When I was 16, I left school and got a job as an apprentice toolmaker.
I worked in a factory, and the job that fascinated me was a guy called the ‘Progress Chaser’.
It seemed his role was to chase a particularly urgent job through the system.
Not every job, just whichever job he’d been told was a priority.
He’d walk around the factory floor shouting at people working on the machinery.
It seemed that whatever was happening with all the rest of the factory’s jobs, his job was to push everything else aside so his job(s) got done first.
First on the lathes, first on the milling machines, in the polishing shop, in the chroming vats.
Anything else wasn’t his problem, so he had a vast sense of self-importance as he swaggered through the factory floor barking orders.
This was Progress-Chasing.
It seems to me that’s what we have in advertising, but it’s called ‘Traffic’.
As if by changing the name we made it seem like a sensible way to run an agency.
It works just like progress-chasing: wait until account-handling are finally ready with a brief.
Then throw it into the creative department and mark it ‘Urgent’, it’s a rush job so we need a first review this afternoon, that gives you 6 hours to do it.
6 hours later, we find the brief was wrong, here’s a new one, we need to see work at 9am.
Next morning none of it’s right, but we’re seeing the client for lunch: you’ve got 3 hours.
So that’s the work the client gets.
Because that’s ‘Progress-Chasing’ that’s not ‘Traffic’.
Traffic is what we see every day on the roads, a controlled flow.
Traffic lights allow one minute for east-west traffic, then a minute for north-south traffic.
And everything moves.
Now imagine if Progress-Chasing decided to get rid of traffic lights and put red flashing lights and sirens on some of those vehicles, that’s how most agencies are run.
That’s why the quality of work is piss-poor.
Agency priority isn’t about anything but: ‘Get out what you can, asap.”
We don’t have traffic, we have (at best) a conveyor belt, we’re back to the way it used to run in factories, why is that?
Because the creative part is left to the end of the process.
Account handling and planning aren’t trafficked, so-called Traffic (Progress-Chasing) doesn’t even start until the brief is written.
So they can take all the time they like to write the brief, no one is chasing them.
Then they throw the brief into creative and put ‘Traffic’ (Progress-Chasing) on it to hound it through in whatever time’s left.
REAL traffic is when you apply the system to the ENTIRE agency.
The minute you know the airdate, you divvy up the time fairly between departments, so say: account handling gets a quarter, planning gets a quarter, creative gets a quarter, and production gets a quarter.
Then you feed this into real ‘Traffic’ and they enforce deadlines in EVERY department.
That way the client gets the best job the ENTIRE agency can do.
Instead of just whatever progress-chasing can hustle out of the creatives in a few hours.
At present, when the client sees the final creative work, they think the entire time they gave the agency was used to come up with the idea.
They don’t realise it was 40% account handling, 40% planning, 10% creative, and 10% production.
Given all that actually appears on the screen is creative and production, you might wonder why they get just 20% of the time, and the part that doesn’t appear gets 80% of the time.
As a client, you might wonder why you’re paying for that 80%.
True but gotten worse, Dave.
One agency I was at, the chief visualizer insisted
on 2 days for every job.
Fine if creative team had 2 weeks for the brief.
We didn’t.
The thinking, which management either didn’t know about
or just approved, was drawing up ads required a certain
amount of time.
But coming up with ideas could be speeded up.
That sucked but things have gotten worse.
I was at an agency that also did online work.
The argument was “no time to traffic.”
So the ‘brief’ was emailed to the writers – lots of
content work.
Traffic was left out.
So no one really knew how much work was going through.
But one thing was sure.
The work was bad.
Plus there’s others in Creative now. Design plays a role art directors once did . . Because it’s not an ad if it’s not a Mac visual , in the correct colours , proper type face , end line in the right place. Crafting has gone.. no time and depending what agency you’re at so has ownership.
I’ve worked on stuff at a soon to be defunct agency where Ive been told to pass work on to another team to finish, or I’ve been given other team’s work to get on with. Time was I owned a piece of work til it went out the door, even if that meant working late , working weekends .
It will be ready when it’s ready was one of the best lines so often used by a writer I once worked with . Bloody right too.
I’ve come to believe clients actually prefer to just play around in strategy -they’d much rather not have to do the creative bit at all. Some clients have basically said as much themselves. Thats why the client/planning stage gets an unfair amount of time (given that, as you said, people only see the execution) Many clients actually believe now days it’s them doing the heavy lifting and the agency just help them out. A couple of decades ago agencies sold the idea that the planners were the brains behind an agency and now its shifted to where the clients believe they hold the smarts. But the reality is the actual magic, the emotional thing the audience responds to, the bit people remember, if it happens at all, still tends to originate in the creative dept. When the (real) idea does come, everyone who’s contributed in the process before that moment misconstrue that the execution was an inevitable conclusion to their brilliant thinking. But my experience is most briefs on the page are solid but fairly obvious thinking, often generic, certainly not something people would be inspired by unless they were transformed creatively.
In my experience when a creative team takes the brief and engages directly with the client team and business, success happens. The issue is that agencies feel they need to provide insulation via a thick wall of account folk. I’m not even sure the equal division of time solves problem. Let the writers and art directors work with the clients and the account team match the media channels to the creative solution and sort the billing. I’ve never understood why this doesn’t happen. When I take my car to garage to get fixed I speak to the mechanic and when I build an extension on my house, the architect, builder and electrician. I can tell them exactly what the problem or brief is and how much money or time I’ve got. They then tell me the scale of the job and what it’s going to take to do it to suit me. It works.
A million years ago I started in the Control Dept at JWT. I can’t remember how the briefing process worked but everything else including TV and the then ITCA went through Control. Doubt any of it does now but there was more to control then: we had to “encourage” proof readers , typographers, tv producers, typesetters, art buyers etc as well as the creative and account teams and very often the client. After four years I changed agency and became a suit. The system at the new agency was called traffic and had nothing to to do with TV but it largely worked. Every move saw reduction in need but was always less efficient. The comments above talk about putting the creatives in front of the client. I believe that is the preferred Mother route among others. Experience over the years has taught me there are creatives who want to be involved with the client and creatives who steadfastly don’t, until they become freelance that is. If you are setting up an agency it easier to get and manage those that do. Trickier if you want to move an established outfit to a new modus operandi.