Friday, April 28, 2017

Culture beats strategy? Well, it sure destroys creativity.

It’s easy to shoot your mouth off about the shortcomings of the ad agency business, as I’ve recently been doing about an overall industry culture almost perfectly re-constructed to keep creativity average.

So how about some solutions, smart-*ss? I hear you ask.

Dovetailing commerce and creativity is no cakewalk – if it was, anyone could do it - but neither is it rocket science.

Creative talents have no particular background – educationally or otherwise; they have no particular regimen behind their working day, no particular religion, skin color or diet.

But there is one thing they do have in common: turning up at an office cubicle at a given hour smartly-dressed plus sitting with a whole bunch of other people, attending meetings, going home at a particular hour tends not to be their thing.

Just because the ends are commercial and there’s an office, today's ad agencies expect their creative talent to work that way, to be clerks.

And on top of the physical environment, there’s the far more creatively destructive matter of culture.

In the days that Karl Marx plied his trade pushing a now largely bankrupt communist ideology, one of his more intriguing views was that religion was “the opium of the masses”, i.e. a construct put together by rich people to keep poor people in their place.

It isn't a stretch imho, to view the corporately much-lauded and adored idea of corporate culture as a new opium.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is the quote falsely attributed to management guru Peter Drucker that’s been floating around for 20 or 30 years or so.

Some believe it actually appeared somewhere in the middle of 1980s/1990s merger mania as business leaders struggled to keep workforces intact.

The idea behind the phrase is, of course, that strategy is synthetic, a manufactured idea designed to deal with a particular business challenge. Culture, meanwhile, is behavioral, meaning that companies with a strong culture hire a particular kind of person - like the CEO of a big boring agency who proudly informed me that his agency hired only ‘nice’ people.

I can entirely see how a fixed culture might be important to help leadership control staff in a corporate environment. But for brilliant creativity? I can see how such a culture is anathema.

To be constantly creative you need all kinds of folks. And creativity is essentially born of conflict, its best practitioners usually unconventional in character and, yes, often behavior.

‘Giving birth’ to a brilliant idea can be a tortuous and painful process. People can drive themselves to nervous exhaustion as they struggle to drag it into the world.

Screenwriters, authors, painters and other artists get to do all this in the privacy of their own space. Ad agency creatives don’t.  

Add a creative partner (as in writer and art director) and you have another potential source of creative conflict. Toss in account handlers, a planner or two – and, of course, clients with their own, crucial pov - and it’s clear to see how - if genuine, world-class creative brilliance is the aim – things could get a little, er, heated.

There are simply so many elements of so many shapes, sizes and intensities involved in the above creative ‘stew’, that modern-day, Sarbanes-Oxley-inspired, one-size-fits-all human resources (HR) practice simply cannot come close to handling it all.

Adland's response? To set HR policy to the lowest common denominator – i.e. the average office worker – and the devil take anything that falls outside.

This happens because the financially-driven men who came to take control of the ad agency industry and thus to orient it culturally, have zero touch, feel or time for true creativity and its management.

They’re happy to have a blanket HR policy – a blanket nowhere near big or smart enough to cover the exploits of creative genii.

Crude example: if an account director loses his temper over less-than-optimal performance from a colleague and screams, “F*** you, you f*****g useless ***hole!” then he would expect to be seriously disciplined – maybe even fired. (Remember, modern Adland is a world where one of the biggest settled lawsuits in modern advertising apparently concerned an account director asking a female subordinate, “And what did you get up to this weekend?” Even if an urban myth, my own experience where my first far-from-footloose Christmas Party as a US agency chairman may as well have been organized by Bomont’s Reverend Moore, suggests it ain’t that mythical.)

But for a creative person confronted by the people who have just taken her work to a client and come back with five mandatory client changes that turn the work into something anodyne and unrecognizable to scream the same or similar is entirely understandable. If anything, her passion and commitment to excellence should be admired. Her emotion is entirely understandable having created the work at huge personal mental, spiritual expense. Yes, I know she is handsomely paid, so what? She isn't allowed to care deeply about excellence?

You need to understand how these two events are in no way the same and can in no way be accommodated by an HR policy designed to deal with the former example alone.

If you don't understand it, then you don't have what it takes to be part of a company whose major output is creativity.

So you’ll fit right in in today’s Adland.

Among the admirable elements of corporate HR is the way it protects women from the inappropriate behavior of boorish/predatory men in the workplace.

But even that aspect falls down in regard to creative personnel. True creativity is deeply 'bohemian' in nature - bohemian being defined as 'a person, as in artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.'

"Shut up, Mark! You're not artists, you're office workers/marketing services personnel like the rest of us and should abide by the same rules," I hear you cry.

To which I answer, "We are now!" - which is precisely why the work looks the way it does: assembled by bureaucrats. 

The erasure of bohemianism in Mad Ave - with the departure of Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky, pony-tailed Jeff Goodby may be its only remaining champion lol - has been among the most deleterious anti-diversity plays in ad agency history.  

While even the original ad agency account handlers were like movie producers, able to handle all manner of high-octane talent and high-jinks, modern account handlers are basically carbon-copies of the clients they shadow.

This doesn't make them bad or even untalented people, but it means that their overriding allegiance is to matters like financial efficiency and ‘keeping the trains running on time’.

Creative management simply isn't a major factor in their professional lives.

Thus, the HR culture that ad agencies have carried over to help mirror their clients sits just fine with these account handlers.

But for genuinely creative staff it's soul-destroying.

Which perfectly explains the soulless advertising in a world where exploding connectivity and means of expression should have led to extraordinary, barrier-breaking creativity.

It does - everywhere but in advertising.

And Adland wonders why it has a talent problem. I believe the expression is "don't p*ss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".



  




  



No comments:

Post a Comment

Will the last creative agency please turn off the light.

The original ad agencies came into being for the same reason that most business ideas do: to fill a gap in the market. That gap...