Is this your spine?I just glanced at a front page story in The New York Times about the raging debate in Europe over the efficacy of castrating sex offenders. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/world/europe/11castrate.html?_r=1&hp
Unfortunately the re-Depression, or the Mega-Recession, or Depression 2.0 has already rendered that debate moot in the advertising industry. Castration, or attempts thereof, is rampant.
I explained it this way to my wise-beyond-her-years 21-year-old. For my generation (I am 51) it took a certain confidence, outspokeness, zeal and, yes, perhaps, pain-in-the-assness to make it in this business. Now, as the specter of fear looms larger and larger we are expected to be more easy-going, more compliant, less confrontational, more amenable.
When the client or "management" says, "I have concerns," you prick up your ears. And yes, that is as painful as it sounds.
"Do not go gentle into that good night," Dylan Thomas wrote half a dozen decades or so ago. Maybe now he'd have writ, "Do not go gentle into unemployment."
Oh, thank you. I had a phone argument with a sister office yesterday, trying to get the babbling account manager to nail down the one benefit I need to focus on, while she kept repeating that the client seemed to want this visual and that copy line. In the end, I felt like I'd pissed off everyone on the other end (and I'm a quiet person, lemme tell you)... but all I wanted was the stuff to do my job right.
ReplyDeleteApparently that was secondary.
Too many very capable but reasonable people have conveniently been laid off recently because they did what management and clients asked for even if they knew they could do better. Because if they had fought for their work, most probably losing the argument, they would have risked lay offs.
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