I finally got around to watching Art & Copy the other night, and had two responses.
OMG, I <3 THIS!!!
I was flooded with remembrances of what I once loved about advertising, why I wanted to be a writer, why I admired the agencies and creative people I did.
I think I was only vaguely aware of the existence of ad agencies before my father introduced me to the idea of working in one. He was sneaky about it; he came home one day and told me, “You should work in advertising. You’d love it. I was in the head of the agency’s office today, and a woman, I think she’s a writer there, came in, flopped over the back of his couch, and yelled, “Fuuuuuck!” How cool is that?”
My father knew me so very well. So yes, I was intrigued. He kept bringing things home – little posters people made and posted around the shop, examples of ads they were making or had made, stories about the brilliant or hilarious thing that the creative directors said, or about the guys playing HORSE in the half-basketball court, or how work broke down on Fridays as everyone ran for the roof with water-tight vessels of any kind in hand, ready for delicious beer. Dad was installing their servers and network and he loved that place.
The place? Weiden + Kennedy, the agency behind “Just do it” and more recently, the Old Spice videos.
So studying advertising seemed like a sure-fire way to find my way to a career of flopping onto couches yelling, “Fuuuuck!” And for the price of in-state tuition, no less.
When I took my first course in the ad sequence at University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications, in my junior year of college (oh my, you have to take all these classes and a Language Skills Diagnostic Test before they let you in! You have to write an essay! Mine said I wanted to be either James Carville or Dan Weiden – note the total absence of female heroes), I thought I would be an account person. I have no idea what voice told me that was the right choice, or that I couldn’t be on the creative side, the side my dad celebrated so regularly. I was running a student magazine, and writing and reporting every two weeks – why didn’t I think I was a writer, yet?
But I did take Introduction to Copywriting – it was required. Halfway through that 10 week class, I was sure I was drowning. I couldn’t figure out why some of my ideas worked and others didn’t; I simply could not come up with anything for Right Guard deodorant. The instructor, Ann Maxwell (that link is shamefully sparse, it doesn’t even begin to describe her), had mid-term check-ins with all the students. I came into her office for the first time, sat down, and scanned the room. She had cool stuff. She had a nice window. She had Clios.
She told me she thought I was very talented and that she knew I said I wanted to go into account management, but that she thought I should do this instead. I was shocked. But, as I have been incredibly lucky to do a few times, I chose to just say, “okay.” And at that moment, I became a copywriter.
I devoured anything I could find – The Copy Workshop Workbook, Ogilvy on Advertising, The Book of Gossage, How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising, Truth, Lies and Advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor, Communication Arts, Ad Age, Creativity, agency reels, stuff I saw in magazines and on television, anything. I worshipped at the feet of the two great Creative Revolutions in American advertising – those giants: Bernbach, Gossage, Riney, Wieden, Goodby, Chiat, Clow. I leaned on Mary Wells Lawrence‘s agency’s approach for organizing my thoughts. I venerated Janet Champ‘s work on Nike’s PLAY campaign: “If you let me play sports.”
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When it came time to apply for jobs, I aimed high: Goodby Silverstein & Partners, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Ground Zero, Fallon, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, WongDoody, Butler, Shine & Stern, Cliff Freeman & Partners (not all of them survived the agency consolidation movement or the Great Recession). I had a positive response, people liked my portfolio, they loved my cover letter (oh my kingdom for that Word file!), they invited me in for interviews, they almost hired me several times. But times were tough in the ad business, and junior creatives are always scraping for any job that gets them in the door.
I got this feedback once, from a young man in a creative department in a creative agency in Los Angeles: “Well, it’s obviously a woman’s book. There are no women in our creative department.” I’m pretty sure I ended the interview right there.
When I came back, two years later, after having worked as a copywriter (in the spirit of the times, I was actually the Creative Director) in a web shop, that same agency had finally got around to hiring a woman. She told me that my portfolio showed that I could write, but not that I could think. She recommended moving very far away and working for free. She recommended, in other words, posing no further threat to her. She was now The Woman in the Creative Department.
I think that’s when I started wondering again whether I really was a writer, whether that was acceptable, or possible, or worth the rejection. I was watching the level of creativity decline again, and it was depressing. After some wonderful detours, I landed at Chiat, embraced by the account director on Apple, who told me that I belonged there, that he wouldn’t get in the way of my dream, and that I was hired. But – oh, irony! – I was hired into the account team. Somehow, with the help or seduction or something of a very charismatic planner (and a woman!) I morphed into an account planner – a field that is, at most levels, dominated by women in the US. Theoretically, the planner is the creative’s muse and the voice of the consumer. Sometimes, that’s true. A lot of times, it’s just another kind of account management.
It was not lost on me that only about 3% of creative directors in US agencies are female; neither was it lost on me that only about 18% of management jobs are held by women. It also was not lost on me that my new employer’s planning department was run by a man who’d never been a planner; that an account director once exclaimed in his English accent, “There are too many bloody women on this account!” or that he referred to me as a part-time woman of no importance. To my face. I told him, quoting one of my heroes, Gail Zappa, “I’m going to remember you said that.” And I have.
Anyway – very long digression, right? – I became a strategist and an innovations expert. I’d become entirely disenchanted with advertising. What good had it done for culture, for society, for its clients, lately, anyway?
But sitting there for 90 minutes watching Art & Copy, I was reminded that sometimes a well crafted bit of copy and an amazing image can change your life (“I will be… naked more” from a Norwegian Cruise Line ad was the piece that made me want that job as a ‘creative’). It can motivate you to do something you’ve always wanted to (a friend at W+K met a couple camping across America who had quit their jobs and packed their tents because of an ad for Nike he’d written). It can inspire you to care (“If you let me play sports…”). Or it can reflect back all that you admire in humanity (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”).
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Sometimes advertising can aim a bit higher than doing no harm or being merely ‘effective.’ Lots of things that are effective aren’t any good at all. But the work and thinkers and makers featured in this documentary are good. They’re better than that, they’re the enemies of good. They’re great.