When I left art school, I went for interviews on Madison Avenue.

I wanted to work in one of the hot young agencies that were following Bill Bernbach’s model: putting art directors and copywriters together – in their own offices.

These were the agencies where all the great work was being done.

The advertising that was making consumers sit up and take notice, advertising everyone was talking about it.

I didn’t want to work in one of the older, bigger agencies that had huge, open plan  offices.

They were stuck in the past – everyone in open plan spaces, copywriters on one floor and art directors on another.

Traffic would put a brief in the copywriter’s IN tray.

The writer would write an ad and put it in their OUT tray.

Traffic would collect it, take it to the art directors floor and drop it into the IN tray.

An art director would do a rough and put it in their OUT tray.

Traffic would collect the ad, deliver it to account handling and put in their IN tray.

Account-handling would sell it to the client, then put it in their OUT tray.

Traffic would collect it, take it to production and put it in their IN tray.

Production would then get the ad made and it would run.

This was the fastest, most efficient way to get ads out the door, the quickest way for the agency to make money.

Splitting people off into separate, open-plan areas made it like factory, it meant a lot more work could get done, a lot cheaper, in a shorter time.

Of course, production line quality is never great, but that didn’t matter, the work was formulaic, repetitive, and there was lots of it.

And the production line wasn’t a new idea.

Adam Smith wrote about it on the first page of his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

“I have seen a small manufactory where 10 men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations.

But though they were but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about 12 pounds of pins in a day.

There are in a pound upwards of 4,000 pins of a middling size. Those 10 persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of 48,000 pins a day.

Each person, therefore, making a 10th part of 48,000 pins, might be considered as making 4,800 pins in a day.

But if they had all wrought separately and independently, they certainly could not each of them have made 20, perhaps not one pin in a day.

That is certainly not the 240th, perhaps not the 4,800th part of what they are at present capable of performing in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”

So that’s the original concept of the production line.

And just like pins, if you want to mass-produce mediocre advertising cheaply, the conveyor-belt is the fastest, most efficient way to do it.

Open-plan desks in open-plan offices – you can fit more people in more cheaply, and crank out ads in the shortest possible time.

But what if you don’t judge ads by how fast you can crank them out and how much money you can make by running a production line?

What if you want something better than everyone else?

Then you may have to start doing advertising one at a time – not mass-produced.

Starting from a point that not all problems are identical, so not all solutions will be identical, that means the process can’t be identical, so you can’t make ads on a production line.

But of course, there are lots of clients who do just need a conveyor belt cranking out lots of ads in a hurry.

And that’s okay, as long as the ads don’t have to do any more than just fill up space.

In fact we can do them even cheaper and faster without any people at all.

Just by using AI.

The post CONVEYOR-BELT ADVERTISING first appeared on Dave Trott's Blog.