There's a very good reason that you see so much awful advertising these days. Not that it wasn't abundant in the past, but it's everywhere you look in 2011. And that's because as time marches on, more and more titled, well-meaning miscreants, fevered egos actually, get between the people making the work and the people approving it.
Here's the problem.
You're the big boss of "Amalgamated Durables." You want a new advertising campaign to push the great new widget you've spent millions developing.
So you talk to your second in command, who talks to the Vice President of Marketing. Who in turn talks to the account manager who's assigned to the new widget. And that account manager talks to the account manager of the incumbent agency, who writes a brief (hopefully in conjunction with a planner) who then consults with the creative director. When everyone's happy, the brief goes back in front of the client for approval, but rarely does it reach the top echelons of management.
After some late nights, weekends, and a few bottles of Ibuprofen, it's approved. The creative department begins work, throws ideas at the CD who tweaks them, rejects them, approves them and so forth. Then it's presented to the account team, who will always have their say. Then it goes back for further tweaks. Then, after a few rounds of this, when everyone is happy, the ideas are presented to the people on the lower rungs of the ladder at Amalgamated Durables. They can't make a solid decision for sure, but they have a good idea what their bosses want, so they put in their ten cents. And the creative department, keeping promises made by the account team, make changes.
This all goes back and forth for weeks, ping-ponging steadily between the agency and ever-increasing layers of authority at the company, until one day, the big cheese sees the work. It's not even close to what he or she had in mind. Everyone gets blamed, the VP of Marketing blames the underlings, the underlings blame the agency, the agency starts in-fighting between the creative and account departments, and meanwhile the clock is ticking on the product launch and the media buy.
The whole process starts again, in a massively crunched timeline, weak work is presented that's "safe" because there's no wiggle room for arguing, the head honcho buys the campaign because it's better than nothing, and a wonderfully vanilla campaign plops onto our streets and pollutes the airwaves.
Is this remotely familiar? If you work in either side of the industry, it should be. So what do we do?
Here's the solution.
Cut them out. All of them.
Ahh, that's just completely impossible right, and just cruel to boot. Well, initially yes, but change is never easy. However, it is necessary. And it's sad to say that advertising and marketing has become one of the most bloated and self-serving professions in existence.
Thousands of middle-managers exist solely for the purposes of pushing memos and emails between clients and creative departments. Millions of those "comments for the sake of making them" worm their way into projects, destroying the creativity and strategic direction. It all leads to billions of wasted dollars creating an ever-increasing gap between the people who do the work and the people who want the work.
So, streamline. Try it at your agency. Use only the bare bones on any job. If that means the copywriter or art director makes a few calls to the client, well great! What's better than getting instruction direct from the source? Furthermore, at a presentation of the work, insist on being there if you commissioned the project.
The people below you may have their uses, but second-guessing your wants and needs is not what they're good at. In fact, from this day forth, if the ad agencies presented directly to the people who control the money and have the final say on the advertising, this industry would be a much better place...and the work would be phenomenal.
Is it a crazy dream? Yeah. But it's not so crazy to want to move away from a system that is based on the game "Chinese whispers" and move to one that actually works.
