Advertising and the Joy of Naivete
Gawker published a great point-counterpoint-counter counterpoint today on working in advertising. A few quick excerpts and my response:
Hamilton Nolan:
Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. We all need jobs. There is nothing wrong with doing something that is not your dream job, out of necessity. But it doesn’t have to be advertising. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist. If it doesn’t work out financially, at least you gave it a shot. And you never have to stop making art, regardless of your circumstances. Unless you agree to sell your creativity to that machine.
Drew Magary:
Yeah no, that’s wrong. Your creativity isn’t worth anything. In fact, you probably already have a terribly overinflated sense of just how awesome all of your ideas are. “Why do I have to be slave to corporate America, man? Why can’t people appreciate, like, the purity of my art?! MY PRECIOUS ART!” It never hurts to work inside a system that knocks you and your bullshit pretension down a peg. You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece. God forbid you work to please someone other than yourself
Fine points all around, but it’s never so black and white. Advertising, as an industry, has always been viewed as this freak nasty beast shoving products down our throats and raping our poor, innocent eyes with pictures of hot women eating cheeseburgers, but there’s more to it than that. I’m 29, married, and I work as a management consultant. For the past two years, the majority of my projects have involved me writing literature reviews for the Department of Defense. I have clients paying for my ability to read and write and they can be just as asshole-ish as any corporate stooge who shows up at meetings just to say something sucks. I write for a living, but I’m still doing it for someone else. I’ve learned to stop complaining about that. It helps that I get to work from home and walk my dog every afternoon. I even get my “contributing to society” rocks off knowing my work is going towards helping active duty service members and vets stay safe and healthy. But it’s not enough.
I want to work in advertising to learn how to communicate and inspire. This is ridiculously naive and idealistic, I know, but I can think of few other industries where I can learn to write in a way that motivates people to do something. It’s not sexy or glamorous to think about ways to get a middle-aged housewife to buy more laundry detergent, but the principles of writing to inspire action are invaluable. So many of society’s great ideas are lost in the weeds because they don’t know how to communicate. Potential solutions to complex problems like climate change or poverty or disease prevention often fail, not because they’re flawed ideas, but because they lack great advertising. Learning how to write and sell ideas that spur action, that’s pretty damn exciting to me; regardless of whether I’m selling shoes or federal fiscal policy changes. Every “Lost Puppy” poster and “[Your Favorite Band] Live!” flyer is advertising. It’s not always soulless and evil.
The American Society of Magazine Editors has this yearly conference where they all get together and jerk off and talk about where they are and where the culture is. So they invited me down a few years ago and asked me to talk about the Esquire covers and tell everybody to stop doing terrible covers, or something like that. I was like, “So you want me to come down and bust balls? OK.” Just about every editor and publisher in America was there, and I just ripped their eyeballs out. Every magazine except maybe Vanity Fair and the New Yorker was complicit in the Iraq war. I gave them the whole thing about weapons of mass destruction and said, “Every one of you sons of bitches is complicit in what’s going on over there.” They were all, “Oooohhhh.” Ten minutes later I did a little bit more of it [mimes clapping his hands together to demonstrate their applause], and then half an hour later I really ripped into them about the war and I got a standing ovation.
Read the rest at Vice Magazine: GEORGE LOIS - Vice Magazine
Nike Big Butt Campaign
NikeWomen has a new ad (actually a reprise of a 2005 campaign) and it’s brilliant. Unexpected. Truthful. Appealing. It’s a perfect marriage of art and copy (notice the staggered margins?). For those thinking, “heh-heh, sex sells…”
#1 - you’re an idiot
#2 this is ad is not selling sex
It’s not school boy raunch, it’s confidence. Confidence sells.
W+K are my favorite teacher.
Nice job with boring text over stock footage.
Nice job integrating a 1980’s infomercial soundtrack to attract a young, urban, superstar athlete.
Nice job speaking, rather than showing the old-time NY Knicks greats.
Nice job losing the lebron sweepstakes.
