So what were you doing last week? Dancing topless on a 200-foot yacht off the South of France? Rubbing elbows with some ECDs from South America? Bumping uglies with a random AD from Amsterdam?
Sounds awesome. Hope you took pictures.
Me? I was in the office, cranking out work like a mofo. Selling shit. Saving projects. You know, a typical week in advertising.
Now, I’ve come down on award shows before, and this post isn’t really about that. I actually think Cannes, out of all the shows, seems to honor some of our …

Not that you have to play a role every time in your agency, even knowing that there are some guys in this market that actually play to be someone they are not for their whole life.
But that’s not the subject of the article today.
What I am trying to say here is: nobody is good at everything.
Curiously, we are frequently questioned – and we question other people frequently – exactly about our/their weaknesses. Your boss and colleagues do this with you, you do it with them. People only see the flaws.
That’s …

Sometimes we forget that we are all in the dopamine business.
More than anything else, our job as marketers is to create a brand experience that fires off synapse explosions in the target consumer’s lower frontal lobe, triggering the secretion of dopamine. It sounds harder to do than it actually is. We experience these reactions every day, whenever we taste something weird or delicious, listen to Kanye, or search the web for photos of grown men wearing baby bonnets.
These are the very reactions that make people do the things they do. …

You know the game. It’s at every carnival and boardwalk across the country. You take a mallet and try to pound the crap out of a bunch of stuffed moles that keep popping their heads out of a bunch of holes.
It’s pretty damn annoying really. The more you get into it, the more the moles keep popping up, to the point where it’s impossible to hit them all.
It’s just like advertising, really.
Just when you think you’ve solved a problem, another one pops up. Whack! You write the perfect headline. Another …

Let’s face it, for decades now, print has been considered the bastard child of advertising. Nobody wants to work on print. If you ask a team to work on a print campaign, their eyes glaze over. Those eyes say, “please, shoot me.”
“So, I want you to spend two nights trying every conceivable design permutation. Then, if you are lucky enough to sell the campaign, you can spend three days refining that look. This will be followed by another seven days fleshing out the campaign, with 27 different lines. Then, you’ll …

Client:              Achieving maximum ROI requires our organization to periodically seek input from non-standard suppliers. We need to benchmark all aspects of business to ensure we regain momentum and evolve the brand so we’re well positioned to meet consumers’ needs. As we proceed towards critical measurement periods we must determine which vendor relationships represent net positive impact on market-critical targets. To date, despite significant progress towards EOY expectations, we have determined the relationship with ABC Agency to be suboptimal.
Agency:           Our long-term relationship with XYZ Corporation has proven the superiority of …

Advertising is a team sport.
A relay race is a good metaphor.
When it works well, clients run the first leg then hand the baton to the account guys. The account guys race along and hand it to the strategy guys, who, in turn, deliver it to the creatives, whose job it is to get it across the finish line.
Sure, sometimes the baton gets dropped.
Sometimes a runner falls.
And sometimes everything goes right and you still get beaten.
That’s the business.
But there is one mistake that is really unforgivable: when one discipline doesn’t hand …

You get a brief. You work up a few ideas. You get them in a nice place and decide to show your account team.
That’s when you see the look of fear in their eyes.
They’re afraid to show one or more of your ideas because they are anticipating a poor reaction from the client.  Not because the ads are off-strategy. Or off-brand. Or off-anything.
They’re afraid simply because the client has reacted irrationally to work before and they are trying to anticipate what might set them off again.
I get it. Understanding the …

The catastrophic earthquake in Chile changed something I’m sure few people ever even thought was possible.
Time.
Apparently, our days are now 1.26 milliseconds shorter as a result of the massive trembler, due to the earth being thrown off its axis by about 3 inches.
Now, I know, some of you are freaking out about this. Oh my God, there isn’t enough time in the day as it is! Now it’s even shorter!?!
Yes it is. And I think that’s a good thing. I just wish it was by more than 1200 or so …

Is it an automobile or a car?
Is it a motorcycle or a bike?
These are the discussions that take up the bulk of my time in conference rooms. They usually come up at the end of the approval process. These are comments made by smart people. And, I welcome the feedback. I just feel that it’s feedback for the sake of feedback. In other words, when people are being paid a lot of money to give their opinion, they feel obligated to say something smart. It usually evolves into this kind …