.

Just because Ted, Marshall, Lily, Robin and Barney hang out at MacLaren’s Pub all the time, doesn’t mean it’s cool for you to do as well.

Read a book you by an author you don’t normally read; see a movie you wouldn’t see; watch TV, a lot; go to a restaurant you haven’t been to and order something you don’t normally eat.

Every new thing you do gives you a new perspective and broadens your thinking.

You could notice how people who can’t handle spicy food look like they’re taking a Lamaze class when they eat, or how the majority of commuters read books on the train, or all the weird tips and tricks for picking out perfect produce you learn from farmer’s market patrons.

They can all birth interesting ideas that come from simple life insights.

Another thing I would recommend is to watch a lot of stand up comedians. All and any you can. Local ones, international ones, male ones, female ones, transgender ones, old ones, young ones, Irish ones, American ones, Spanish ones, Chinese ones, Nigerian ones, bad ones, really bad ones, all of them.

Especially those who specialise in observational humor.

What these people do for a living is take even the tiniest life insight, like the faces men make when we shave, and turn it into something relatable, funny and entertaining.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

And you can tell they’ve hit the nail on the head with these details of daily life because of the immediate laughter from the audience.

Young creatives could learn a lot from these people. The more you watch, the more perspective you benefit from - it’s simple.

As a creative (especially one working in advertising), you’re not just living life, you’re exploring it. And the best way to do that is just do something different from time to time.

A friend of mine, Iain Nealie, a creative at TBWA\Tequila in Auckland, once did something as simple as using a different mode of transport to go to work each day for a week.

He managed it (walk, run, car, skateboard, bus).

Simple as that.

Or just at least make sure you’re getting enough TV each day.

Budget or, Sometimes, We Kill It For Ourselves

Recently, as is my usual experience since entering the ad industry, I learned something new.

I learned about the way clients tend to work which, in a lot of cases, could prevent a lot of problems agencies tend to have with idea approval.

It’s probably one of the most annoying aspects of dealing with clients; you’ve presented to the Marketing Managers, they’ve given their approval and you’re in a great mood because your work is going to get run. When all of a sudden, you get that email that says the idea has been canned because some random manager from higher up was on a different page.

What I didn’t realise is that in many cases, the indirect cause of this is the agency themselves.

It’s to do with the budget.

Simply put, when the client sets their budget and the agency sticks to it, sometimes approving the idea generally lies with the client’s marketing team.

However, when an idea requires more funding in order to execute, the budget increase has to be approved by a manager higher up.

And any decent manager (no matter how much you’d love them to) doesn’t just sign things willy nilly. Especially when money is involved.

So just like that, you have another pair of narrowed eyes, fine-tooth combing through the idea. And should that manager find something they don’t quite agree with, another change is proposed.

The further up the chain you go, the more sensible-minded and less risky the bosses tend to become and you may find that it gets harder and harder to relate the creative concept to them.

So your ideal plan would be to avoid getting these dudes involved if you can help it, for the sake of not dragging a project out for months on end.

This scenario played out with a client of ours. In late 2010, a ballsy idea was pitched to them and approved. However, the idea exceeded the original budget.

The concept was then presented to a Managing Director for approval of the budget increase, but, being a cautious businessman, he had some issues with the idea, so it came back to us with revisions.

We then requested another budget increase and so more bosses got involved with more watchful eyes on the project and more opinions to consider. Too many people were getting involved at this point and too many concerns were arising.

This difficulty continued until August and as misfortune would have it, a certain international political incident killed our idea completely as it may have suggested an association with the event, which was unideal.

Had we stuck to the budget in the first place and kept the involvement from the higher-ups to a manageable minimum, we could have run the campaign swiftly and long before the political incident took place.

The funny thing is, from where I sit, these changes look like they come out of the blue and it’s just the clients being clients needing the opinions of the entire staff before the go-ahead can be issued.

It wasn’t until I had a chat with our Strategy Head about the matter that I learned that if we were as creative with our resources as we were with the idea, then things may have been different.

It makes you think twice about whether asking to up the budget for your brilliant idea is the easier road to take.

That Damned Client or, Stepping Up Your Game

It seems that there is a new reason to quit the advertising industry each week.

It could be you’re fed up that at the end of the week, there were more days than hours sleep you got.

It might be that nagging Account Executive has brought the deadline forward for the last time.

Maybe it’s the fact that if you’re not talking about advertising when with your friends, you’re not talking.

A lot of the time, as far as I’ve noticed, it’s the clients.

They can be real bastards sometimes.

Between demanding the work be done yesterday, cutting the budget and wanting the logo to be large enough so that the magazine ad will be noticed by the guy walking his dog 500 meters down the street, dealing with clients can be taxing.

A lot of the time, these people don’t seem to be in tune with what people like and respond to, or what will make their brand stand out from the thousands of others they battle for attention each day.

They cower at any idea that is remotely controversial, or unique and insist we tailor their communications they way everyone else is doing it or how they’ve always done it since the business started in 1946.

They are the reason we don’t get to do cool work.

If you agree, you just activated my trap card.*

“Cool work gets done because of cool clients.”

This is a common mistake that most junior creatives tend to make. I shake my head in disappointment to think I strongly believed this once.

Yes, I suppose there are exceptions where there is a friendly and trusting relationship, like Leo Burnett Malaysia shared with Petronas.

But I have a theory.

Every single client in the whole world is shit to deal with.

Yes, even the one you just thought about with really cool advertising; yes, the Skittles, the Old Spices and the Coca Colas of this world are all crap and wouldn’t know an really creative and awesome idea if it crawled in their ears and introduced themselves.

There’s no getting away from it. Those marketing people were simply not taught to think like those at an advertising agency does. They think about making money and selling product. That’s why ideas get whittled down.

However,

The agencies they work with bust themselves to give them work that is so phenomenal, that even when it’s whittled down to something a little less that the client can deal with, it’s still diamond-studded gold.

I like to think that Wieden+Kennedy pitched something far more fantastically creative to Old Spice than ‘Old Spice Guy: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’, but when the client had a go at it, rejected some of the more outrageous ideas and changed a few things, they were still left with a piece of creative treasure.

That’s what happens when the only thing the client has to choose from, is quality or more quality.

My theory may not be right, and Old Spice might be on the same page as W+K and a dream to work with, but that’s the picture I prefer to paint.

I’ve been in numerous presentation situations where the strategy was to present a really good idea and a safe idea to under sell and make the good idea look better. Then everyone gets pissed off when the client chooses the safe idea.

That’s easy to solve. Don’t give them a choice between a good idea and a bad idea.

Clients don’t think like you. More times that not, they’ll choose the idea you think is bad.

To further illustrate:

Last year my art director, Kishan and I were working at JWT Auckland. We were doing a small job for Nestle as part of a campaign for Milky Bar to search for the next Milky Bar Kid.

Our task was simple: do up some concepts for an internet banner ad to inform people that the top 10 kids who auditioned were chosen and it was time to vote for the winner.

We did a whole bunch, naturally, and two were put forward. One was a bland concept with straight copy using the stock campaign imagery. The other was a neat little animation about a classic western ‘baddie’ dressed in black coming out of the saloon, looking around and then jumping into a nearby barrel and the line comes up:

The Milky Bar Kid is gonna be back in town.

and then,

Choose who it’s going to be here.

Or something to that effect. 

Also, there was little budget for this so, the illustrations I did would have to be used. The concept was funny, it was likable, and it meant that something I drew could get on the internet.

I was excited. The Account Director happily took it to sell.

She came back and said the client bought the safe, bland one.

A good client can recognise a cool idea.

A better suit can sell a cool idea to a hesitant client.

The best creative can work around a client that still says no.

*Yu-Gi-Oh reference. Anyone? No? Ok…

Passionate People or, Temporarily Living The Dream

The DDB Group in New Zealand was always an agency I wanted to work for. It was one of the top in the country. 

How could you not want a piece of that?

It wasn’t until I was about a month out of leaving for Malaysia that my little dream was answered. I received a text message asking me to come into the Interbrand office to work on a couple of projects.

This was off the back of a very good recommendation from my past tutor. So I was elated. You couldn’t get much closer to a professional orgasm than that, short of a promotion to your dream job.

I went in there for the meeting on the Monday, and started work on the Wednesday.

I was nervous as hell, as you can imagine. Walking into the same building as some of New Zealand’s most awarded creatives.

But I cautiously wandered into the office, sat down and proceeded to work like I’ve never worked before. I wasn’t there long, as I had a flight to catch in early March, but it was the most productive few weeks I had experienced.

I have a couple of answers to why that may have been:

It might have been the fact that I was sitting at a desk in the big, tall building at 80 Grey St in the heart of Auckland’s CBD, or it could have been I was working for a Creative Director (Lorenz Perry) that I had heard so many good things about in the past.

However I’m more inclined toward the fact that the Managing Director, James Bickford had an amazing way of igniting the the wick of the team’s passion and shooting it up into the sky to explode in an array of colours and sparkles.

He was a great guy to work with, to say the least.

He was one of those people who was very involved with all the work the agency was doing and really liked to push ideas.

He was someone you really wanted to impress, too.

One meeting, we were discussing a look and feel and name for a particular band of lamb.

“Yes, I love that. Now, this is interesting. Yes, I was thinking the exact same thing! I’m not sure this works. What do you think? Yes, I agree, I was wondering if it would be better like this? For me that works best. Ah, yes, I see what you’re saying. What was that you said? Yes, that one, I like that one.”

Trying not to sound like a blubbering ad fanboy, but it was magic to watch.

I was asked to come up with names and tag lines and other little copy based bits for the projects I worked on. I was surprised at how I was churning out the words.

They wanted names for a drink brand, I gave them over 100 suggestions by lunchtime. They wanted me to push a few. I came back with about 50 in half an hour. I was feeling good.

This is exactly how you want to be in your working life; surrounded by people who awaken your love for your work and have you performing like you’re up for an award.*

Surround yourself with passionate people and naturally, your work begins to improve as your attitude does.

Obvious. You see it in the opposite scenarios too. There have been many times when we’ve had a client reject an idea or propose a really silly change and team is on its last legs and collectively goes,

“Fine. It’s no use fighting anymore. Just do whatever.”

How deflating is that?

Someone who is trying to keep fighting and try to get something at least a little cool out is going to drown with do support.

It happens. But if it happens often, you need to get out and go find a place where it rains positivity. 

Another thing to keep in mind is you can’t depend on these people to keep you positive. It’s a dyadic process. You’re surrounding yourself with these people and in turn they’re surrounding themselves with you. They’re counting on you to keep them going too.

I’m guessing that’s how James stays so passionate: because the rest of the team at Interbrand NZ are as equally as passionate and keep on delivering passionate work.

And then you become a place to work that people like me admire, blog about and wish to work for.

*I’m not saying all the other places I’ve worked were not like this. On the contrary - every single place I’ve worked at has given me something different that I couldn’t get anywhere else. I’m not sure I have a favourite place, yet.