Thanks, Advertising!
From castoffs to the big Times
“Shut up, Steve1.”
“What?”“STEVE. SHUT. UP.”
“Paul2…”
“You weren’t there and you don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about so just stop talking and listen for once.”
I hung up. Face red and raging, I looked across the cubicle divider where my friend and work partner Ryan3’s eyes expanded, the whites widening, widening,
w i d e n i n g. I had lost it. It had been a long few weeks. The project had taken its toll. And now I’d taken the nuclear route. It takes a little something to shock Ryan. And he was shocked. Not that I’m proud of it.
Detour. Let’s back up a month or so, to another heated interaction. I wasn’t part of this one, though, I just overheard it. A woman’s voice, mid-argument, was unmistakably furious, somewhere between shouting and barking. She was chewing out one of her minions, an account manager named Jack, on the very stairs I’d intended to ascend but was now, hearing what I heard, not going to ascend.
“This is ridiculous, Jack.”
“But, Lindsay4…”
“No, Jack. There’s no good reason. Honestly, I don’t think anyone should be working on this dumb project, much less FOUR TEAMS!”
“Just let us get the first round of…”
“No, Jack. First thing tomorrow, you will have ONE team working on this. Preferably a junior team. That’s it. We’re not gonna piss away any more valuable time and resources on this stupid project that we only inherited because no one in New York wanted it. GOT IT?”
Me, my partner, three other creative teams? We’d spend the rest of that selfsame night, toiling to crank out concepts for this project that, as mentioned, no one in our mother office in New York wanted. We all stumbled out to our cars sometime long after midnight, while Lindsay was out the door before 7.
True to his orders, after we all presented ideas the next morning, Jack whittled it down to one team. And that team? Me and Ryan.
For the next month or two, it was like Ryan and I were on an island. A leper island. A radioactive island. A radioactive leper island. Abandoned. Nobody wanted to so much as hear about the project. We didn’t even have a creative director approving work. Our directive was to Just. Get. It. Done.
Oh, and, yes, Steve—who, as you know from my cinematic flash forward earlier, I will in the future emphatically invite to shut up twice in two sentences—was also on radioactive leper island. Steve worked the account side. Jack was his boss. So Steve was coordinating with our client, managing timelines and deliverables, right there in the trenches of radioactive leper island with us. That’s what makes my lash-out sting the most. He was one of three people doing ANYTHING on a much-maligned, don’t-wanna-hear-about-it project and I turned on him. Bad form on my part. Regret. I got one moment of “letting him have it”, one moment of fiery and biting and let-er-rip “satisfaction”, and the bad feelings will stay with me forever. Honestly, one of the nicest guys at the agency and he caught my arrow in the neck. He didn’t deserve it at all, a whipping boy if ever there was one. I still follow his wife (she was in the creative department with me) on Instagram and get stinging pangs of I Am A Terrible Person three out of every five times I scroll past her posts. I like her and Steve and they have two adorable kids, but I do think my inner guilt-ridden 13th-century Catholic keeps following for the flagellation.
Anyway, Ryan and I had rustled up some pretty decent campaign ideas, involving human-ish internet banner ads trying to find the right someone. Some digital, maybe even some print. An animated video with an earnest/sarcastic voiceover (which is, I believe, what Steve and I were, um, discussing on the phone before I ashamedly lost my cool). Ryan even flew to San Francisco to shoot some original photography with photographer Stan Musilek5 for our concept. Steve was instrumental in selling the work through to the client, getting buy-in and sign-off and all that.
And in the end? Our work was actually…pretty good, all factors considered6. It was on-strategy, smart, fun, a bit tongue-in-cheek, and informative (which was the whole idea—educating the public about opt-in internet advertising).
And nobody at the agency really cared. At all. It was essentially a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell situation, start to finish. No one would talk to us about it, give us input, even acknowledge that we were working on it. After Lindsay’s scorching reprimand of Jack that first night, nobody wanted to come near it without a hazmat suit and a sturdy pair of tongs.
I suppose it’s more accurate to say they didn’t care until they did care. And when did they care, you ask? Well, that was when the New York Times called and wanted to do a story on the campaign. Since the campaign was part of an educational effort on the hot topic of internet privacy issues, the campaign had piqued the Times’ interest.
Next thing, Steve’s telling me Lindsay needs me in her office, stat. She wants me to brief her on what we did for her upcoming interview with the New York Times.
No exaggeration. From radioactive leper island to one of three mission-critical people who could possibly brief her about what we had done—all for her glorious moment in the sun7.
I’m a pleaser, both by nature and against my own will. So I grit my teeth, dragged my feet up the stairs, sat down across from Lindsay in her office, and gave her the gist of what Ryan and I had come up with. How our creative strategy and execution lined up with the objectives in the client brief. How we thought about the challenges. Some of the tactical decisions we’d made. The pain points. The big idea.
And then I walked, one vertebra the worse, back to my cubicle. She might have said thanks then. I don’t remember.
Some time later, Lindsay got on the phone with an Emmy award-winning journalist. She got her name in the New York Times8. She got to sound like she was an integral part of what we did, despite the fact that she had never wanted us to work on it in the first place. She didn’t even know what the ads and video looked like, until our briefing. She had yelled about “this dumb project”, remember?
People taking credit for your work is, sadly, not all that rare in the advertising world. Creative directors, in particular, have a nasty and deserved reputation for sucking the proverbial midnight blood of their younger teams, and then hoarding all the glory if/when the awards come. So it wasn’t entirely shocking that a senior person swooped in at the last minute to take credit for our work. But it sure was disappointing9.
Even more disappointing? The day the story runs in the New York Times, the agency has this big company-wide meeting to recognize and celebrate the agency being featured in the almighty New York Times. Not a small deal for a Utah ad agency. There was clapping and hooting and hollering and probably cake and for sure speeches. And I’ll give you one guess who the three people NOT mentioned in the thank yous were10.
Names changed to protect the innocent.
I was not innocent. My name stays.
Not a pseudonym. I got tired. And, at least here, Ryan deserves credit for his work and for putting up with me.
Pseudonym but not quite so innocent, if you ask me.
Stan Musilek: brilliant photographer of many things, including one of the big rock misfires of the 00’s (the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration LULU) and, um, lots of people not wearing clothes (artfully, of course). My claim to fame for a full year was that another campaign we did for a client that the client killed (server technology combined with construction sites that were apparently “not impressive enough”) was used as Stan’s print ad (meaning: trying to drum up more business from creative types) in Archive magazine, where he had won plenty of awards for his work. Yes, I am going to make you look at them. LOOK!
Beautifully shot. Solid headlines, even, for a pretty complicated, inside-baseball-type subject (the root servers of the whole dang internet!). I got into advertising because I love ideas and I love being around creative people and I’m addicted to the feeling of conjuring something from nothing. (Just in case this post gives you “this guy just complains about his job” vibes.) The reward is the work, even if sometimes it gets business-political or client-diluted or whatever.
Honestly, any time I see a really, really good campaign, I can’t help but think of a) how many things had to go right for it to work out, b) how far off it was from the creatives’ original concept, c) which client’s significant other got a say in the final product, d) what the original brief was, and e) did the client even like it when all was said and done.
She got ONE line in the article, for what it’s worth. Call me Tom because I’m Petty, ok?
It reminded me of when Elvis Costello eviscerated Margaret Thatcher in his song “Tramp The Dirt Down.” Referring to Thatcher, he sings,
“Who takes all the glory and none of the shame.”
If we failed (which she was planning on), Lindsay would’ve disavowed the project entirely (she already had!). When it succeeded, she was quick to grab the spotlight. Am I salty because I wanted to talk to the New York Times? No. I like credit where it’s due and I like positive attention as much as any middle child, but I’ve no appetite for getting a pull-quote in the Times about choice-based advertising, thanks.
Not mad but DISAPPOINTED? When did I become my parents?!?
As part of the video, Ryan made an awesome graphic that said “THANKS, ADVERTISING!” and, after this whole debacle, that image would get passed back and forth sarcastically any time something dumb happened at work. Which was, sadly, not infrequent.