If you are anywhere near the creative industries, public relations and advertising, and want a good pick-me-up, go see Art and Copy at the Documentary Film Festival.
Yeah, it’s a review of the early American advertising industry, but there is still freshness about their thinking and their client solutions. We learned of the irreverence these pioneers had for their clients, but also of the tremendous results that were achieved. This was the golden age of advertising, when people loved marketing and weren’t yet called ‘consumers’.
For me, two comments had particular resonance:
- People make advertising decisions by committee, because it avoids them taking responsibility if things go wrong (this applies equally to other industries of course); and
- If you make a mistake, forget it and move on. You learn nothing from your failures, but lots from your success. Art & Copy featured this ad as an example.
Another thing that I’ve learned about managing communications, and it was only today, from a client who was talking about preparing good briefs: the proposals that clients receive from their agencies are only as good as the brief they’ve been give. Most likely, if the ideas are crap, the brief was crap. I hasten to add that our discussion did not relate to anything that had just been proposed.
