Joseph Heller's novel "Something Happened" has perhaps the most stirring, scary and riveting opening sentences I have ever read. It's a novel of worlds gone terribly wrong. Where balance and equilibrium are gone, and fear and terror are ascendant.
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Something Happened in our industry. My client has given us two or three assignments that I simply cannot understand.
No, I mean it.
As account people like to say, "I don't even understand the 'ask.'"
They aren't asking for creative, or even "strategy," whatever that is. They are asking for schemas, rollouts, go to market plans. They are asking for decks that help sell notions--not to their customers or prospects--but to their own organization.
Something Happened.
The bloat of marketing organizations, the bloat of agencies is such that we have lost our original meaning.
We aren't about communications. We are about spending retainers, making sure everyone is busy and posturing about what will happen in 2014 if we do X,Y and Z in 2012.
We have become bureaucracized.
We have become powerpointless.
We have become meeting moguls.
Something Happened.
1 comment:
or you're just working for the wrong client at the wrong agency. I work in the same industry and don't suffer nearly the issues and drama you do.
wendy
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