I suppose I have been an oxymoron for on-and-off about ten years. That oxymoron? Creative management. That is, I spend more time managing and going to meetings than doing what I'm good at which is writing ads.
A lot of meeting mania comes from the onslaught of work-place democracy. Let's talk about things, collaborate and reach consensus rather than listen to the directives of the person putatively in charge.
So we talk and talk and talk rather than do and do and do.
It makes me sick.
This is why it takes six months for an ad to travel from brief to newspaper. And why it get schmushed along the way. It all reminds me of that game we played when we were kids: telephone. You start with a message and by the time it proceeds from the originator to the end, the whole thing is shot.
This is the advertising industry.
Years ago when I was looking for a job I asked for a decent base salary--ok, though significantly less than I was used to making, but $25 per page of powerpoint I have to sit through.
If the agency I was negotiating with agreed to that, I would have wound up making an Alex-Rodriguez-like salary. If in turn they banned powerpoint in order to economize, I would have been left with time to create work, would have won major awards and would have moved on to eventual riches.
4 comments:
i hate meetings in a way that would cause me to be arrested and stoned in some parts of the middle east
Here's the pithy core of the problem with our meeting-culture.
Account people say: "We had a good meeting."
Creative people say: "Did we sell any work."
There's the rub.
i'd like to reply to this, but i have a 10 o clock meeting to discuss things we need to do for an 11 o clock meeting
wait till you're a muckety-muck. it gets worse.
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