September, 2009

It's all fun and games 'til someone loses a foot.

In the Mad Men episode that aired 20 September, 2009 the chairman of the board of the British company that bought Sterling Cooper gets his foot cut off by a John Deere rider mower being ridden at an office party.* The scene is hilarious, shocking and gross all at the same time.

The grotesqueness of the involuntary amputation however matches the  grotesqueness of the forced jollity of the party being held to honor . . . what exactly nobody knows. In a brilliant bit of satire, the creators of Mad Men nailed the quintessential agency event at which agency higher-ups spout bromides about commitment and partnership and announce decisions that muddy the waters for the staff, leaving it confused and insecure. Then, once finished with speech-making, and to make the muddle somehow more palatable, they pour booze and present plates “of delicatessen.” This sort of thing goes on all of the time. The ties may be skinny, credenzas filled with liquor and assistants called “girls”, but the scenes in this year’s Mad Men are pure 2009. The writers have captured the ad world’s zeitgeist perfectly.

Roger Sterling, co-founder of the agency and ambivalent recipient of a windfall from its sale, is absent from the party when the foot is lost. He finds some of his staff sitting in a room from which the blood is being squeegeed from a smoked glass window. On his way in he says “Woah, it looks Iwo Jima. . .” He then says to the huddled, shaken, and gore covered-staffers, “somewhere, this has happened before, in another agency.” That one line captures the best of what agency life is all about: dark humor, insouciance, a jaded invincibility and an appreciation for the absurd. It is funny, and perhaps true — if not on a literal level, then definitely on a metaphorical level — and the knowing laughter of the folks in the office affirms this.

Too often these days agencies are dour places, filled with folks worrying about utilization and billable hours and the stock prices of the holding company which will ultimately determine the their employment prospects. Art and magic are increasingly replaced by metrics and ROI as a decidedly soft-science business tries to dress up as a hard science business and provide what Wall St. investors demand. Trust me, I support it — it forces us to be accountable and provides value for our customers — but there is a fundamental, and growing conflict at the heart of the large, publicly-traded-holding-company-owned agency. Art and creativity and design and all of the things that go into great creative, and into making agencies fun places to work are fundamentally subjective. It’s hard to produce objective results from quarter to quarter with unbridled subjective judgments — both of consumers and clients — driving the metrics that determine the success of your  business. This season of Mad Men deftly chronicles very modern ad-biz problems, and in a literal and metaphorical mangled foot, we see the old spirit (a spirit we try to keep alive in our own fledgling shop) of the ad world shining through, reminding many of us (at least me) what it is that we love about agencies at the same time that we witness their diminishment as wholly owned subsidiaries of out of town land lords.

*Check out the recap to get the back-story on the mower.

Best to leave it to the pros

Lately, I’m hearing about many jobs and opportunities at various ad agencies. Surprisingly, there are jobs in the advertising business, despite the gloom and doom of the industry in particular and the economy in general. For those of us around Boston we have to be willing to relocate. For all of us, in the advertising biz, we apparently need to possess multiple skill-sets.

If you are an art director then you must now be able to concept, create great designs and help sell ideas to clients (standard job description) as well as know Flash with ActionScript and hopefully some HTML & CSS. I recently read a post by a young art director wondering whether she should learn HTML because some copy job descriptions now list coding knowledge as a requirement. I see jobs for my role, producer, that require knowledge of Flash with AS2 (not AS3, are you sure?), HTML/CSS & JavaScript, PhotoShop, Illustrator, copy writing, and great MS Office skills especially, Project and PowerPoint. A former colleague once complained that the designers on our job didn’t do front end development too, and wondered why not.

Whenever confronted with this attitude, or with job descriptions like the above I wonder in which year folks are living because it sounds like 1999. My next thought usually has to do with the evolution of societies. Back in the early days of web marketing many folks did many things like design and code and even write. An interesting thing happened, as it often does in evolving societies: things started to get complicated and division of labor within the (web marketing) tribes began to emerge. Granted, there are folks who have truly full tool sets, and the more that you can do, the better. Yet, I think it unrealistic to expect everybody to wear many disparate hats as par for the daily course. Sure it’s great from a bottom-line, head count perspective when you can hire one rather than two folks. In over a decade in this business I’ve met very few people who were conceptual thinkers, great designers, rocking Flash developers and good managers (in fact, I know one).

I do believe that everybody in an interactive agency who touches work that goes into the world needs to understand the medium, the platforms and the capabilities and limitations of same. Expecting a copy writer to write both the copy and the markup that holds the copy is asking quite a bit of that person and, frankly, not providing the level of service and work that we should provide to our clients. Many of us in advertising can do many things. We are gamers and are willing to tackle challenges. Perhaps the new business model –whatever it will be — will require us all to wear more hats (though, the old one did too) but I want to wave a caution flag. Unless that copy writer is very good at both markup and pithy marketing copy — and I mean very good at both — then she should not be writing both. There is a professional level of work that we marketers need to deliver to the people paying the bills. I’m not entirely convinced that hiring Jacks & Jills of all trades is the way to deliver that superior product. If an agency finds that multi-tool person, by all means, scoop them up, and pay them well. Otherwise, hire appropriately, let people do what they do well and deliver great work from within well built teams.