The best way to teach advertising
Credit to Author: Vincent Pozon| Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2020 17:07:46 +0000
THE advertising agency isn’t an office; it’s a home. People spend more time at work than at home, so the office must be comfortable; going to office must be a welcome act. That is why harmony is primordial.
The fastest way to turn tasks into tribulations, simple chores into sizeable crosses is to inject disharmony into the workplace. In my nearly half a century in the advertising industry, I saw how the nasty and the negative, how even one grumbling, mumbling employee can disturb an office. I call them blackholes, as recognition of the strength of the negative. One black hole can suck up all the humor and congeniality from an otherwise happy team or company.
I remember leaving a conference room buoyant about the results of the meeting. We just had a creative review, and the visiting fireman from headquarters was impressed, appeased at the very least, and I was eager to tell the creative department that we managed to get approvals. As I opened the door, I was met with glum, end-of-the-world faces: someone from the same meeting had gotten to them ahead of me and told them that it was a disaster. One black hole managed to make several people distraught, in minutes.
In the agencies I have been involved in shaping, I dismantled the traditional setup of having discrete accounts and creative departments, and, instead, created business teams.
In teams, people of all disciplines sat beside each other, breathed the same air, and, more importantly, spoke for and defended each other. Accounts people would attend recordings if the copywriter couldn’t, for instance. Help was asked of each other. The team system helps prevent the usual wrangling and wrestling normally found in ad agencies.
But it helps to put applicants through a sieve and screen for the big agency virus called “taray,” and check any emergence of infection harshly.
Taray is that smirk, that glance, that whisper, that spirit, that arrogant humph; and that arrogance comes from an insecurity found in, bred and cultivated by people in the creative field. The snark and the snide remark come when the creative man is in a corner and faced with a deadline, unable to come up with something decent. The abrasiveness is the characteristic of the insecure, of people uncertain of their worth or ability.
The copywriter who contests a creative brief and argues with an accounts person is a craftsman who cannot come up with anything of worth. The words on the brief do not nourish him, and he lashes out, in panic. He needs an alibi. The insecure creative man is disharmonious. I exaggerate, of course.
I have interviewed many people in my years in management, and I saw that people from large agencies tend to have full-grown horns and bad habits. Having been in several large and old ad agencies, I can understand the need to equip oneself, steel oneself with the armor and horns, be wary of backstabbers.
To avoid hiring black holes, we tried considering only fresh graduates, and discovered that the greenhorns, too, had horns, albeit junior. They already had the perceptions that plague the industry, e.g., that advertising is a glamorous job; that it is about art and expressing oneself; that it is not about science or selling. These are the very myths that attracted the students to the course.
The lesson was clear as day. This told me — a bona-fide dropout, one who had but a badly-attended year in college — that I have to teach. That I must start while they are still in school. Which means I must have a college degree, and postgraduate units, so I can teach, so I can help improve the industry by providing it a subset with a better understanding of the business.
So, I can, at the very least, have young people I would be glad to hire and enjoy training.
And so I taught advertising in college, I had hoped to affect and infect the industry with people with the right work ethic and values. Most courses attempt to simulate the real world of a profession; mine did not. The real world of advertising is fraught with errors, fallacies, and, simply put, what not to do. I had hoped to “improve the industry of advertising by providing it with a better generation,” so I wrote about this foray into teaching.
In part 2, I will detail what I taught, what I sought to teach, and what I believe is an even better way to teach advertising.
The author is chairman of Estima, an ad agency dedicated to helping local industrialists and causes, and co-founder of Caucus, Inc., a multi-discipline consultancy firm. He can be reached through vpozon@me.com.