From F to B. (A ramble.)

If you read advertising blogs, as I have said in this space before, you traipse through a universe where nearly everyone is a hack and any work that any agency has ever done sucks a bone the size of the Washington Monument.

The small-minded, mean-spirited venom you find on the likes of Agency Spy, or even George Parker's wonderful blog Ad Scam is almost enough to make you give up blogging altogether. (Not that blogging has any importance. I blog because I love to write. And now that I've worked my way down in advertising to the point where I'm not a Big Cheese anymore, no one is around to listen to me spout. In a blog people can ignore my thoughts anonymously. Which is much safer for all concerned.)

In any event, I was thinking this morning about something I've always said to associates, bosses, big bosses and giant bosses. "If you want to move an account from a "B" to an "A," I'm not your man. But if you want to move one from a "D" or an "F" to a "B," there's no one in the industry better than I am."

The fact is, very little of the work in the industry today can be regarded as "A" work. And very little, as far as I can discern, of that "A" work actually ran.

Much more of the work we produce is unimportant, mediocre, mild and mundane. It is insultingly dumb. Uninspired. It is work designed to fill 30 seconds, not move a client's business ahead.

Of course, our mania as an industry is to divine excruciating "A" work that no one sees or notices. In the parlance of thousands of account dweebs sprinkled across this not-so-green planet of ours, we create work that "boils the ocean." Conceited, small and incessantly masturbatory.

The bigger job--the rising tide meant to life all boats--of taking dreck to respectable is a quality we, as an industry, ignore.