A Open Letter To You, Mr. Big Shot

Also known as "How not to offer someone a job in advertising.."

I got an email today from the head honcho of an agency that shall remain cloaked in mystery for this post. Well I might spill the beans, but I'll start out with noble intentions..

So this dude is the chief of a digital agency and the stuff he was saying was pretty much like a fresh pile of shit. Fresh in that it's just come out, but it's shit and it's not like we don't know what shit is right? I guess the point he was trying to make was "Come work for us, and not any kind of traditional agency because they have no idea what they're doing and they're gonna die a fiery death, and we'll rise from the ashes and save the world" - I got this impression because that's what he said in the email. Not exactly, but pretty much.

So I sent him a reply telling him to swivel on it. Which means something like this:


And it got me thinking back to a post I had started then stopped then started some more a while back. So I finished it.

Human beings are intrinsically both tribal and hypocritical. What we criticize in others is often a reflection of flaws we see in our own characters that we choose to ignore. And this post is about that very subject.

The advertising community, like every other human community is essentially a collection of tribes. I could go into a monologue on the social history of humans, but the majority of you guys know more about it than me, so I’ll cut to the chase.

There is a tendency, particular now in the web 2.0, 3.0 10.0 / social-media / digital world we live in to take the sword to ‘traditional advertising agencies’ - the companies built by people whose names adorn their logos and walls to this day. They don’t really get digital, they still think the 30 second spot is the zenith of communications, they try to push ads onto MySpace senselessly and still think they occupy the intellectual elite with their Oxbridge degrees and old boy meetups. They have become the enemy.

The hero of the piece, as some would like to tell is the the mobile startup, the perfectly differentiated company, staffed with radical free thinkers who don’t know or care about the boundaries and boxes that define traditional advertising. They are at the forefront of the push to make comms more organic and are altogether full of goodness.

So you have the good guys and the bad guys, locked in a titanic struggle. The traditionalists are arrogant and closed-minded, while the new kids on the block are the exact opposite.

In painting this picture, a slice of the so called savior sect have turned into total assholes. Totally. They’ve become everything that they accuse the traditional advertising community of being. Arrogant, a closed group who laugh with disdain at everything the others do. ‘The traditionalists don’t go to cool conferences and they really really can't do good work’. The saviors have become everything that they said they weren’t.

The purpose of this post isn’t to name names, I’ll leave that to the tabloids. Or even to say who’s right and who’s not, because the truth, as is always the case lies somewhere in between. What I’m trying to get at is that advertising as a community - and a small community at that, is facing tough enough times as it is. We’re up against a formidable enemy: the limits of the human brain’s bandwidth - our inability to process more than a certain amount of messages.

To slice ourselves up into little cliques and paint the others as the enemy is not really the best course of action. Bear in mind that a healthy, competitive rivalry is not what I’m talking about, it’s the acid-laden ‘we’re better than them’ sanctimonious bullshit that makes me think ‘do these people not listen to themselves talk?’. Both sides are guilty of it, but I find it ironic that each side claims supremacy but essentially is the same. They are both, in their own capacity trying to make their work better. Some attitudes need a little readjustment.

The people who really get it, and they are out there in droves, the silent majority as it were, are able to articulate their differences in a rational and persuasive manner that makes it extremely hard not to respect their opinions (no matter what you think of them personally), because they have conviction in themselves but are gracious enough to realize that they don’t know it all. They are open to new thoughts and experiences.

There will always be intra and inter agency politics, that’s a human trait, to be tribal. And we will always see everything through the lens of our insecurites. Let’s remember that this industry is maybe one of the most stimulating because of it’s purpose and its people. To slice and dice it to put yourself on a pedestal at the expense of others is a childish, adolescent act of insecurity. And as someone who is still coming out of his childhood and adolescence, these aren’t traits that we need to propagate and use to identify ourselves with.

The point of all this is that the future of the industry is what our problem should be, not who's wearing the funniest t-shirt. And this phenomenon of hurling shit at the other guys reeks of teenage angst, and now that we all (well most of us) have gone through puberty; what's your excuse for it?

Oh and Mr. Big Shot, I'm not interested in your agency if you're running it. Momma didn't raise no fool...