Tuesday, April 1, 2008

How was your day, dear?



Most agencies today, and most clients, are run by people who are not creative. Agencies are run by account guys. Clients' marketing departments are run by MBAs. It appears that their collective objective is to make meetings, not to make creative ways to impart useful consumer information. So yesterday's post about the fifteen or so emails needed to pin down a time for a relatively useless status meeting wasn't really funny. It was sad. It was a dozen or so people not thinking, not working, pushing digital paper.

Not that long ago when I worked at a gigantic agency and had a creative department of 140 people to manage I urged my SVP/GCDs to take one day off a week--one day where they went to no meetings, reviewed no work, spoke to no account people or clients. One day where they actually thought about their clients' business. I figured these were the highest paid people in the creative department, and as an agency we were losing something not having them actually create. So I urged them to.

I was roundly excoriated for this. Told I was a loon. That what I suggested was impossible, naive, foolish. So it never happened.

There is a certain inevitability to all this. We wake up, we got to work, we sleep. We go to meetings, shuffle through emails, go to more meetings, prepare for meetings, repair what we prepared, and so it goes.

No wonder. That's all I'm going to say. No wonder.

3 comments:

Tore Claesson said...

so it goes.
i don;t know how many meetings i've been in that is simply about setting a time for the next meeting.
People feel very scared when they are not invited to meetings. as if they are no longer important.
The need for meetings gets bigger the bigger the agency.
if there isn't a natural way for people to interact, or meet, and see each other in the same room frequently
a meeting must be called. To calm everybody's nerves.
Try this: Invite everybody but one person to a meeting. Then check the pulse on that person.

Laura said...

I often wonder what would happen if people started dying in meetings? Would they get the hint or just continue talking?

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