Fugacious advertising
Last night, my daughter was watching live TV and a commercial I wrote came on the air. For the past two months, she's heard all it entails to bring something like this to life. Approving the voice over by the copywriter and in some last minute instances rewriting portions out of necessity. Endless revisions. Client presentations. Choosing a director and production house and post-production, too. Wardrobe. Setting and location. Pre-production meetings.
She saw me in my bedroom/office on the remote shoot, heard me talk about the edit revisions, and listened a million times to the opening mnemonic, a word I have sense learned to spell without having to think about it. And don't forget VFX, color sessions and sound mixing.
Despite having watched me go through the process, it didn't really hit home until she saw it on TV. Then the switch flipped. She came out of her room and looked at me with slight astonishment. So that's what he does.
Despite the pre-pandemic shoots around the world, luxury hotel stays, expense accounts that have admittedly dwindled year after year, and the bevy of self-congratulatory award shows, advertising is, like most jobs, a thankless one.
My work week averages to about 50 hours. Sometimes it's closer to 80. At this level in my career most of my days are spent in meetings. Instead of creating, I creative direct. Approving someone else's ideas and making them better, or attempting to, depending on the day's level of imposter syndrome.
But for the most part its meeting. Zoom meetings. Sometimes back-to-back-to-back-to-back so that I am taking five minute pee breaks like I was in high school in between classes, or eating lunch or dinner in front of the computer on mute with the camera turned off. During the height of this particular production, I'd start while the moon was still up, and stare at my computer until well past sundown. I started taking vitamin D because I spent six weeks indoors
Despite this I still love the job and the industry. I am blessed to work when so many others aren't, and immensely blessed to work from home.
Still, it's rare that I ever have a true day off; even holidays are peppered with "quick follow ups,' or "quick chats," or something that may or may not be quick but often disrupts what little reverie I get.
If the above paragraph sounds like only the type of complaining a privileged person can do, consider for the moment that the day I flew home when I found out my mom had died, I had a boss call for "a quick chat" about a "huge opportunity." (The call was not quick and the opportunity was not huge.)
A few years later, after switching to a different agency, I got a text message and email during my dad's funeral asking if I could be back in the office the next day for a briefing. This was after informing them three days before that I was taking bereavement leave.
In other words, it's not just free-time and weekends that have been disrupted. It's emotional ones, too. This does take its toll in one form or another.
Beyond personal disruption, advertising is a strange industry in that it requires you to work crazy concentrated hours wracking your brain to come up with the most compelling and creative campaigns that are then, for the most part, treated as fleeting, not enduring. The days of long-running campaigns like Absolut Vodka have long since passed. Now everything is temporary. At best you get a viral spike that lasts two days. If not, it's forgotten on the same Thursday it's released. Skipped, muted or sometimes reported. And that's assuming anyone saw it to begin with, which is also in doubt.
Even the commercial my daughter saw on TV will only run a few weeks unless they bring it back. And yet seeing it still moved her, in a way that most consumers who see it will never feel. For that I am grateful. Not because I'm so enthralled with my own work, but because I want to be someone in her eyes. Someone to look up to, I guess.
For all the industry's faults, the good thing about advertising is that it taught me how to work off a brief (or writing prompt) and do so quickly. Ideas must come, there must be a lot and when you sift through them all to find the one or two or three that work, you have to be able to develop them at breakneck speed. That skill has been invaluable for me when crafting fiction. When I see the concept or plot before me, then I can write with ease, even if I'm not one hundred percent sure of where the story is going. The only time it truly becomes difficult for me in either case is when I'm in the dark.
I'd rather be on to something even if it's ultimately nothing, because when I'm on to something, there's a greater chance that it will end up being something.
Also: If you aren't following me on Twitter you probably should.