Too much of everything
Being a "creative" in the marketing and advertising industry demands that you are constantly reading about how much bad advertising there is in this world. From infomercials to billboards, banners and pop ups, movie ads, etc. etc. everybody is bitching about something someone else made.
This is not to say that there aren't any good ads, and that they don't get their due, but an exorbitant amount of time seems to be spent pointing out, ridiculing, justifying, and lamenting the bad ads of the world. Many fingers are pointed. Many agencies are shunned. Fewer are exalted.
Recently I have been thinking about how many people there are in the world. This led me to a dizzying attempt to think about how each of them could really find a job, a place in life, to be happy. I came to the conclusion that there must be a huge number of people working in jobs that they don't belong in, despise or even hate. This must be true of the many players in advertising as well - client and agency side alike.
So, with that motivation and considering the number of possible time slots on televisions to fill, the number of billboards that need communication, the ever-growing pages of magazines, an internet explosion... it seems to me that it is fairly reasonable to expect a lot of terrible advertising to be produced.
Great work takes time and cunning and the ability to revise and contort and just plain think. We don't have enough time or committed people in the industry to make them all great ads.
So, when we choose to be choosy about the least among ourselves, perhaps we should consider that the people who made it might have no desire to do good work in the first place. Perhaps they are on their way to the thing that really makes them happy, or they are filling the space that we have generated or perhaps the process killed everything good along the way, because the process is the same people who hate their jobs anyway.
Perhaps we just have too many people who need jobs and too many ad spaces to fill.
All of this was spurred by this lovely post from American Copywriter.
This is not to say that there aren't any good ads, and that they don't get their due, but an exorbitant amount of time seems to be spent pointing out, ridiculing, justifying, and lamenting the bad ads of the world. Many fingers are pointed. Many agencies are shunned. Fewer are exalted.
Recently I have been thinking about how many people there are in the world. This led me to a dizzying attempt to think about how each of them could really find a job, a place in life, to be happy. I came to the conclusion that there must be a huge number of people working in jobs that they don't belong in, despise or even hate. This must be true of the many players in advertising as well - client and agency side alike.
So, with that motivation and considering the number of possible time slots on televisions to fill, the number of billboards that need communication, the ever-growing pages of magazines, an internet explosion... it seems to me that it is fairly reasonable to expect a lot of terrible advertising to be produced.
Great work takes time and cunning and the ability to revise and contort and just plain think. We don't have enough time or committed people in the industry to make them all great ads.
So, when we choose to be choosy about the least among ourselves, perhaps we should consider that the people who made it might have no desire to do good work in the first place. Perhaps they are on their way to the thing that really makes them happy, or they are filling the space that we have generated or perhaps the process killed everything good along the way, because the process is the same people who hate their jobs anyway.
Perhaps we just have too many people who need jobs and too many ad spaces to fill.
All of this was spurred by this lovely post from American Copywriter.
Labels: advertising, rant
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