An email from Cassandra.

While I was wallowing in the nostalgia an email (below) came in from a dear friend of mine. Cassandra, by the way, was a Trojan seer-ess who could tell the future but no one would believe her.

George,

today the only thing that really matters is technology.

And stuff that has little to do with the actual work.

The ideas, the creative work, the stuff that connects, communication is the stuff that we're supposed to give away for free. Discussing it in meetings is what agencies get paid for. Not the quality of the work.

That's why everyone can and do have an opinion about the creative work. 

An opinion about concepts and ideas, the words, the lay-out, the typography, the size of the logo, what not. 

But nobody has an opinion about the plumbing. Because that's the mysterious dark forest today. 

So it's perfectly fine to work forever and charge thereafter for that sort of basics. Stuff that means nothing if there's no message. In general clients seem to accept paying plenty for a lot of fluff but nothing for the actual work. 

Paying for hordes of people sitting around talking BS (at best) seems to be fine. Useless decks are discussed in eternity. And then, when after endless discussions and useless pseudo scientific testing shit has gone on, costing a lot of money, the work is finally to be proceed.

Then every cost that might positively affect the product is discussed and questioned. It's hell to be on the creative side in today's advertising world. The only people who actually produce anything of value are the ones valued least. We never ever get to produce what we really think is right. We have to bend and follow a whole bunch of self important hacks and idiots. That is, if we have a job at all of course.

The era of Ed McCabe, Lois, etc. is gone. There are NO leading creative voices in todays ad world. The stars of our time are relegated to be stars among other creatives only, relegated to the fame of the awards, not business success.

Also. Computer technology has made the creative people terribly efficient. We can produce entire campaigns in a few hours. Almost ready to run. The amount of comps and sketches and halfcooked cap we produce today are hundredfold compared to 30 years ago when we sat shown for days to THINK before we started to look for pictures.

So there are fewer and fewer of us in proportion to the talkers and pretenders that populate our meeting rooms.

The real reason for all those meetings is that most of the people in the room do nothing productive in between the meetings. The meetings are their job. And we're prisoners in it.