A visit to the posting on the Web site Today's Big Thing from July 23 (http://todaysbigthing.com/2008/07/23) takes you to a scenario that would be funny if it were not so close to the reality we face every day in the agency business. Even though the site is called "Today's Big Thing," the message is old news. In the scenario acted out by truly likely young, hip corporate types, a designer is charged by his corporate client to design a sign that could be installed at intersections to encourage drivers to stop. In other words, they wanted the designer to create a stop sign. After reviewing a syllabus made up of PowerPoint slides, the designer comes up with a simple red circle with the word "Stop" inside. Trim the rounded edges into an octagon and you have our familiar "Stop" sign.
But no, the corporate team feels that the message, while simple enough, doesn't capture the real stopping experience. Dozens of revisions later, the team manages to force the designer into a pink and blue sign with a half dozen logos of cooperating entities, a tiny stopping message and a photo of a woman they deem to be their target demographic. I watched in horror, as it happens to those of us in the advertising business far too often to be funny.
The phrase "everyone's an art director" is so common as to be ubiquitous in our field, but I would add to that "everyone's a copywriter," since wordsmithing among otherwise engaged senior managers is endemic. I started my career as a writer and teacher, serving as a columnist for Taft Newspapers and working as the creative writing director for the nationally acclaimed Living Arts Center.
I taught bone-head English to college athletes and published in dozens and dozens of the little literary magazines before writing my first long fiction, plays, novels, short stories and narrative work, yet my writing is subject to correction, reinterpretation, revision and word substitution by plant managers, human resource managers and corporate hangers-on at nearly every level. Sometimes I am even told that the work was looked at by a family member or a next door neighbor who was or is still "an English major." As though somehow my own passage through academia was nullified by writing a jingle, composing a print ad or stooping to try and sell something.
Wives and girlfriends
I particularly enjoy the client who, not content with his own lack of expertise in communications and marketing, yields to a wife, girlfriend or recently graduated daughter because they "have good taste," "graduated from such-and-such college," or "are simply in love with marketing." These opinions make response from a professional art director, designer, writer or creative person even more difficult since ignoring them or finding issue with them is now a rejection of home and family, a hot weekend remembered or the apple of daddy's eye.
One client, sent to us by a major national retailer who felt he needed help with packaging and in-store display, insisted on inserting his own photographs of the product in use, even though the focus was challenged by presbyopia and the composition by lack of experience. When his own work was installed on the packaging, his wife preferred it and his brother-in-law thought it looked great. We went to the mat, convinced him of his error and produced a package that is actually selling product.
Charting the course
People who would otherwise never tell their surgeon how to go about removing their prostate or offer to help their Southwest captain prep for departure from La Guardia are unafraid to assume a knowledge of fields they know equally little about. I know of more than one fortyish graduate from an expensive private liberal arts college who claims that he learned everything he would need in life, short of practicing surgery and flying a jet aircraft, from his good old alma mater.
If colleges are prepping our future corporate icons with the kind of omniscience that works as easily as a collegiate sticker on a rear windscreen, maybe that's why corporate communications are so obtuse and communicate so little.
Judge results not taste
The test of the pudding is in its success in the marketplace. By second guessing your creative team about what captures the imagination, fuels the soul, educates the masses and brings people to your products, you are supplanting your taste, your judgment, your likes and dislikes with those of the demographic group that are supposed to buy whatever it is you're selling.
I had a client in his fifties, complain about the media placement for his small chain of stores, specializing in "junior" and "missy" clothing for young women. "I haven't seen a single commercial for my stores," he impinged. "I spent too much money on television not to see my own commercials once in a while." I reminded him that our audience consisted of girls 12-16. I asked if he watched the same programming that 12-16 year old girls watched and named a few shows. "If you were seeing your commercials," I said, "I would have failed you. Little girls don't watch the news, Wall Street Report and Meet the Press."
"The important thing," I said, "is whether little girls are coming into your store to buy things." He assured me that sales were up and traffic was better than ever. I rested my case.
Ron Jackson is the CEO and president of The Idea Farm, an advertising, marketing and public relations group based in Danville. You can reach him at ron@theideafarm.net.