on making a contribution

I've been thinking about El Joker's kind response to a post about the comparative social worth of our line of work versus that of, say, doctors.

On one part it's frustrating to not make a difference in the world and on the other, well at least I'm not being depended on to save a limb.

And what I'm thinking is: we DO make a difference, though it's easy to forget in the melee of dealing with deadlines and crazy clients. For better or worse we are the world's Culture Mongers, dispensing values and ways of life to aspire to, impacting boggling numbers of people around the globe, even in places where our campaign isn't running. (Like in rural China where Wilson tennis racket cases are coveted shoulder bags.)

Sure, one measly coupon insert or banner ad won't change the world, but we shouldn't forget that what we produce in the aggregate has a huge subliminal (and liminal) impact. Which is why stuff like Dove's Real Beauty campaign and Italian Vogue featuring non-white faces wields power beyond what research charts show, the power to (slowly but surely) right a wrong situation.

Of course, most of us don't get the opportunity to disseminate our own admirable values in a broadscale campaign that's ostensibly to push product. But we can make a difference, I believe, in seemingly small choices regarding casting or artwork or word choice in copy.

Now back to our regularly scheduled soapbox.

people who work in an advertising agency and feel just like a prostitute

A while back, Jane Sample posted about this facebook group, but given that the world's oldest profession is so much in the news, I thought you'd enjoy a reminder of how our own work, um, measures up to it. Here's the facebook description in all of its goodness, a list I wish I had written myself:

The truth about working in an ad agency
1. You work weird (night) shifts...
Just like prostitutes.

2. They pay you to make the client happy...
Just like a prostitute.

3. The client pays a lot of money, but your employer keeps almost
every penny...
Just like a prostitute.

4. You are rewarded for fulfilling the client's dreams...
Just like a prostitute.

5. Your friendships fall apart and you end up hanging out with
people in the same profession as you...
Just like a prostitute.

6. When you have to meet the client you always have to be perfectly
groomed...
Just like a prostitute.

7. But when you go back home it seems like you are coming back from
hell...
Just like a prostitute.

8. The client always wants to pay less but expects incredible things
from you...
Just like a prostitute.

9. When people ask you about your job, you have difficulties to explain it...
Just like a prostitute.

10. Everyday when you wake up, you say: "I'm not going to spend the rest of my life doing this."

JUST LIKE A PROSTITUTE!!!

sunday new york times, biz section, pg 5

Laggard. Instead of spending uncompensated time reading blogs like this, or posting on better ones, you could be making $535/hour brandspeeding. What's brandspeeding? According to a full page ad in today's NY Times, it's a no-nonsense, 10 day alternative to ponderous and overly expensive approaches to new products' and brand positioning creation. (Sorry, no link.)

Brandspeeding sounds like advertising on Adderall. Copy claims that it's helping companies invent a new product, create a brand positioning for it and coming up with a real introductory advertisement--all in 10 days.

How, old-school thinkers may wonder, is this possible? Because Speed allows great ideas to happen before bureaucracy and over thinking gum up the works. At last a way to eliminate client revisions (bureaucracy) and testing (over thinking) so that creatives need never go back to a drawing board.

The going rate for a 10-day brandspeeding project is $42,800. Plus expenses. Pro-rated that's $4280 a day. In a year, you could conceivably rack up over $1.5 million.

How to get started? First, get a client to buy into the process. Then, it's easy as 1,2,3:

#1. First, spend a half-day (a mere half-day!) with 15-20 client personnel in a meeting you call an invention workshop. Ostensibly, this meeting is to gather client input, but my guess is, what it's really meant to do is to fulfill marketing personnel's dream of "being creative"--something ad agency types are forever putting the kibosh on.

#2. Stage another half-day (half-day!) session with 12 invention specialists in varied creative careers. Invention specialists! Inspired title for friends and out of work colleagues (freelancers, failed novelists, artists without grants, photographers who haven't landed a job in years) who can be coerced into an afternoon at a corporate park in New Jersey--say you'll cater the meeting and it should be a cinch.

#3. Pick a product and positioning that comes out of the sessions and develop a real introductory advertisement for it. Thus cleverly short-circuiting the usual ad-making process which allows for pesky client feedback, revision rounds, legal mandates and testing.

I googled the agency that placed the ad which claims in a subhead that their client roster includes 66 of the Top 100 Global Brands. (For speed-mongers, their site takes a surprisingly long time to load.) But all I found posted were print ads for failed or ancillary brand extensions. Like a new sandwich from Wendy's featuring the dubious combination of chicken, ham and pecans. A sonorous spread for a bank service with the headline Be the early bird. Visual: Bird getting a worm.

I have to hand it to them, however, for the genius it took to come up with an agency deliverable that produces more fee than tsuris. And if they can make enough from it to place full page in the Times, just think of the riches awaiting ad grunts with talent.

help yourself, it's 2008

Like Daily Biz, I've been mulling over Toad's trend predictions and came up with one to add to his list:

#7- Return of Service to Customer Service

I was grocery shopping the other day and the clerk at the register discontinued her (loud) conversation with the clerk in the next aisle, made eye contact with me and asked how I was--for which I felt inordinately grateful.

Since coming of age in an era when waiters did curb-service and elevator ladies in white gloves opened gates in dept. stores, I've downsized my expectations again and again until now I anticipate almost no service from service workers. (The nice clerk's bagger was busy deciding what to order for lunch, so naturally I bagged the groceries myself.)

Perhaps service workers get away with almost anything these days because they are an endangered species. It used to be pumping your own gas would save you a buck and you could make the choice to pump it yourself or not depending on how energetic (or strapped) you were feeling. Now, self-service is usually the only option, and even when full-service is offered, it's inexplicably the same price, unless you count not having to tip. (Exception: it's illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey and Oregon--not sure what this says about lawmakers' view of constituents there.)

Once gas pumping went manual, banks began doing away with tellers. ATMs weren't popular at first--people were scared machines might issue wrong amounts of money, or they'd be robbed by passersby who'd push them aside on the sidewalk and grab the cash being excreted. A friend in the business worked on a bank in the 80s that decided their strategic point of difference would be no ATM's. Headline: Would you rather deal with a human or a machine? Needless to say, the bank went out of business. But now might be prime time for it to make a resurgence: ever try to get a cashier's check or deposit a big payout at one of those ATM-only branches?

I bet I'm not the only consumer weary of superstores making me check out my own stuff or airlines refusing to let me talk to an attendant before dealing first with a kiosk. I predict that consumers will begin to fight back, insist on service that's been lacking of late, even if they have pay a bit more for it. And, in a culture where social status is inexorably linked to monetary value, customer service might transform into a noble profession.

CS professionals might take a lesson from ad grunts who have been servicing customers with a smile for years. Another revision? Want that with fries?