Does work like this matter anymore?
Almost forty years ago, I developed a test.
A test of people.
(As my daughters might say, I’m a judgey sonofa.)
Around that time, even though I was young, often clients and others would ask me if I would talk to their niece or nephew, or a friend of a cousin’s tennis coach, because they wanted to get a job in advertising.
When I started in 1993 or so teaching a course or two in advertising at the School of Visual Arts, I quickly realized something.
A lot of people want to go into advertising.
They think it’s easy.
They think it’s fun.
They think it’s rich.
They think ideas pop into your head and the next thing you know you’re off shooting with gorgeous actors in exotic locales.
And breakfast burritos.
At the School of Visual Arts I realized that if your class started with fifteen people, after four weeks it would be down to ten.
After three more weeks it would be down to seven.
At the end of the twelve or fifteen weeks, three kids would still be working hard on the assignment. Those three would eventually get jobs in the industry.
Even though it’s almost 35 years since then and a lot has changed, I’d imagine those ratios really haven’t.
The test I developed was blunt and binary.
I learned it from my father, actual.
He was blunt and binary.
I’d ask wannabes a simple question.
When you go into a grocery store, do you get excited?
That is do you like seeing product design and display?
Do you like seeing how products present themselves?
The monikers attached to them?
Do you like seeing them showing off like a musician during a guitar solo?
If you’re not excited by what we sell and how it’s sold and how others are doing it, I reason, you’re probably not right for the business.
(Going to the A&P with my father was like watching a ballgame with Branch Rickey or a fashion-show with André Leon Talley. These people see a lot of these things. They zero-in on small specialness.)
My core belief is simple.
There’s a lot of sameness in the world.
In the grocery store.
In politicians.
In products.
In agencies.
In people trying to break into the job.
I’ll put it very simply.
As simply as I can.
No one gets picked for blending in.
People, products, companies, politicians, butterflies on the wing get picked by standing out.
(Years ago, Steven Spielberg started filming the stories of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. Even these stories, full of emotion, horror, woe and triumph got boring after a while. Some of the world’s most powerful stories didn’t stand out because of their sameness.)
The biggest change I have noticed in advertising is that no longer do we have to have heated arguments about the color green versus yellow, or the word “but” versus “although,” today we argue over un-arguable things.
We actually argue over the need to differentiate.
Many people, maybe the majority, no longer believe you have to.
They have all sorts of plannery-ratiocinations why differentiating is no longer necessary.
I think this started in the early days of advertising and data.
We somehow believed that our targeting would be so good we’d get our message to an eager buyer and it would be perfectly adroit and convincing. You’ve heard the hype.
The right message to the right person at the right time. (That seldom happens even with the most ardent lovers. What are the chances it will happen with mayonnaise?)
Its mere arrival would lead to sales.
No idea was actually necessary.
That thinking spilled into direct marketing's adjunct, digital.
And from digital it went on to sully every other sphere.
What’s more, maybe the people in advertising today no longer actually go to the grocery store.
They no longer make a decision about what they buy.
Or they no longer think about it.
About once-a-week someone over 50 calls me.
They’ve just lost their job.
They have a great site.
And won two lions at Cannes a couple years back.
“What makes you different,” I ask.
They funfer. That’s Yiddish for er-ing and um-ing and not answering.
Finally they ask indignantly, “what do you mean?”
“I mean everyone has a great book. Everyone’s won two lions. Everyone has great recommendations and something shot by Brian or Lance.
“What makes you different?”
Funfer.
What makes you different is from an ontological point of view about the world’s hardest question to answer.
It’s what makes you you?
Or as they sang in The Chorus Line, “Who Am I Anyway? Am I My Resume?"
Most people prefer not to answer it.
So they meander from one shit-hole to the next.
Never more than a post-nasal-drip away from being again fired.
Because ‘what makes you different’ is hard.
Too hard for most people to bother with.
Here are some differences.
There’s not a soul alive who could convince me these ads would not work today.
But we’ll never know.
They’re different.
And different is too hard.
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