Advertising - Craig Jamieson

Moldy Whopper

The Burger King moldy whopper ad which dropped this past week has sparked some interesting debates. On the one end you have people in the ad industry hailing this as brave and genius advertising, while on the end you have crying out about the actual customers who probably don’t really want to be turned off their supper when they see BK Ads of moldy burgers.

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/1230115099660124160

I appreciate that their burgers have no artificial preservatives, I’m not a fan of preservatives, processed foods etc, but I’m also a pretty sensitive eater, who often eats with his eyes when it comes to fast food, as let’s be honest we all know how bad it is for you, but it’s their advertising that convinces you to order the stuff. So with that in mind, the picture of the moldy burger is not very appetising and makes me feel pretty gross.

Transparency

This morning I had the pleasure of giving a pretty open talk titled “10 Things Craig Jamieson” at Creative Mornings in Cape Town on the topic of Transparency. Thank you to everyone who woke up early and was present, you were a great crowd, I truly hope you enjoyed it. Please find my deck below.

[slideshare id=67790389&doc=creativemornings-transparency-161028141849]

Freelancing Creative Director Failure

My career has never been the norm, not by any standards. I did not get a matric, I dropped out of college, I was self-educated in design, computers, development etc and instead of joining an agency, I started freelancing from day one. But eventually I joined an agency and was quickly hired as a Creative Director and did a descent job of leading the digital charge within the Ad industry. But it was never smooth sailing and I have had to resort to freelancing again, with very little success. Now if I had the answers, I would at least have a fighting chance of understanding why after 10 years of successfully freelancing, I was suddenly unable to. So I have a whole lot of assumptions as to why, freelancing as a Creative Director is doomed to fail.

Before I start explaining, I want to apologies for the mixed use of CD and Creative Director, I simply felt it made sense to use one or the other as I typed it. It’s how I roll … deal with it.

Networking

Any good freelancer will tell you that one of the must have things you need to go it alone, is a pretty strong network. Well I have been a CD is some of the most respected agencies in the country, if not the world. I have successfully worked on many campaigns for multiple brands and formed relationships not only with my colleagues, but the clients too. I don;t mind saying I contacted everyone I felt comfortable enough to reach out to, but with very few people able to offer much more than encouragement. Which leads me to wonder, why that is.

Expensive

My first thought is that people may think I’m an asshole, it’s possible, but I can’t control what people think of me and I try not let that get me down, besides that would make a lot of people pretty two-faced, cause I generally feel pretty liked. So my next thought has to be that people assume I am too expensive. Truth is, I probably am too expensive. While I would not dare charge the rates an agency does, I do believe given my experience, I am worth a descent wage. Even if I wanted to work for less, I’d also have to be responsible and charge the type of money, I am used to earning, or what am I doing this for. I can;t exactly be a homeless CD, it just doesn’t work like that. Any CD would understand what I’m saying, firstly we don’t earn as much money as people think, we gave up getting rich a long time ago when we chose creativity as the main focus of our career, by joining the creative leadership team at an agency. It was a very conscious decision. The hope being that maybe one day we might be promoted into a higher earning position, get profit share or some day get our name on the door. The industry is pretty good at coming up with reasons not to give you the annual 5 – 8% increase agency folk might get, there is no pay for overtime and a world cup period where festive bonus cheques comes once in a lifetime, at least it did for me. But still, I believe I charge a fair rate, so much so that the number I had in my head is actually less than I earned, before I joined an agency.

Skills

You’re the big cheese, you direct creative, so your skills are probably a little rusty. Now I’ll explain this in detail next, but to be clear, you cannot freelance as a creative director, you are a creative director freelancing in digital. So it means you have to do the work, the teams you used to manage did. You have to design, develop, art direct, write and so on. And truth be told, there’s a lot of CD’s I know who were never very good at doing any of those things before taking on the CD role, they were good at brown-nosing the man who hired them over Friday drinks. But that’s not me, as I said, I successfully freelanced for a decade prior to becoming a CD, and given that I was self-taught, I made it a habit to constantly keep learning, so despite being a CD by day, I used to study at night. I admit my confidence in this area, was not as high as I would like, but that’s only due to the high standards I aspire to for myself. I was always a believer, that I need to know as much as anyone I manage, so I can make informed decisions. I am also quite a geek, and wanted to stay up to date and engage with colleagues in my industry who were doing big things, away from managing talent within agencies.

Director

The creative part of what I do, combined with the skills I have, means I’m pretty much covered. It’s the director part that I debate, even if it’s only with myself. Good CD’s lead by doing, they have the respect of their teams cause they lead from the front, but another important thing is relationships of mutual respect. If you think it’s easy to walk into an agency and actually freelance as a CD, let me tell you, it’s tough work. Creatives in agencies have mis-guided egos, so trust me, being told to lead a team is challenging. A CD is supposed to direct creatives, and depending on the agency, be responsible for not just the teams, but the direction creativity goes within the agency, but if you’re only a temporary resource, it’s not likely you will factor into the operational or drive the vision. It has been my experience that other than being a contractor, you are rarely ever asked the CD at an agency. Often I have been asked to help with campaigns etc, but I tend to fill the role of an art director or designer. Positions on a freelance level that are not a whole lot of fun for someone who has been leading creative teams for the better part of 7 years.

Conclusion

Freelancing is supposed to be about working for yourself, choosing when, how and what you work on. Waking up late, going to bed later. Sure there’s a bunch of challenges associated with that, but for a long time I did it, producing some amazing work, that spans a client base and a network across the globe. But then things were simpler, I had no education, so I earned enough money to pay the few bills I had, but it provided me the opportunity to free up my time to learn more, usually by playing. However now, as I furiously head towards my 40’s and I’m responsible for more than just myself, but now a 6-year-old kid and some poor financial decisions, I can no longer earn what I need to be a freelancer, yet alone a freelance Creative Director. I don’t know that I have explored this in it’s entirety, so perhaps there will be a follow up post and it might only be a play on words or my own understanding of responsibility, but you might be an art director, a designer or even a contracting creative director, but you will never be a freelancing Creative Director, it simply makes no sense and you are setting yourself up to fail.

Apple – The Song

[youtube id=WRsPnzcZ1VY mode=normal]

Today Apple reminded me of what I aspire to achieve. There holiday campaign left me with goosebumps and this is what I hope I can make people feel when they experience my work. Thank you Apple, as always, you gave me something I didn’t even know I needed.

Creative in Business

Everyone likes to call themselves creative these days, long gone are the days when creative purely meant those weird arty types who draw, act and write poetry. No these days everyone thinks they’re creative and are entitled to be creative. Often I hear people say, “ideas can come from anyone, even the tea lady”. Does that make her creative, or perhaps part of the creative department in an agency? My best are the bean counters who handle the money and assign the budget, who proudly proclaim to be doing, creative accounting. Well I have to agree, creativity is not exclusively for a single department, any more than being good at business isn’t restricted to the suits. But we all have our roles to play and more importantly our responsibilities within an organisation. Lets face it, we are all paid accordingly.

The creative department; by which I mean art directors, copywriters, designers etc quite frequently solves business problems, that is the business we are in. But more often than not, creative departments go beyond merely solving the client’s business problem, they are often solving a critical agency business problem. So what is this problem I speak of? There is no title, because purely calling it a business problem, would mean the business side of an agency would have to take responsibility and actually do the job they are titled and responsible for, and being that they also want to be part of the creative process when it suits them, we just don’t want to label it. So let me explain. Quite often the business side of the agency agrees to things, over commits, under charges and so on, while the creative departments are left to find a way to get it done. More often than not, the creative departments work themselves to death and complete the ridiculous tasks set before them, often feeling under valued, resenting the client (who is usually blamed for the poor timings etc) and putting out some half-baked work, that does little more than keep the lights on. All while having to share what they’re doing with the business folk, to make sure they don’t feel left out and like they’re just paper pushers, you know, they have ideas too. I was once told I’m like Willy Wonka and sometimes the suits also want to share in the magic of the chocolate factory. Vom!

I’d prefer that the business side of an agency focus on business, hell they could even get really creative about business, but as long as they keep the money on their end and don’t make it the creative departments problem. By this I mean they need to start caring and taking responsibility for bringing in the numbers without inconveniencing the creative department. I promise you will not get better ideas through threats of being fired by the client if we don’t nail this concept. All the time lurking while creatives try to solve these problems, should be spent thinking of creative ways to bring in more revenue for the business. Finding better ways of working with the client to write a brief, plan their project and hopefully save everyone some money.

I am yet to have a business person walk into my office with a puzzled look on their face, and after I asked whats wrong, get told, “I am trying to figure out a way to make real money from digital” or “I am trying to figure out a better way to estimate time on projects, so that we don’t under charge our client” these are business problems that could involve creative, my door is always open, so I am happy to help where my insight is most valuable, but these are challenges facing suits which they should be thinking about.

Being on the digital side of advertising for most of my career, I have often felt a lot of pressure to deliver the goods on some ridiculous budgets and deadlines. I constantly try to think of new ways that we could manage this all better, how we could increase our rates without chasing away clients and how we could better manage client expectations on time and project outcome.

TV as an example hasn’t changed in years and while current trend is to reduce media spend, TV in most parts of the world still has the largest reach, so it’s a profitable business to be in. The format hasn’t changed very much, so the production is pretty similar and easy to estimate, get buy-in and get a reasonable advert produced. Digital on the other hand is more often than not, pretty unknown. There are so many variables involved and quite often being innovative means, so many are unknown. Yet the manner in which digital is billed, is completely flawed. Clients generally pay by the hour, which is charged based on an estimate before any of the relative teams who actually produce the project ever even know what has been agreed upon. A half-baked brief is put in the system, usually just before month end, so that the suit meets their monthly target and then it’s up to the creative team to solve. Suits rarely ever like to phone the client and ask for more time and budget when the teams figure out that what is being asked for is impossible and more often than not, build something that delivers to some degree, but could have been much better had they had the time.

Often when people see my personal websites people comment on the level of craft that goes into them, well there’s a simple answer. I constantly keep perfecting the design and functionality, while I aim for a target date, I would rather do it properly than meet the deadline. I constantly keep iterating even after launch as the beauty of digital is it’s not like a TV Ad that has aired or a printed item that once the ink is dry, it’s done, no more changes can be made. I see this as a huge opportunity to continue to make money, as it means no project is ever really complete and if only someone could make the client understand this, we might be onto a way of making money continually while offering the very best solution.

What amazes me is that clients pay millions to produce 30 second TV Ads, yet they won’t spent nearly a fraction of that on digital projects like websites, which actually live online 24-7-365. This is one of those business problems I feel our suits should be trying to solve, their chance to get creative doing what they do. You should be proud to say you are in the advertising industry, it is perceived as creative, but that doesn’t mean you should try to be part of the creative team, be a team player by being creative about how you do business and bring in real money, so the business has the time to be creative.

Focus on the project, not awards

It’s my opinion that creatives in the ad industry are focussed on the wrong things and they’ve lost site of the experience you go through actually working on projects. Too often I hear people start a project with statements like, “we need an award winning idea”, “this is an award winning campaign” and “this is the agencies Cannes entry” and honestly while it makes sense to keep your eye on the prize, let’s not forget the journey, so to speak.

I guess however, I can only really talk for myself. So I’ll try and explain things as I see them. I enjoy being recognized by my peers, the industry and even our clients. I love my FWA certificate, my Pixel Award etc. it’s good for my career, good for my reputation, my ego even. Most importantly, awards are good for business.

But I enjoy making stuff even more. I’m a journey guy, I appreciate what I and the team I work with go through on a day to day process as we craft our project. Sure there’s a lot of headaches in between, but getting us through that shows the kind of metal we’re made from. Each iteration we go through, every step we go through, brings us another step closer and sometimes further from our end goal, passionately pushing around pixels, debating ideas and figuring out the code. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me excited to do what I do every day.

Of course if you know me, although I see work as play, it’s not all work, I’m a clown, I always have time to laugh, to make an ass of myself, pull pranks and to do midnight food runs. We play together and we hurt together, but we’re in it together and those bonds are the lasting ones.

So I’d be so brave as to suggest you put on your big boy pants, you roll up your sleeves to get the job done and forget about your shiny shoes and monkey suit. Enjoy your work, stop focussing purely on the end reward, if you do great work that should be reward enough, and besides when you do great work, more often than not, you will get the recognition you deserve.

Legocy

Today is Mandela Day in which we celebrate on Nelson Mandela’s birthday every year. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share with you the Legocy project which I had a hand in earlier this year.

In support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, YouTube asked agencies to enter a competition by making a short film as a tribute to Nelson Mandela. The smart folk at Quirk Jozi came up with doing a short Lego stop frame animation to one of Nelson Mandela’s most famous speeches. The hope is to get enough signatures and send a request to Lego to make a Freedom Fighters Lego set. As I have been collecting Lego for a personal project for a while, I was asked to help with the cast, and of course being such a huge Lego fan, I jumped at the opportunity to have a play date with the team at Quirk. In addition I helped build them a responsive one-page site, provided the domain and hosting. They won the competition, and below is the end product.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tdheV2I_Vw?rel=0]

Please add your name to the list www.legocy.co.za

The better part of 2013

Just about every person I talk to had a pretty rough 2013 and they’d just like to put it behind them and are hoping for a better year in 2014. I certainly had a challenging year and I could rant, but I’d rather attempt to highlight the most memorable moments of 2013.

I got out a bit and was lucky enough to see some of my favorite bands and entertainment. In February I watched the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rodriguez. I got covered in colour during the We Are One (Holy One) colour festival and thoroughly enjoyed my first Roller Derby. Drove out to Pretoria to a Lego fair which inspired me to start working on a minifigure installation. I painfully pedaled my way through the Joburg city one night at Critical Mass.

I’d like to remember the people we lost and celebrate their life. From our president Nelson Mandela, to celebrities like Paul Walker and everyone’s favorite gangster James Gandolfini. You were inspirational and you will be missed.

RIP

This year we used the word selfie more times than we probably should have, and all due to the smashing uptake of Instagram, currently my favorite social network. Coca-Cola’s Share-a-Coke campaign was brilliant and while I’m still waiting to get my hands on a bottle of Coke with my name on it, it’s just been brilliant. Apple announced the release of many new upgrades to their products and I’ve not seen nearly as many people upgrade to iPhone as they have the 5s, I actually do not know how I lived without the fingerprint scanner before.

#ShareaCokeza

I started the year strong, still dropping the weight and very quickly fell ill, but in the hands of the professionals I’m one organ less, but recovering nicely and getting back in shape again. I have gained a significant amount of muscle mass and I’m feeling great. I got a lot of ink, and most importantly started my back piece, which I’m hoping to complete in 2014.

We have watched some of the most amazing TV series this year, everything from Breaking Bad to Walking Dead has people talking and could very well see the revival of live TV. New series such as Ray Donovan, House of Cards, The Blacklist and Mob City have been great additions while we wait for new Game of Thrones and some final seasons of Mad Men and Californication.

I’m looking forward to 2014 and hope that it brings us all a whole lot more success, health, happiness and more of the good times.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Crafting Digital

Last week the digital industry came together to celebrate the 2013 bookmarks awards and it’s great to see some great work being produced.The focus seems to be integrating campaigns and more around the idea, as it should be. But I feel that there isn’t a very high standard of traditional digital craft.

I went through all the award-winning work on 10 and 5 and there are only a handful of agencies who are really standing out for me. The thing that stood out most is that no one is caring enough about craft. Most of the supporting sites on campaigns aren’t great and simply functional. But there’s no real love for beautiful design, clever code, fast loading mobile friendly sites or any advances in technology. Hardly any of the sites I visited were responsive, reduced in file size or anything resembling the standard of design I have a spent an entire career trying to replicate. The best designed stuff came out of Ogilvy Cape Town, who are a traditional Ad agency, but in my opinion, in the running for the top digital agency too. Not that I’d take anything away from the teams at HelloComputer, Native VML and Quirk who are really coming into their own and crossing that line between traditional digital and integrated full service agencies.

At the end of the day, I totally understand that clients don’t really care about using SVG graphics so that things scale beautifully on retina displays and are tiny in file size, but as the digital industry, we should care, we need to set the standard. If work cannot be crafted by the time it needs to launch, the beauty of digital is that it’s easy enough to polish after the launch and we can always continue to refine our stuff and let’s be honest, if we are going to use it to promote ourselves, then you don’t need a budget signed off to show your work some love.

What I’d like to see from the bookmarks are categories that look at high quality web design and development, best interfaces, mobile apps etc. These need to follow best practices, be light, adaptive and certainly not follow the cooky-cutter format most of them currently have. They also need judges who understand this. While I have a huge amount of respect for the senior representatives from the previous winning agencies, they are not necessarily qualified to be judging work that is technically brilliant as important as it is aesthetically pleasing.

I like that the bookmarks award individuals in categories like User Experience Designer and Strategist, but what about best interface designer, digital designer, front-end developer and so on.

I feel bad writing a post like this, because I have never entered the bookmarks, I also haven’t been producing as much work over the past few years, but I do believe in craft and I do believe in our industry, so whether I’m producing the work or not, I feel I have a responsibility to motivate the industry to do better work. Yes I’m a kak writer, my rambling here isn’t going to inspire much, but if the lack of gold compared to the huge amount of bronze awards are a sign, the level of work is worse than my writing, with the exception of a handful of talented folk, we have a way to go, so let’s not forget about craft.

Tossing Tables

It’s been my experience that most agencies are structured wrong for optimum creative collaboration. Traditionally there are studios that have client service departments in one room, a boardroom or two and the creative studio, which consists of even more rows of desks. While I would love to tackle the entire agency, in this post, I want to challenge the perception of the creative studio.

First thing I would do, is toss the tables. They take up too much space and unless you do production, I can’t see a major reason to have them cluttering up the limited floor space.

Of course there is a need for desks, so I’d put a variety of different spaces for people to plant their laptop around the office. Things like small tales with chairs around them. Higher cafe/bar style surfaces along the walls. This is a great space saver and additional helps creatives stand and work which is highly recommended. The use of board room tables can also be used. Coffee tables are perfect for lounging.

On the topic of lounging, this is where I’d use the floor space. I’d create clusters of couches, bean bags and go so far as to say have hammocks if need be. We’re in the idea business and we spend large amounts of time thinking, so why not do it comfortably and socially.

With the use of wifi and the mobility of devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones, it’s easy enough to sit where ever, when ever.

Some might panic because they don;t have a space to put their stuff, well it would be easy enough to give the staff lockers or shelves they can call their own.

Another great addition to help use both sides of your brain are having play areas with games, toys and libraries.

The factory like setup does not promote collaboration or encourage creative thinking. It’s too easy to get stuck in your own space, staring at a screen all day. The perfect environment would be cozy, fun, collaborative and stimulate the already challenged creative minds.