Why advertising needs to think more and romanticise less.
Many advertising folks I know started their careers diving head-first into the deep end of the pool. Like me, they have come from far corners of the sensible world: law, medicine, engineering, I.T, and without anything to keep them afloat, they have gone searching for pennies on the pool floor. But of course, it is more than just academic diversity that finds home in the bean bags and conference rooms of ad agencies. Sometimes it feels like: “Have birth certificate? You’re hired.” And that, for better or for worse, is the world of advertising for you.
In advertising parlance, this is called passion; and by those on the outside looking in, it is uncharitably termed ‘an inexplicable madness.’ Passion sounds good, even looks good in print. A famous 90s denim brand ran the headline, “Count the passion, not the inches” which many of us adolescents only partially understood. Yet, after two and a half decades, I cannot but sigh a little wistfully; not in reminiscence of any fabled ‘good old days’ or in hand-wringing despair of the current state of affairs, but in sadness that this ‘passion’ leads so many good people astray.
Nostalgia is a dangerous pastime and advertising folks play with fire all the time. Passion is the one-word-fits-all for the heydays. In this flashback, people pushed themselves, fought tooth and nail for an idea, worked themselves to a bone, and lived and breathed advertising. Having done this myself, I neither applaud nor criticise it. While passion may have sparked much of this behaviour, let us be honest, it was driven by other pragmatic concerns. Romanticising the past exaggeratedly, puts passion on a pedestal as though that were the only ingredient of great advertising. And the P-Quotient cannot be the only benchmark for evaluating an advertising professional.
A passion for creativity is the ticket price for entry into advertising. But when it comes to sustaining a career and surviving the industry, passion simply is not enough. Passion fades. Business reality says, it’s not you it’s me. And now, with the agency landscape shapeshifting and A.I. getting some popcorn, I feel passion is even more defenceless, ill-equipped, and dare I say, sadly comical.
The truth is, I am still afflicted by this inexplicable madness I feel obliged to offer an approach that I hope is helpful; aka give back to the industry that continues to put bene dosas on my table. If passion by itself is insufficient to build a lasting career in advertising (without losing one’s sanity), what is the alternative? As with most good answers, it is a bit of this and a bit of that. Some heart, some head. If passion is the heart, then we need to complement it with an intellectual perspective that will protect it and even nurture it. A symbiosis that reminds me of the (Assamese?) fable: the grass agrees to protect a stone by growing tall and hiding it; and the farmers refuse to cut the grass because they know the hidden stones could break the blades.
As a copywriter, being dramatic with the written word comes easily. If this was an emergency in advertising, here is my R.E.D alert—the intellectual component to passion. Rejection, Expectation, and Deception. In the deep end of the advertising pool, my passion helped keep my head above water only for so long. Understanding these three approaches has been critical for me to stay afloat for over two decades. Today, I parrot this my team, and I wish someone had parroted it to me much earlier.
One of the things that unites advertising folks is rejection. Writers (which here and everywhere else in the article includes designers, strategists, and account managers) are constantly asked to create something more impactful, chase an ‘a-ha moment’, rephrase, rewrite, rescript… everything that will drive them to resign. It doesn’t matter whether the diktats come from within the agency or the client, from peer pressure or one’s boss, from lofty self-expectation or the desire to create something new. Whatever the cause, a writer spends more time rewriting and rehashing what they have created than creating something new. Passion is great to get started but one needs persistence to sustain. I prefer stubbornness. Be a mountain.
When a writer signs on the dotted line of the offer letter, they are agreeing to hearing a lot of Nos. But it isn’t easy. As with all creative work—whether it is one slide in a deck or a brief—there is often something of the creator on the paper, mixing with the ink, flowing through the words. Every creative output contains within it an intangible Me-ness; one’s own flavour of creativity, a personal magic that comes from an unknown place. Consequently, when this work is rejected it stings. The rejection isn’t just a dismissal of the output, it feels like a personal negation. That deep hurt is more than just disappointment.
This has led me to postulate that the longevity of one’s advertising career is directly proportional to the thickness of one’s hide. While it is true for all careers, for sure, I believe it has greater significance in a creative career. Stubbornness, doggedness, and persistence build one’s hide; and a strong hide in turn develops the other three. Grass protect stone protect grass.
Practically speaking, what helps build this fortitude is reconfiguring one’s thinking. It starts with not just acknowledging, but also making peace with the reality that advertising is as commercial, ruthless, and profit-minded as any other business. A person with a decade in advertising will find that to be a banal and obvious observation. But that same person would also wish they had realised that truth much earlier. More than strategists or account managers, creative folk need to spend weeks at the client’s office; shadow their clients, sit in on sales review meetings, budget discussions, and eavesdrop on back-and-forths with vendors. But instead, many creatives cocoon themselves from the harsh realities of the business side of advertising; they upholster their bubble with swandowns and puff away substances, in glassy-eyed pursuit of the ‘big idea’. By not understanding that clients need to make money, that this is a capitalistic endeavour in an unsympathetic, unforgiving market, creative folk in effect blindfold themselves and then complain the industry is dark.
Creative folk are paid to do a job. Their creativity has to serve a purpose and be subservient to the business objectives and realities. The sooner we understand this the easier it becomes to distance ourselves from our output. Distance from the creative output reduces the sting of rejection. Less sting, less pain. Longer career. QED.
For those already bristling and foaming at the mouth and want to put me in my place, might I suggest you read my article on trolling with poetic sophistication. It’s called, John Dryden – a Jedi of trolling. Look, this is business, and I am not below any self-promotion.
As a lawyer turned copywriter, disclaimers are my bread and butter. So let me state them, not because I am obligated to, but because two and a half decades in the business has given me understanding. Ideas are still king, top dog, alpha. This business runs on innovation and creativity. That’s why we got in, that’s why we are paid. A flash of brilliance can completely upend a client’s rigid thinking and present a solution that drops jaws (on and off Linkedin). Everybody wants a great idea, but remember not everybody has the money, courage, or conviction to stand behind it. Accept it, make peace with it, move on. Just because we presented a great idea doesn’t mean it has to see fruition.
This brings me to the next point in code RED. Expectation. Advertising doesn’t owe a creative person (again, this includes the strategist and the account manager) anything. The industry doesn’t exist to provide a space in the world where we can truly and fully express our creative talents. I find it odd even having to write that. Yet, for no fault of theirs, many creative folk walk into agencies expecting just that. I have no shame in admitting I was one of them. I expected my sizzling headlines to be instantly praised, my weirdest scripts to be flashing across TV sets, that campaign line (so high in cringe I hurtle towards Freudian repression) to be sneering at everyone from billboards. Let me say with much understatement, when none of them saw the light of day, I didn’t take it too well. I railed, shook my fists at the boss’ cabin, raged at the client—I did it all. Hide thin, sting much.
The point isn’t that some of these ideas were very good and some were awful. The point is, I expected all my unfulfilled creative desires to be satisfied by this amazing industry called advertising; a godsend where I could be my whacky, creative self, and get paid for it. What’s not to like? Every creative person needs a moment of losing that innocence. That first contact with business reality gets them in shape, quashes myths, rectifies faulty thinking.
Like St. John the Baptist clamouring through the desert, I exhort copywriters to release Advertising from shouldering the burden of fulfilling their creative needs. Redirect it somewhere where crude commerce and whimsical corner cabins cannot dilute, reject, or alter your creative output. Exhaust your jouissance there, and come to Advertising light and easy to bear. From my own experience I have discovered that having a writing practice apart from advertising has actually improved the quality of my copywriting and creative thinking on advertising briefs.
Finally, we need to be aware of a Deception. One that we have brought on ourselves. Most of us came to advertising with a certain self confidence that while we may not know much about it, we could figure it out as we went along. You have got to love Advertising for that. Where else would such swagger and brazen cockiness be excused? But for writers that warm welcome is deceptive. They would be foolish to think a mere felicity in stringing a few sentences together would suffice. For a while, a writer can get by employing handy cliches, puns, wordplays and phrases picked up from other ads. Learning to swim at the deep end itself brings enough desperation to learn the skills required to stay afloat. But to be able to do laps effortlessly, to wade into the depths of the ocean where greater challenges and greater rewards lurk, one needs to learn, to study.
Honing one’s craft, I believe, will challenge us, keep our thinking fresh, and drag us out of the swamp of complaining the client doesn’t appreciate our work. If we truly understood that our craft is our livelihood, we would guard it, nurture it, and develop it with…yes, passion. It is essential to quickly break out of the deception that simply because most of the day-to-day skills required in advertising are things one does anyway—writing, talking, thinking—one will get by just fine, (add jargon for best results.)
In mail order advertising of the 60s in America, every advertisement carried a cut-out coupon at the bottom, and the efficacy of each advertisement could be tracked by the number of coupons that came in. It clearly set apart the ads that worked and didn’t; the writers who knew their trade and those that didn’t. In fact, some agencies only paid their writers if their ads pulled in a sufficient number of orders. Today’s writers, free from any such requirement, don’t feel the pressure—or necessity—to hone their craft.
While every writer has their personal bag of tricks it is essential to periodically refresh that. This is demonstrated beautifully by a popular exercise I have used personally and with my teams; the task is to fill fifty boxes with new ideas, (or new headlines, taglines etc.). I assure you, by box 10 or 15 people are gasping for air.
The issue, I believe, is that as writers, we never simply ‘practice’. All our practice is on the job, on actual briefs, with a deadline looming (or long gone), and a Friday evening that promises debauchery. Pressure can force sudden brilliance, but it isn’t the best time to ‘practice’. Our designation as a copywriter does not magically bestow us with knowledge. We don’t wake up knowing the right way to speak to a woman approaching her forties, anxious about the impending changes to her body; we are not hardwired with the right words to use to invite a millionaire to consider an exclusive luxury property. Writing for a retirement plan is vastly different from writing to spur an impulse purchase. Consider the sheer number of different categories, target groups, and products that copywriters must write about as though they have personal experience. This cannonball of an expectation is unreal, unforgiving, and yet routinely tied to the legs of the deep-end swimmer.
A writing habit outside advertising will certainly help sharpen our writing. In the absence of that, I suggest deliberate practice: simply sitting down and training ourselves to write for different products, different services, and different audiences. Make a list and work our way through it. Re-reading everything in one shot can be illuminating and humbling. It will reveal how uniform our sentence structures are, how deficient our vocabulary is, how repetitive we sound. It will bring home the truth that unless we study copywriting techniques, we remain a one-trick pony, neighing the same way whether we are selling soap or whisky.
Given that no writer can know about every industry and cannot have experienced everything they have to write about, the solution I feel is to use copywriting strategies and frameworks. Truth is, many of us do this instinctively; a habit acquired over years of plying the trade. But we do not stop to think about it or name it, or even develop further techniques, because then it seems to take the magic away from the process and reduce it to a formula. I disagree. From agency rooftops I will claim, frameworks are freedom.
These frameworks are easy to find and can become part of one’s deliberate practice ritual. The Minto pyramid, or the PEEL (Point, Explanation, Evidence, Link) framework are simple and easy to make second nature. If all this sounds Greek and Latin to you, consider Aristotle’s keys of Rhetoric (which is a way of building an argument): ethos, pathos, logos; simply translated—credibility, emotion, rationality. Mapping the product, audience, and context to one of these provides a sound starting point. While overlaps will occur, the rhetorical spine of our argument remains stable and consistent.
Frameworks will provide the logical structure for copy, but the emotional lattice is built from experience. And there are two ways a writer can build this knowledge: conversations with people and conversations with books. The former requires us to detach from our phones, seek opportunities for conversation, not be fazed by small talk, and develop an interest to speak to a wide variety of people. Precisely because the writer does not know who their next client will be, or what category they will have to work on the following day, it is important to treat all conversations with equal importance, whether it is with the lady at the jewellery store counter or the laments of the storekeeper at an appliance shop.
While not all readers write, most writers I know read extensively. Some writers I know should most certainly read, but that’s for another time. It feels a little silly to belabour this point, but there is much to learn about the human condition from literature. Even a visit to the bookstore can be revealing; the books on display prominently at the front indicate what is top of mind for a certain section of society. It spotlights the subtle undercurrents, political, social, spiritual and more. An interesting experiment is to see which ones retain their prime real estate after a few weeks or months and which ones have gone with the wind.
Good authors have a special gift of touching a cultural nerve and making society convulse. That, is precious. Regional writing is home to a treasure chest of insights, the likes of which would bring tears of joy to those who value insight driven creativity.
With the three RED perspectives in place, I believe passion can not only do its job better, it doesn’t have to go beyond its JD. Passion can then inspire an interest to learn and help us stay motivated in a business which will inevitably give us low days—just as any other business or relationship will.
Passion is the singular virtue for the Romantics, and they berate the current generation for the lack of it. Sit at a table with them and one is immediately overpowered by the fumes of cynicism. “The Death of Passion” is their succinct summary, neatly capturing all the ills of the industry; a stark one line indictment. But it need not be today’s truth. With the right mindset and dedication to honing one’s craft, passion won’t just survive, it will drive the industry—as it has always done. If the swimmers at the deep end of the pool, however, have only their passion and birth certificate, then it is not they who need a lifejacket, but the industry itself.
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