stevehenry

I’ve been in too many meetings recently.

I’m sure you have, too.

I don’t need to be a mind-reader to know this. If you’ve been in one meeting, you’ve probably been in too many.

Because most meetings in advertising only move the game backwards.

A few months ago, one of my favourite writers, Oliver Burkeman, wrote in the Guardian about The Law of Triviality – whereby if executives have to talk about two new projects in a meeting – say, an atomic reactor and a company bike shed – they will spend a lot more time on the second topic.

The first is complicated and frighteningly expensive, and you risk all sorts of things if you try to make a point.

So the atomic reactor is covered in a couple of minutes.

But the bike shed can be debated for two and a half hours, “then deferred for decision to the next meeting, pending the gathering of more information”.

Ring any bells ?

Ding dong merrily on high, of course it does …

But there are other problems in meetings. As Mr Burkeman wrote in another column, there is this thing which the Greeks call “akrasia” – deciding on the best course of action, and then doing something else.

Most meetings are a crash course in akrasia.

Specifically, there’s the meeting where the first half is spent exploring exciting new possibiities and the second half is spent making sure that none of those possibilities is followed up on.

Of course, meetings are supposed to about making decisions – but try telling that to a meeting of marketing minds.

The only place most marketing minds meet is in agreeing not to make a decision.

Partly because agencies don’t always want to sell ideas (their remuneration is based on the number of meetings they have) and clients are cautious about buying anything because if it doesn’t work, they’re in trouble.

My Burkeman (again) recommends the 37% rule.

So for instance if you are looking to buy a flat, reject the first 37% then pick the first one after that which is better than them. Or if none that follow are any better, pick the best one from the first lot.

Which sounds pretty random, but is better than enjoying a range of good ideas and then infallibly picking the worst.

But I always feel at my absolute lowest shortly after a meeting has finished.

It’s not like the sexual guilt described by William Shakespeare as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” – and which involves tidying away the handcuffs and wiping up the chocolate sauce – it’s a feeling that one has irrevocably and irredeemably thrown away the last three hours of one’s life and only made things worse.

(Although that can happen after sex as well.)

At which point, the only meagre joy lies in finding the right word to describe the asininity of the lead individuals involved.

Was he a “dick” or an “asshole” ?

There’s an important distinction.

Was she a “bitch” or “moron” ?

Very important to know.

Precision matters in these instances, and brings its own rewards.

As Mr Oliver Burkeman (quoted for the last time ever by me, in 2012) put it: “We can presumably all agree that Simon Cowell is a bit of a tosser. But his success makes it hard to dismiss him as a f*ckwit, while it’s not clear he’s guilty of the malice that would condemn him as a sh*t”.

Wise words, indeed.

And I’m sure very comforting to Mr Cowell.

Happy Christmas to all of you. There may have been a few  knobwipes, fenceshitters and fartheads along the way. But through the Christmas fug, it seems like they’re a small minority.

And 2013 is another year  …..

I’ve been in too many meetings recently.

I’m sure you have, too.

I don’t need to be a mind-reader to know this. If you’ve been in one meeting, you’ve probably been in too many.

Because most meetings in advertising only move the game backwards.

A few months ago, one of my favourite writers, Oliver Burkeman, wrote in the Guardian about The Law of Triviality – whereby if executives have to talk about two new projects in a meeting – say, an atomic reactor and a company bike shed – they will spend a lot more time on the second topic.

The first is complicated and frighteningly expensive, and you risk all sorts of things if you try to make a point.

So the atomic reactor is covered in a couple of minutes.

But the bike shed can be debated for two and a half hours, “then deferred for decision to the next meeting, pending the gathering of more information”.

Ring any bells ?

Ding dong merrily on high, of course it does …

But there are other problems in meetings. As Mr Burkeman wrote in another column, there is this thing which the Greeks call “akrasia” – deciding on the best course of action, and then doing something else.

Most meetings are a crash course in akrasia.

Specifically, there’s the meeting where the first half is spent exploring exciting new possibiities and the second half is spent making sure that none of those possibilities is followed up on.

Of course, meetings are supposed to about making decisions – but try telling that to a meeting of marketing minds.

The only place most marketing minds meet is in agreeing not to make a decision.

Partly because agencies don’t always want to sell ideas (their remuneration is based on the number of meetings they have) and clients are cautious about buying anything because if it doesn’t work, they’re in trouble.

My Burkeman (again) recommends the 37% rule.

So for instance if you are looking to buy a flat, reject the first 37% then pick the first one after that which is better than them. Or if none that follow are any better, pick the best one from the first lot.

Which sounds pretty random, but is better than enjoying a range of good ideas and then infallibly picking the worst.

But I always feel at my absolute lowest shortly after a meeting has finished.

It’s not like the sexual guilt described by William Shakespeare as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” – and which involves tidying away the handcuffs and wiping up the chocolate sauce – it’s a feeling that one has irrevocably and irredeemably thrown away the last three hours of one’s life and only made things worse.

(Although that can happen after sex as well.)

At which point, the only meagre joy lies in finding the right word to describe the asininity of the lead individuals involved.

Was he a “dick” or an “asshole” ?

There’s an important distinction.

Was she a “bitch” or “moron” ?

Very important to know.

Precision matters in these instances, and brings its own rewards.

As Mr Oliver Burkeman (quoted for the last time ever by me, in 2012) put it: “We can presumably all agree that Simon Cowell is a bit of a tosser. But his success makes it hard to dismiss him as a f*ckwit, while it’s not clear he’s guilty of the malice that would condemn him as a sh*t”.

Wise words, indeed.

And I’m sure very comforting to Mr Cowell.

Happy Christmas to all of you. There may have been a few  knobwipes, fenceshitters and fartheads along the way. But through the Christmas fug, it seems like they’re a small minority.

And 2013 is another year  …..

On Monday night, the marketing industry addressed one of the most important topics it could ever face.

What to buy Johnny Hornby for Christmas.

It’s a perennial problem – what do you give the man who has everything ?

Johnny’s got good looks, intelligence, charm and money. But I think a plate of chicken tikka king prawn balls from Iceland might fit the bill.

Maybe I’ve been watching “I’m a Celebrity” too much.

(How do people eat that stuff ? I don’t mean the crocodile penises etc. I mean the Iceland stuff in the break bumpers.)

However, Monday was also the night the ad industry addressed the huge topic of social issues – at the inaugural White Pencil symposium organised by D&AD. As Kim Slicklein said in a speech on the night, 500 billion dollars are spent on paid-for media every year – could this be the tool to change the world ?

Well, judging by this particular night, I’d have to say – hmmm.

This is the most important thing that could be talked about, it’s a fantastically brilliant initiative, but we still haven’t got the tone of voice right.

Mind you, it’s very difficult to get this tone of voice right – and I should know because I’ve tried a few times.

To be honest, it was quite difficult for me to listen to the speeches that night. Partly because I had a bad cold, and it affected my inner ear …   But also psychologically – because although one of the nicest feelings in the world is the ability to say “I told you so”, one of the worst feelings is “I was saying all this stuff 12 years ago”.

Claire Beale could probably back me up on this, since I made a speech at a Campaign conference on creativity, back in about 2001 (pre-Facebook, pre-everything that now runs our lives) – about the need for advertising to be ethical.

This is crucial stuff.

It could save the planet.

More importantly for the readers of this blog (“Hello, Jim. Hello, Bonzo.”) it might even be the re-invention of marketing.

Especially given that, as Sir Martin Sorrell said on Tuesday – “marketing has lost its way. And its influence”.

But if I’ve learnt one thing in all this,  it’s incredibly easy to put people off when you talk about ethics.

You can do that by being boring, by being worthy, by being humourless, by being patronising, by being arrogant – I’ve done all those, and the speakers on the night tried all of them as well.

But if we want to change how people feel about this issue, we need to find a better way to talk about it.

For me, the best speeches (like David Jones’ of Havas) managed to avoid most of the pitfalls mentioned above, while also being genuinely inspiring.

But it was tough going for some of the time.

It’s all very well pontificating and patting ourselves on the back.

Well actually it isn’t.

Because, despite some brilliant marketing initiatives from the likes of Levi’s, IBM, Patagonia, Unilever, Nike, Chipotle, Kenco, etc – there are still millions of acres of rainforest being destroyed every year, and we’re losing the battle.

Paul Polman of Unilever has said that if companies get involved in the sustainability bandwagon for PR or damage limitation purposes, they’ll be too late.

Very true.

But you could argue that Unilever is too late.  You could argue that everybody is too late.

And the lateness lends urgency to getting it right.

The answer to this – at least in our industry, as with most things to do with advertising – lies in a combination of digital and creativity.

I.e. not the things which seem to matter most, status and money.

Digital – because digital has changed the world of communications beyond recognition. (Despite the fact that some people still don’t get it.)

Digital communication means a world of – interactivity, putting customers first, story-telling, NOT being sell-y, responding to customers (listening), providing entertainment or utility, co-creation, being human, building communities and tapping into communities, giving not taking, being transparent and accountable, respecting people’s time, respecting people’s data, being involving, being shareable – brands have to communicate bottom up, not top down, which will be a huge challenge to most anxious, control-freak marketers.

But it’s why Obama beat Romney.

Creativity – because we’re going to need lateral answers to this problem. It isn’t going to be solved by anybody with a literal mind.

Anyway, by half-way through the evening, my cold and a feeling of being preached at had both got the better of me and I headed home. I should have had hot lemon and gone to bed. But I had hot dogs and watched Eric Bristow’s arse crack on “I”m a Celebrity”. (When Helen Flanagan’s breasts went home, the cameramen instinctively focused on any cleavage they could find.)

Because I had an irresistible urge to do something irresponsible, after all the preachiness.

That’s human nature, I reckon.

And because I was late home, I could watch the programme on Sky+ and fast forward through the diabolically bad ads. Which raises a couple of questions.

Like, number 1, what HAS happened to creativity in our industry ?

And – number 2 – how many years has Mars been running that spot with the monks ?

Come on guys, I’m all for every aspect of sustainability under the sun.

But you’re going to give re-cycling a bad name.

(The day after this Symposium, I went to the Marketing Society Conference, which featured a very similar debate about social issues in marketing, aimed at the client community. And I’ve blogged about this in my blog on London Loves Business.)

In a front-page story about the resignation of George Entwhistle, the Sunday Times wrote in a tone of disparagement that the man taking over temporarily, Tim Davie, had “a background in marketing – he spent part of his early career with PepsiCo.”

You could almost hear the *sniffs*.

On page 7 of the same newspaper, an article about Alan Bennett’s new play quoted an historian called Adam Nicholson speaking of an England “that is awash with marketing and uncertain of where it is going.”

I’m reminded of a section in Douglas Adams’ great comic novel The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which we discover a planet populated by telephone sanitising engineers and marketers … The implication being that if we could only relegate such non-productive people to a distant corner of the universe, we’d all be better off.

We need to ask ourselves why marketing is such a dirty word – and I think it helps to look at masturbation in this context.

Warren Beatty once claimed to have made love to over 1,000 women.

The musician Basshunter once claimed, while in the Celebrity Big Brother House, that he’d masturbated 20 times in one day.

Both of these are wonderful achievements, you have to admit, but I know whose hand I’d rather shake.

Now I’m not saying that everyone working in marketing is a masturbator. But I am saying that a lot of marketing is masturbation. Engrossing for the individual at the heart of it, but either meaningless or offensive to everyone else

Let’s look at toothpaste advertising, in particular.

Most of it is boring as all hell (I don’t think even the most self-obsessed of my Facebook friends would bother telling me about how they brushed their teeth this morning, but we’re expected to be engrossed when a complete stranger interrupts something we’re engaged with to tell us).

The problem is that they’ve done focus groups.

And non-experts convened in a room to discuss advertising rarely move the game on, whether it’s a focus group or a creative review session with 14 random people in it.

I’m sure in focus groups people say that they’re interested in technical breakthroughs (“this toothpaste not only cleans your teeth, it cleans your arse at the same time”) but in real life nobody usually gives a monkey’s.

However, toothpaste advertisers have their research figures to back them up, which leads them to believe that they should keep on boring people to death with product-y ads.

However, the  key thing about marketing isn’t about understanding your product, it’s about understanding your consumer.

It’s no use finding a neat way of summing up your product if nobody’s interested in the first place.

(And believe me, in about 95% of situations, nobody IS interested in the product. I’m not sure if we actually NEED many new products. But we certainly need new brands – because there’s only a handful of real brands out there. And people are looking for brands to bring something valuable to the party.)

What people are interested in, are their own needs and desires.

That’s what you need to focus on – and if a toothpaste campaign did that – thinking about its customers, what they like, what they want from life – rather than bleating on about some miniscule and uninteresting product benefit, they might actually build a meaningful brand – in a sector which currently has no products which I would consider even worthy of the name “brand”.

The thing is – it’s all about focussing on them, not you.

Which is rather like the difference between sex and masturbation.

Gore Vidal (whose memoir “Palimpsest” I’m currently enjoying very much) had lots of sexual partners. Although he once claimed that he had never knowingly given another human being an orgasm.

But he wrote “even at twenty, I often paid for sex, on the ground that it was only fair”.

Treating sex as a paid-for medium is all well and good – but sex like that is essentially masturbation.

And I don’t think that’s a recipe for success in marketing.

In fact, to get back to the toothpaste theme,  it’ll probably just leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

“I think all this criticism of Jimmy Savile is unfair. He did a lot of good in his life. Personally, I will never forget the time when I was eight years old and he fixed it for me to have a go on a milking machine blindfolded”.

That’s the gag that got some credulous DJ in trouble when he read it out on air, thinking it was a genuine email.

(Surely  “blindfolded” was a giveaway. Even to a DJ.)

I don’t know what you think about the morality of that joke – but clearly there are many darker jokes than that on the internet, and it’s worth realising how the internet has undermined traditional approaches to morality as well as everything else.

And that ties in with a great piece in Campaign last week by Tracey Follows about the Wired 2012 conference.

The host, David Rowan, apparently described the event’s speakers as “the people who are not accepting the world as it is”. As Tracey wrote – the only answer required in order to succeed these days is this: disobey.

All the speakers seemed to love breaking the rules.

One of them was Thomas Heatherwick, designer of The Olympic cauldron. The organisers had told him “Whatever you do, make sure you don’t have any moving parts”. So he made something with 204 moving copper petals – and created the most striking and famous Olympic cauldron of all time.

All this is meat and drink to me. I’ve always said – show me a rule and I’ll tell you how much I want to break it. But, as Tracey wrote,  “Advertising … was an all-too apparent absentee from the event.”

What the f*ck.

Advertising used to be full of the sort of people who as kids had sat at the back of the classroom and tried to smoke a spliff when the teacher’s back was turned.

Now it feels like it’s full of the kids who sat at the front and told the teacher what was going on at the back.

Hoping to be paid for their trouble.

A love of money has taken over from a love of mischief, and we’re all the poorer for it.

Tracey wrote that the conference “had much to teach us about the triumph of creativity over mediocrity, mundanity and adversity”.

Actually there’s a new agency just launching called Mediocrity Mundanity and Adversity. Their goal is to sell in 4 years.

But a love of money is no use without realising what product  it is which you’re selling.  It’s about time we realised that creatives are the rock stars in our industry … and they need to break the rules.

As Sir John Hegarty said at a recent Creative Social event, all great advertising is built on irreverence.

I couldn’t agree more.

As I said at the same event, I believe that our job is to make “weird shit”. Why ? Because that’s the currency of conversation. That’s what people talk about.

When you get home in the evening, what do you talk about with your flatmate or partner ? You could tell them about the boring Tube journey, the boring meeting, the boring sandwich – but that isn’t going to work very well.

But if you tell them about the punch-up in Reception or the sexual act which happened in the boardroom – well, that will work.

Weird shit is the currency of conversation, and if we want our work to be shared, we need to grasp that.

A well-executed shot of good-looking people using your product is the equivalent of an egg-and-cress sandwich from Greggs.

Now, like the old saying (don’t tell me you’re funny, tell me a joke), it’s no use talking about irreverence unless you live up to it.

So maybe we should get back to the Jimmy Savile gags.

But I bet you know them already – or if you don’t, there’s always Google.

Mind you, who needs gags when you read that Prince Charles asked Jimmy Savile to advise his erstwhile sister-in-law Fergie on keeping  a low public profile ?  That’s true, but there isn’t a single clause of it which isn’t weirder than any of the gags.

There probably aren’t many bloggers who were at the D&AD 50th party one day and the Worshipful Guild of Marketors soon after.

Bridging the world of agency and client like a Middle Eastern peace envoy on a Segway.

To me, the split between agencies and clients has never seemed wider.

At D&AD, creatives moaned about clients. And in various client conversations I’ve had recently, there’s been a bit of righteous moaning about agencies.

(Although the Marketors’ dinner itself was a model of propriety.)

Is it possible to align the two groups ?

It should be, because they both want fame.

So let’s start off by looking at the age-old battle of how big to make the logo.

And let’s look at a quote from Campaign recently.

John Webster was probably the most talented creative guy ever to work in advertising. And, when asked why his ads featured prominent logos, replied:

“I don’t know how many of you think you’re in the entertainment business. But if you do, you should probably f*ck off and write for The Two Ronnies”.

The sentiment is understandable, but for today’s marketing, I couldn’t agree less, I’m afraid.

Advertising must never forget its commercial focus, but to do that these days, it has to be entertaining – and not sell-y.

Making your logo bigger is sell-y and boring.

Of course, Webbo was working in a different time – a time when people were more engaged with the ads. The early 80s was famously a period when about 35% of people said the ads were better than the programmes.

(And not necessarily because the ads were any better then than they are now. I don’t think they were – it was a lot to do with novelty value, and a healthier economy.)

So people were willing to engage with advertising in a way which they’re not, now.

Under those conditions, maybe the answer was to make your logo bigger.

But these days are different.

Now the novelty’s worn off, we’ve all been through enough recessions to learn that tightening our belts isn’t going to kill us, and people can see the hidden agenda.

Which is that ads are trying to get you to spend your money or change your mind – things which people are reluctant to do.

So, actually, our only hope is to be entertaining.

(And actually I believe most ads are. The general standard of advertising is much higher now than in any so-called Golden Age.)

It’s like with your friends. You’ve got friends who you really trust – and some who you don’t trust so much, but you like them … because they’re entertaining.

Our whole industry falls into that second category, and the only brands that get into the first one, largely do so by avoiding advertising altogether.

To have an advertising budget is to say – we’d better be entertaining.

I remember hearing that at one stage Mother were thinking of re-branding as an entertainment agency not an ad agency.

I haven’t checked that out with my old mucker Robert Saville because this is just a random ramble not an attempt to win the bleedin’ Pulitzer prize for journalism.

But I hope it’s true, because that’s the charge which Mother has been leading brilliantly (and almost single-handedly) for the last 12 years.

Of course it might be too late to save the industry.

Because it can sometimes feel a bit like a bloke clutching his head at the kitchen table and saying “I promise I’ll cut down on the booze/cocaine/high class prostitutes/cannibalism/massive logo habit/whatever.”

And every sh*tty toothpaste ad that’s apparently aimed at people with the IQ of an electric toothbrush destroys the notion that we respect our audience.

I actually think the main reason people don’t like advertising is because it’s still so “top down”.

I.e., it’s arrogant.

(Am I the only person to find the phrases “top down” and “bottom up” really rather sexy ?)

Advertising needs to embrace digital, which means being bottom up – i.e. learning how to listen to your customers and then communicate with them in a way which doesn’t insult their intelligence or their soul.

People by and large don’t like advertising – and the way to get them to like it, isn’t to have a big logo.

That can only ever be bullying or insulting or arrogant or clumsy.

The answer is to entertain.

But then again, it pretty much always has been.

As John Webster demonstrated.

Funnily enough.

A friend pointed out to me that my last 3 blogs had dealt with penises, bottoms and breasts.

Essentially that means there is only one place left to go.

And that’s the D&AD 50th anniversary party.

Because that evening was full of …

No I’m sorry, that joke is just too easy to do …. !  And also grossly unfair – the evening was full of delightful people enjoying probably the most magnificent tribute the industry has ever organised to celebrate outstanding creative work.

D&AD has been celebrating great work, (sometimes against huge odds) for half a century. The evening showcased the best of that time – and it was absolutely stunning. What a mind-blowing evening.

It’s only a shame, as Claire Beale pointed out, that it was so poorly attended by the creative directors of our current times  – i.e. marketing directors.

For me the evening had everything I love and hate about creative awards shows, redoubled in trumps. It had beautiful women – I was sitting next to Helen Calcraft, a woman the entire heterosexual  male population of adland has a crush on – it praised the kind of work which makes me proud to be part of this industry, and it filled me full of rancour and gall.

If we can get work like this out, why can’t we do it a lot more often ?

Move on, Steve.

Deep breath.

Remember what your therapist said about anger being an unattractive quality in blogs.

But the thing about awards ceremonies which always niggles me is this.  They are an example of something originally very laudable which has now been subverted in a way which goes almost directly against its original purpose.

A bit like voting for Nick Clegg.

The original aim was to celebrate creativity but now they’re more often used by CEOs to beat up their creative directors.

Originally it was “I know the client wants a 30-second pack-shot but there are better ways of engaging with people”; now it’s “why haven’t we got more creative awards than those guys ?”

Maybe this is part of what I’ve just decided to call the Inevitable Quantification of Everything.

Anyway, part of the evening featured  several lists of “Top 10s” and I was very gratified to be included in the list of “Top 10 copywriters”.

Until, that is, I came tenth.

Coming tenth out of ten can’t help but feel pathetic.

Of course, looked at another way – being the tenth most awarded copywriter of all time, globally – well that’s not such a paltry thing.

But I bumped into one old friend who greeted this accolade with the respect it deserved. “You snuck in there then,” he muttered.

Awards dos, like doggy dos, can bring out the worst in people.

But I need to put my cheap carping to one side, because the evening did genuinely proclaim the thing which is at the heart of all good ad-folk.

The f*ck-off bit of creativity.

The night ended  in fairly typical fashion. I found myself vaulting over a spiked fence beside a gate in the south west corner of Battersea Park because they’d locked all the gates I could find.

I risked the trouser legs of an expensive suit and my balls, but fortunately all 4 survived.

I was going to untangle the thorny issue of bringing together high-end brand thinking and cutting-edge digital execution skills in this blog, but then I started thinking about Desmond Morris’s breasts.

I don’t mean the great man’s manboobs per se – although I suspect that Desmond, the dapper, Silk-Cut-smoking populariser of zoology, might have boasted a modest pair, if he’d been snapped in his paddling pool one hot afternoon.

I mean his theory that breasts are womankind’s evolutionary attempt to mimic the powerful sexual signals of the buttocks – as if breasts were a kind of front-mounted bottom.

Thus encouraging face-to-face sexual activity and as a result greater emotional bonding.

I’ve always thought that this was a cracking theory, on many levels.

I mean, what’s not to like in that theory ?

It’s got everything covered.

I won’t say I’ve lived my entire life around its tenets and implications. But I have always thought – nice one, Des.

However, I then read in a new book that this theory had been thrown into disrepute because someone had discovered some primates who apparently enjoy face-to-face sex even though the females are predominantly “flat-chested”.

This kind of killer thinking is what we’re burdened with every day in advertising.

I don’t mean arguing about whether  breasts really are buttocks manqué or indeed whether monkeys’ buttocks are breasts manqué.

But just that process whereby someone produces an interesting and provocative thought – and someone else tries to shoot it down.

Does the existence of some missionary position monkeys – which seems a bit far-fetched anyway and we’ll have to take their word for it – invalidate Desmond’s bold  theory ?

The legendary US adman Jerry della Femina used to bemoan the presence of ‘killers’ in advertising – spoilers, people who’d got to the top just by killing other people’s ideas. But these days the killers outnumber anybody else.

It’s like being trapped in a TV channel dedicated entirely to that part of The Godfather where Michael kills all his enemies in one feel swoop.

Every hour in London there must be about 30 mob-handed meetings in which some clever dick or another finds a  reason “not to buy” an idea and then blows it away .

I know I’m always banging on about this topic. (Creative judgement, I mean, rather than topless scientists in paddling pools.)

But I think it’s a crucial part of why this industry feels so lost right now.

I was talking to a creative last week who’d spent 15 years in Australia and then returned to London. He couldn’t believe how the industry had changed, apparently losing a large proportion of its creative cojones.

For me, it’s about the need to understand something fundamental about creativity.

No creative idea worth its salt is ever bullet-proof.

I used to do a presentation around this topic in which I would take great ads – ads universally recognised to be among the greatest achievements of our industry – and shoot them down.

It was spectacularly easy.

I can do it with any idea you name – and you can do it, too.

The point is that great ideas are always difficult, thorny, uncomfortable.

There is always a reason to kill the idea.

There’s a myth that great ideas pop up and there won’t be any negatives and everyone will instantly like them – like some kind of conceptual Virgin Mary.

Like a kind of scamped-up Ben Fogle.

But if you’re thinking that, you don’t understand  great creativity.

In fact, the next time someone asks to see the Virgin Mary in a creative review meeting, point them in the direction of Desmond Morris’s breasts.

I loved that front page headline in Campaign about Peter Souter bringing Walter Campbell and Sean Doyle to TBWA to team up with Dede Laurentino.

Those four guys are killers.

It certainly bucks the trend of having the top tiers of agencies made up exclusively of people from account-handling or even account-preparing backgrounds.

As I was quoted in that same issue as saying, I believe that most creatives are feeling increasingly marginalised in agencies these days.

A bit like teenagers.

There’s a feeling that they’re deliberately being awkward, and that they may be working to a different agenda.

There’s also a sense that they’re mumbling a lot and they may be taking drugs.

(More seriously, there’s also a lack of trust that any single team can crack a problem. Every brief is a gang-bang these days.)

So it’s great that Peter has put creativity back on the front page – instead of another bloody media review.

Because creativity is actually the product we make.

As Alex Bogusky said, you’ve got to figure out if you’re in the product sector or the service sector – and if you’re in the service sector, stick your head in an oven and kill yourself by slamming the door on it repeatedly.

(He didn’t say that last bit, by the way. I did.)

There’s precious little point in servicing an account where the blandness of the work means it will review in 18 months anyway.

But let’s face it, creativity is tough and times are rougher than an X Factor contender from Newcastle.

Most TV advertising is like having a lunatic in the house, who keeps making suggestions without any understanding of your personality or your financial status.

It’s like having a demented lodger sitting  on your sofa who keeps reminding you to buy stuff you don’t need.

It used to be that lots of bright people wanted to work in advertising – and they did this because they loved the creativity.

Do they still want to work in it ?

Of course there are still lots of bright people working in advertising – but you find a lot of spiders in bathtubs. Not because they want to be there but just because they can’t get out.

It’s not helped by the unrealistic attitudes of some marketeers. I was working with an American agency recently and I came across a line for Southern Comfort that read – “it’s a glorious celebration of all that life has to offer.”

To which the only sane reply is …

No it isn’t.

Someone who works in one of the sexier agencies in London (on the account handling side) wrote once about “the long daily grind and lack of recognition.”

I think we can all recognise that, although if you’re getting one long grind a day, that’s not too bad.

I could live without the recognition.

People pointing in the street and saying “There’s Steve Henry, he enjoys at least one long grind per day”.

Mind you,  it would be good publicity.

Morale is pretty low in the industry because of  an unhelpful focus on the bottom line, which is making people miserable.

Senior agency staff are incentivised purely around keeping clients happy at all costs, and that takes precedence over caring about the work.

Looking at this, it sometimes seems to me that the industry is at rock bottom but still digging.

And talking of bottoms -

In South America, an ex-Miss Argentina died after cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

That story has nothing to do with the main thrust of this blog.

Except that that kind of story is what we’re competing against while we’re trying to convince people that Southern Comfort invented democracy in Ancient Greece.

Because it’s content vs content these days.

Is the answer social media ?

Possibly.

It seems to be the answer to every question around, from “How do you foment political unrest in an otherwise near-comatose proletariate ?” to “What were you doing yesterday afternoon and why didn’t you answer my urgent emails ?”

But a bigger question is whether social media and marketing will mix.

Personally, I like to draw a line between my friends and too much commercial activity.

It gets sticky enough just figuring out whose round it is.

And as a friend of mine Richard Stacy blogged recently …” [In social media], people want information or conversation, not performance.”

I.e. the one-to-many style of advertising won’t translate easily into these new tightly-targetted models.

So maybe we’re no nearer.

As Richard said elsewhere, advertising is the answer to a question nobody asked.

For a while – when nobody took it very seriously – it worked quite well.

Ironic, really.

But those days seem gone.

Maybe Peter, Walter, Sean and Dede can bring them back.

“Americans aren’t happy, they’re just trained to look as if they are … It’s fake orgasm on a grand scale.” (Lucy Ellmann writing a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Smile or Die”.)

And that’s a little bit how it works in advertising.

As one media agency boss said to me recently, the day-to-day job for most agencies is “fragile optimism”.

Agency people are required to be resolutely gung-ho and glass-half-full-let’s-order-another-glass-anyway -  even if this proves a disjoint with the client’s mood.

Sales figures static ? Ach, never mind. Still or sparkling ?

CEO asking how effective last year’s campaign was ? Here, have some meaningless tracking figures and a biscuit.

But. In a world in which marketing directors have a tenure on average of two years, it occurs to me that clients may find the implacably placatory grins of the agency folk a little hard to take sometimes.

Given the stress suffered on both sides, I just wonder if a little more honesty might actually work better ?

Also, the relentless optimism  can be tiring to maintain.

I thought of this the other day when I was in one agency toilet and I heard what I’m convinced was soft sobbing coming from the next door cubicle. Of course, it may have been that the occupant had just won a gold medal in the coxless pairs .

In what is now known as the “sobbing Olympics”.

And, truth be told, people are blubbing in toilets in companies all over the country.

In schools or prisons, toilets can be dangerous places but in many modern businesses, they’re the only place of refuge. In an open-plan, glass-meeting-room world, where if your boss isn’t staring at you he’s scanning your emails, the loo is a rare sanctuary.

By the bottles of Domestos I sat down and wept.

But of course if you’re in adland, there are always reasons to wet the Andrex.

Particularly if you’re a creative.

I went to a discussion about the IPA Excellence Diploma recently, and there was a very strong feeling that  creative talent was being marginalised in our industry.

In many agencies these days,  the creatives feel as welcome as a loud fart in a meditation class.

But as I’ve said before, agencies’ true raison d’etre is to provide creativity.

It can feel like a pretty wrinkled and dried-up raison  these days.

As Martin Boase said about BMP back in the 1980s, the structure and role of the agency was to “protect the creative department”.

I believe that was also the view of David Abbott, the creative founder of Britain’s most successful ad agency for the last 20 years – AMV.

The Man U of agencies, as I think of them. (In two important and linked respects – they’re usually at the top of the table, and they’re atypically loyal to their “manager”.)

I’d never been into the place before but last week I went to talk to Ian Pearman the CEO about Decoded – and it felt like a pretty good place to be. I know I’m normally critical of big agencies, but AMV felt funky and friendly.

(And I  like their new Sainsbury’s ad about the Paralympics.)

Incidentally, AMV wasn’t the agency with the blubber in the bogs.

For the record, I didn’t go to the toilet in AMV, so I have no idea if the inhabitants there are sobbing or dancing on the seats.

But surely the key to a great agency is to integrate and respect your creative people.

Involve them and they might answer the brief in a good way.

Respect them and they might produce some magic for you.

So here’s my creative tip for this blog.

Just ask this question of any idea  -   is this shareable ?

That’s pretty much all you need to ask.

Not just because that’s the free medium of word of mouth.

But also because real people genuinely want that commodity. They need to update their status in an interesting way and frankly pictures of their dog playing football or their kid’s birthday party aren’t going to get passed around very far.

To make yourself interesting on social media, you need to pass around interesting stuff. A cool clip, a banging bit of music, an eye-opening picture.

And that’s what we’ve got to provide.

Hint: it’s the creatives who can help you do that.

On that note, and apropos of virtually nothing, here’s a 45-minute-long but stunning piece of film showing George Galloway taking on the US congress. It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

By the end of it, a small bunch of Americans are looking a little less happy than usual.