I've been doing a lot of soul searching the last couple of days regarding my career. Or rather, the tattered remains of what once was my career. I've come to the point where I decided that maybe it was time to just throw in the towel. But then I realized there isn't much left to throw the towel in on. Advertising, as I knew it, is on life support. It was jumped in a dark alley, beaten to a bloody pulp and left to die in a gutter.
By Marketing.
They aren't the same, advertising and marketing. "Advertising" was known as "The Art of Persuasion", and like any art it required talent. To produce good advertising you needed to be a writer, or producer, or designer. You had to be clever and conceptual. To have ideas. You had to be a showman (or woman).
In a word, you had to be creative.
For years now it's been portrayed as a sexy profession. From "Bewitched" to "Thirtysomething", it was the cool, hip, exciting job. Of course, they never actually showed anyone doing anything. Just hanging out in stylish offices in converted warehouses, kicking back in designer furniture, throwing pencils at the ceiling. That looked like fun! Everyone wanted to do it.
But there was that talent thing. Couldn't do advertising without talent.
Well how fair is that? That's discrimination! What about all the talentless people?
Well, for them we'll create... "Marketing".
In marketing, you don't actually have to produce anything. You don't need to actually create ads. All you need is an opinion on advertising. An opinion you're willing to share with just about everyone. Loudly. An opinion that you can place into flowcharts and graphs and PowerPoints and Venn diagrams.
But who's going to pay for that?
Nobody. So we need to confuse them. With words. Lots and lots of words. Meaningless words. Made up words. Take... "brand". Let's make it a verb... "branding". It sounds important, yes? And it's a whole new billable category!
In fact, let's bill by the word. Whereas the goal of "advertising" is to get someone to "buy something", the goal of "marketing" is to talk about "robust, world-class visual solutions, and benchmarking the metrics to incent your audience to become stakeholders and create a positive end-user experience". See! That's 12 times as many words! And we didn't have to create a thing! Bill 'em for it!
So now it's about "providing a customer-centric pro-active solution" and "being a next-generational player". It's about being "strategically focused on a go-forward plan" and "creating a value proposition based on maximizing synergies." We now strive to "be first to market with leveraged, value-added deliverables". We're all about "creating the opportunity space on a level playing field" and "monetizing scalable supply chains" with "seamless integration". String it all together with some pointless metaphors like "skating to where the puck's going to be" and "blocking and tackling". Because, "at the end of the day", you have to "push the envelope until it's outside the box".
What does all that mean? Beats the hell out of me. Who cares? You could bill that last paragraph for $15K.
But wait... we still don't have an ad campaign, and the budget is all gone. What will we do?
Easy. We'll "borrow equity from an existing brand and trade on past emotional responses".
In other words, just rip off that iPod ad that won all those awards.
Or better yet, have the interns bang out something hip. They know what the kids like.
We'll be at lunch.
Don't believe me? Check out this. That's $50 million you're looking at right there.
Even I have to admire the chutzpah. Linking the new Pepsi logo to the Mona Lisa? With a straight face? And getting someone to pay for it? That's pretty amazing. Maybe marketers aren't so uncreative after all?
The best thing about marketing is there is absolutely no failure and no shame. The same agency behind the Pepsi logo was also tasked with "rebranding" Tropicana Orange Juice, for an equal price. Armed with reams of mission statements, and position papers, and PowerPoints and focus groups, they launched the "rebrand"and within a month, sales fell 25%. Panic set in and within six weeks they'd reverted to all the old packaging in an attempt to stop the freefall. And do you think the agency gave back the $50 million?
All I know is that now the only thing that matters is process and strategy. The end product is often superfluous and an afterthought. And it shows. But who cares? No one really. With the software that's widely available, everyone has a nephew in high school that can do what I do for $15 an hour. Or so I'm constantly told. Worse still, there are millions of people spread out across every third world country with the same software, willing to do the job for $15 a day. And they're all just a mouse click away from Madison Avenue.
I'd held out dim hope over all these long months, but over the weekend came the final blow. I received my latest issue of "Communication Arts". It's been the bible of the commercial art field for decades and it's the only magazine I still subscribe to. And there, in a lengthy editorial, was the eulogy. They rather bluntly admitted that it wasn't possible to make a living being a graphic designer anymore. The only way to survive was to "become a strategic partner with your clients in assessing their branding needs".
To become a... "marketer".
Oy vay.
Well, good luck with that. It's not like I haven't tried. To a certain degree I saw this coming and I tried to drink the kool-aid, to cross over to the Dark Side. But my bullshitting skills, while more than adequate for advertising, simply weren't up to the task for marketing. That, and I could never keep a straight face in marketing presentations.
So, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No use crying over spilled Pepsi. Time to figure out what's next.
Time to "rebrand" myself.
