For a long time before I did anything resembling work in advertising and marketing, I wrote a lot of other things—essays, fiction, short humor pieces, maniacal letters to the editor.  All of these projects were unsolicited and most were received (or not) without financial compensation. And all of these projects were done by me, and me alone.  

Creation by committee gets a bad rap, usually by those of us who are terrified of sharing an idea still in its gestation phase, when it is most vulnerable to criticism or rejection. So after years of working on creative projects alone, it was jarring—and humbling—to become part of a crew.

 

During my first concepting meeting I watched helplessly as one of my pretty decent ideas was tagged and tweaked and bounced around from one member of the team to the other, until it landed squarely in the middle of the room, stronger and sleeker and shinier than I could have ever made it on my own. It was simultaneously exhilarating and profoundly sad to see something I conceived grow so quickly into such a better version of its original self. It’s what I imagine it would be like to meet a child you gave up for adoption who ended up being raised by superheroes.

 

Part of the horror of collaboration is losing sight of the boundaries of your contribution. When your sense of self is tied so closely to concepts as abstract as “words” and “ideas,” it’s frightening to work without a byline.

 

In those first creative team meetings, I struggled to follow the threads of my initial ideas, even as much richer tapestries were woven around them. I would try to quantify my contribution to the finished product even before it was finished. How much of this is still mine? 80%? 60%? 20%? How will everybody know that this idea came from me? They won’t, of course.

 

That level of anxiety is too exhausting to sustain, even for someone as practiced in insecurity as a professional writer. So you learn to let it go.

 

You love the people you make things with. You respect the people you make things for. Then you take your name off the work and let it live in the world. If it’s a big enough idea and it’s executed well, someone will invariably ask, “Who came up with that?”

 

The simplest, best answer will always be, “We did.”

The late comedian Bill Hicks famously encouraged anyone involved in marketing and advertising to commit suicide. Even as a surly, spiky-haired teenager, this seemed extreme to me. But I agreed with Mr. Hicks’s basic philosophy: All advertising exists just to sell us stuff that we don’t need. 

 

Now I am a mature, grown-up man who pays taxes and takes a daily multivitamin, and I have a much more nuanced view of the profession I have chosen. Now I believe that only most advertising exists to sell us stuff that we don’t need.

 

Our industry has a terrible reputation, and with good reason. While there are plenty of clever, honest, tastefully-designed ads out there, each is surrounded by a sea of others that are crass, patronizing, or just plain dumb.

 

An ad doesn’t have to be smart to sell a product; it only has to make us aware of the product. Almost everyone likes to have things, so we’re already looking for an excuse to buy new ones.

 

If your client’s request is merely, “Help me sell this thing,” then you can easily oblige. It’s a simple, short term goal. But the satisfaction you and the client receive is short term as well. If your goal is purely transactional, then your results will be the same.

 

What if you challenge your client to ask different questions? What if you set aside the things they sell for a minute, and ask them to take a look at who they are fundamentally, and what drives their business? What if your goals are transformational, instead of transactional? 

 

Make it your job to help your clients articulate the passion that drives their businesses. Make it your job to communicate ideas that people actually care about. Stop trying to sell things.

 

If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I encourage you to check out what Bill Hicks had to say about our industry. I still think of him whenever I start a project, and I try to imagine what his reaction would be to whatever I’ve just written. If I don’t feel like killing myself I figure I’m off to a good start.

 

When I worked for a small performing arts theater in Minneapolis, I heard countless performers and patrons insist that some of the artistic work being created locally was every bit as good as the work created in Chicago, or even (gasp!) New York. That qualifier—some—was applied only to Minneapolis, as if all of the work coming out of Chicago or New York was great simply by virtue of the fact that it was made there. As if excellence is intrinsically linked to point of origin. As if the garbage-to-gem ratio is any lower in the East Village than it is in Cedar Rapids, or Omaha, or Sioux Falls.

 

A lot of Midwesterners get hung up on their own perceptions of the perceptions of people on the coasts. Do they think we’re all rubes? That we travel by stage coach, and use outhouses? Do they think we don’t know as much about search engine optimization as they do??? Of course no one on the coasts actually thinks these things. But assume for a moment that these hypothetical, impossibly ignorant coastal elites do exist. If they are that stupid, why on Earth should we care what they think about us?

 

When we fixate on the idea that truly excellent work is somehow exclusive to larger markets, we are just erecting barriers to our own creativity, and placing a ceiling on our potential for success. And based on what? Something as arbitrary as geography?

 

“My band is doing pretty well, considering we’re not based in L.A.”

“I bet publishers would take my writing seriously if only I lived in Manhattan.”

“This TV spot is pretty good, given it was made by a local agency.”

 

Whether we’re talking about musicians, painters, or advertisers, there is always a lower standard for anything that follows the word “local.” And despite their protestations to the contrary, I have a suspicion that a lot of local musicians, painters, and advertisers don’t mind those lowered expectations. There is nothing safer or more comfortable, after all, than being an underdog.

 

Unfortunately for the underdogs, the makers of truly exceptional work go wherever inspiration takes them, without giving much consideration to their coordinates. Meanwhile, the people who obsess about where they’re from will always be the ones who get left behind.