The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

For an industry that has achieved a lot of amazing things in its history, it’s doing it’s absolute best to ensure all that is forgotten in favour of hype, ego and delusion.

Thankfully, there are still a great many great people – and a few companies – who continue to wave the flag for quality, purpose and meaning, however the tide is turning and I recently was reminded of one of our great issues when I read this.

Have you read it?

Please do.

You see the issue I feel that is contributing to our destruction is our ability to only view the World in black and white.

There is no grey.

None.

According to adland, you’re either this. Or that.

Nothing in-between.

Hence you read comments like “all creative departments are crap” which is obviously pure fucking bollocks.

Seriously, is that what we’ve come to?

In our desperate bid to ‘grab the headlines’, we’ve decided the best thing to do is make massive, generic – and totally unsubstantiated – claims?

Talk about doing society and humanity a massive disservice.

Don’t get me wrong, having a point of view – especially in this industry – is very important, but saying shit like that isn’t a point of view, it’s making a massive judgement … a massive judgement that ends up making you, and the industry, look like fucking fools.

Some people believe the secret to ‘debate’ is to not give the other side an inch and stick to your [myopic] view through thick and thin.

They’re idiots.

While our job ultimately depends on us making a call on who we are going to ‘target’, if we don’t accept and appreciate there are a mass of differences and exceptions between people, cultures, genders etc etc, then how on Earth can we create work that works … so while it might be convenient to express things only in black and white terms, the reality is doing that directly contributes to our lack of relevance, influence, believability and value – not just with business, but with society as a whole.

Highlighting a group is one thing, saying everyone is like that is completely different.