NORTHERN PLANNER

If you’ve read any of my rubbish, you’ll know I used to be a competive swimmer. What I didn’t say was that I was conned into it.

My Mum took me to a training session on a Wednesday, to see if I liked it and I took to it like a duck to water (if you’ll forgive the pun). I said I’d go again, thinking every Wednesday wasn’t so bad. Only to find myself bundled into the car on the Friday to train again, and yet again the following Monday. Mum had left out the three days a week bit, which soon turned into getting up before 5am and back after school.

Working in advertising is a bit like that, it’s really not like it seems. From both a cultural and craft perspective, there are the things you can get get from books, courses, case studies and company handbooks. Then there is how it really works and what really happens.

Some of the hidden and unspoken parts of the job you just pick up as you go along. many you have to learn the hard way.

Take case studies, the ones agencies put into RFIs or the ones beautifully written to win awards, or to impress folks visiting a website. They can be tremendously inspiring, but they are usually embroidered versions of what really happened at best, in many cases, they are works of fiction.

There are numerous reasons for this.

Sometimes, there is an illusion of some sort of linear process and a lightbulb moment built around the agency proprietary process. Why? Agencies like to appear different so they sell a unique process, even though every project works pretty much in the same way: controlled or uncontrolled chaos at the good places. A vice squeezing out ideas and imagination in others.

Nothing happens in the first half of the project, the everyone panics that nothing has happened. This is not unique to agencies, it’s an iron law in virtually any kind of project in any business.

Creativity is a risk to client business, so it pays to sell a predictable process, when the reality is very different.

Other reasons are that awards juries do not award the best work. They like a good story, so a case study will have some jeapordy in there and crisis, even if there wasn’t one. Awards juries award what is fashionable, so there will an over-egging of ‘purpose’, use of AI, a universal human truth, or whatever is cool this week. What’s more, award entries tend to do better when they have a theme, or a moral of the story, something we can all learn from, not just bloody good work. So there a story made up to fit the theme.

This is important if you’re still finding your way.

Not only do you either need to get used to ambiguity and chaos quick, or understand following the process and the template matters more than the outcome.

You need to get used to the real ebb and flow of projects. Prevarication, followed by panic, followed by a nail biting race to beat the deadline.

You’ll need to be careful using most of the case studies out there as a guide, because they’re mostly really good stories. This is OK, we’re in the storytelling business, but I’d use them for inspiration rather than instruction. This can be really good, as following the same process over and over leads to the same kind of work (see above on process mattering more than work), so inject variety liberates ideas.

But most cases studies show some sort of perfect world and the reality is rather different, sorry.