A year or so back, I was chatting to a young creative team who’d just got a job.
I said “Which one of you is the art director?”
They shrugged and said “We both are.”
I said “Okay, so who’s the copywriter?”
They said “Well, we both are really.”
I said “Then who types up the body copy?”
They said “Well we share that.”
I said “Okay, who does the layout, who chooses the type, the photographer?”
They said “Well we just do a rough and give it to the head of design, he does all that.”
That was pretty much the end of the conversation.
I felt I was talking to children, not professionals.
But that’s the sort of teams we’re hiring nowadays.
They can’t do layouts, they can’t write, and they don’t even care.
Just explain to me why a creative director would hire untrained children.
My art director for thirty years, Gordon Smith, was dyslexic.
So he checked every word with a spellchecker he carried in his pocket.
No one was going to do his job for him, no matter what.
He often wrote better headlines than me, but he didn’t see that as his job.
His job was spelt with a cap A and cap D.
No one dared change anything on Gordon’s ads, and that included all the way up to colour correction on final proofs.
He wouldn’t have let that young team sharpen his pencils for him.
Because what Gordon had that they didn’t have was pride.
Pride in not letting anyone do any aspect of your job better than you could.
Pride in not wanting to look like an amateur.
David Abbott had pride in his job.
John Webster had pride in his job.
Tony Brignull had pride in his job.
Paul Arden had pride in his job.
John Hegarty had pride in his job.
All the greats had pride.
That’s why they were the best.
Under “Profession” John Webster had “Art Director” in his passport.
He didn’t have “Well not sure really, I just do a rough and give it to someone else.”
Of course we want great ideas.
But no one gets there without first having pride in what they do.
Helmut Krone was maybe the greatest art director ever.
He said “I can’t wait for the copywriter to leave after work. Once we’ve had the idea I want to go in the studio and start experimenting with different looks and different typefaces. I don’t want him looking over my shoulder giving his opinion. When he comes in, in the morning, it will be the same ad we talked about last night, but he won’t recognise it.”
My wife was an art director at AMV with David Abbott.
She said that whenever she was putting together an ad she’d done with him, David stayed late into the night until the ad was totally finished.
He stayed in case a line of copy was too long and needed changing.
If the ad looked better for losing several characters, David would make sure he was the one to choose which characters to lose and how to rewrite the line.
Pride is why he won more awards than almost anyone else.
Pride is also why his name is on one of the biggest and best agencies in Europe.
Lack of pride is why I can’t even remember the names of that young team I talked to.
More and more, I meet copywriters who are very proud they can’t
write.
Because no one reads.
And no one reads because these copywriters don’t read.
They’re busy finding out the latest trends.
Hi Dave,
Whilst I agree with you that having pride in your work is key, I suspect the creative team were forced to take on multiple roles by their employers.
It’s becoming rarer for agencies to have specialists in key roles and much more common for them to expect everyone to chip in and do multiple roles. This could be for better scheduling, ease of moving clients, consistency of knowledge when people leave, a desire to employ less people etc.
They could have all the pride in the world but if their work environment dictates they take on every role under the sun then they’re somewhat stuck. Were they to say “no I’m a copywriter I only do X” they may be passed over for other roles when compared to their more versatile peers, or seen to not be a team player.
There’s also another reaction to this team – one that says “This inexperienced team may not have the skills that my years of experience have taught me, but I will take it upon myself to help them.”.
A team without experts is doomed to produce a product only as good as the average of their capabilities. Advertising isn’t my domain, but I know for sure this approach to team building and roles and responsibilities wouldn’t produce very good software 🙂
almost had an epi reading this.
I brief my teams and review and feedback along the process till there’s no time.
But more recently its so off the mark that if I simply take over this at the last minute and do it myself (as the kids refuse to apprentice and learn by the side)
The best part is the kids wouldnt notice the difference between what they did and the final work (luckily the customers and consumers do)
Like I said, almost had an epi…
Dear Stuart, I would just like to point out that no one, I repeat, no one has ever done more to help young people working in advertising, or trying to work in advertising than the Copywriter wot wrote this blog.