One of the many amazing things about life in today's modern advertising agency is how little you may have in common with many of your colleagues. In fact, if you want to get right down to the nub of it, you can divide agency denizens roughly in two.
1) There are those who have had marketing communications run in paid media.
2) There are those who have never had anything run in paid media.
Not doing work for paid media seems strange to me. But so much of what we purport to do today is "meta-media." We create products, apps, ecosystems and more. We polish presentations. We buff theory to a high-gloss.
When clients spend millions to run something that something is accompanied by a huge raft of expectations and responsibilities. Your work is subject to scrutiny, accountability and pressure that I think meta-media work doesn't face.
A :30 Super Bowl spot costs roughly $5,000/frame.
There's no room for amateurs.
I think it is a very valid point you bring up. Although clients may pay a lot of money for a lot of hours on work that is not going towards paid media, there is a certain discipline in having to make 10 million dollars of media spend worthwhile. Spend $100,000 on creating meta media work and if it flops that's it. Spend $100,000 on coming up with a series of scripts, billboard ideas and print ads, and then spend another 10 million to publish it; well, that's a completely different story.
ReplyDelete