My leitmotif of the last few weeks, certainly my last couple of posts, has been about waste.
The waste that comes with the by committee approach to the creation, approval and production of marketing communications.
I am still working on spots I shot on October 14th. The client has some "tweaks." In fact they've had six months of "tweaks."
This can't be good. For either cost-control or communication.
When I was 25 and a neophyte in the business I would labor over a brief until I could write a sentence in eight words or less on what the client wanted to say. When I got to eight words in plain, simple English I would then find a way to make those words interesting.
No one worries about this crap today.
Today we worry about making meetings.
As I like to say, "It's not a communication, it's a negotiation."
No wonder we're in the mess we're in.
And I mean that in both macro and micro contexts.
It’s what happens when you over-professionalise an industry. Advertising has long been an end in itself, rather than as a means of selling more products. Hence it now takes 6 months to get stuff signed off, as that process, which should be single point in time, is now a end in itself, with all sorts of sub-processes. The Ad Contrarian talked about this on his blog as well recently.
ReplyDeleteWe shall never succeed until we cull the entire industry to less than 500 people, whose incentive to make things happen is the alternative of 30 hour days.