I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services.
Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x.
Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.
Marketing: who is the client? what image are they trying to create? what are the target demographics? how much time do they have? how much money do they want to spend? which mediums should be targeted?
Those factors can change quickly depending on news and current affairs, someone beating you to an original idea, technological changes and business changes (mergers, new services/products becoming the focus).
Software development, by your metrics, is very similar. Instead of selling marketing people, you're selling programmers.
I believe the grandparent was referring to a product company instead of a consultancy. A software consulting company does indeed have a lot more in common with a creative agency.
If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense.
If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so.
The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.
I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work.
If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you shouldn't work there.
At the same time there are surely creative people out there who bristle at the idea of working through the night or on weekends. To those people a workplace that closes at 6pm and enforces a no-work policy after that would be appealing.
The beauty of this article is it tells us both ways work. So people who want to close down at 6pm can start a company and draw other like minded people to them. While people with no interest in that lifestyle can stay away
All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this.
Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning.
If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.
They're not art (typically) they're design—they exist to solve a problem. They're not all trash, sometimes they're rather brilliant solutions to selling a product or service or experience (of course they're still selling).
Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.
I 100% agree, when you're talking about the ads that are aired a hundred times a day on syndicated television. Then again, the shows are terrible, so I suppose it's fitting that the ads match.
However, what about Apple's 1984 ad? Or the BMW mini-movie advertisements they ran about 6 years ago?
There are some incredibly cool concept ads out there. They usually are not the ones broadcast, but if you watch the end of the year awards for the industry, there are some very creative minds working there. (And creating some impressive work).
That's absurd. Just because the motive of the advertisement is to sell you an idea, doesn't mean it isn't done creatively and artistically. In fact, advertisements tend to be most effective when they are extremely artistic and unique.
Art is supposed to be emotionally engaging. What does a comic book do better?
A comic book has a theme, a moral, characters, continuity.
An ad has "Buy this car! Buy this car! Buy this car!"
I deny ads work better when artistic. True, you remember them better. But often I totally miss what the product was, which makes them score Zero on the ad-o-meter. Do you remember the product for those 'artistic' Apple ads? Not good enough to say "some Apple thingy".
Perhaps "trash" is going too far, even so I find it offensive that someone would put forward the notion that a work environment that is suitable for producing mildly creative advertisements should be the universal model for all creative work.
Advertisements are perhaps the shortest lived, least substantive, and least impactful creative works.
I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on.
Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.
Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.
Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.
My own work-flow is kind of a mixture of the two. I find that I have to play around with my synths a bit just to find that right sound - it might not be the right sound for the current project, but I save it just in case. Same thing with melodies, I have a ton of files with unfinished melodies that I mine ideas from.
My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off.
It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my past ideas into the one good idea.
This is how you build skill and artisanship but that's not the sum total of art. Is James Patterson the best writer of our age? He wrote 10 novels just in 2011 alone.
Shockingly there's more to art than a trite truism. If you want to acquire skill, go for quantity. But after that, if you want to become a master, if you want to impact people's lives in a way they appreciate and care about you'll need more than skill, you'll need inspiration.
I was expecting them to talk more about getting people structure to get them shipping more and challenging themselves - a la Jobs'. Instead, it really did feel like that place was a soul-grinder. The guy they interviewed didn't even work there anymore - telling...
If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.
Everyone is making (probably well deserved) ad hominem attacks on the ad agency, but the principle of structured creativity isn't a bad one. Steven King once said his muse is a drill sergeant with a flat top lurking in his basement.
The book The War Of Art has a similar perspective from a dance choreographer about how she breaks through creative blocks.
True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned.
I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro technique to break down tasks into manageable chunks with mini deadlines. A simple countdown timer does a lot to get my competitive juices going and just get started.
Well, I can work in any conditions, however I'm most creative (as in "original ideas" creative, not "see what others are doing and do it, too") when I'm motivated by something, not pushed by discipline.
It's hard to explain, but I believe his employees would take a job at Google or Apple (or heck, even Microsoft) any time of the day - if they really wanted to be pushed (not motivated) to their limits, they could've just joined the Navy :-).
My experience is that creative work is trial and error. Can try to put yourself in a position to have inspiration, but then your actual task is to catch it when it comes, and then figure out how the hell to make it work. If it doesn't, then try something else. By being immersed in the work, working it, you are more likely to have inspiration (Poincare worked like this). Sometimes you have inspirations that are solutions to a problem - sometimes you have inspirations of what a problem is, and that it would be really cool to solve it, and that a solution exists (just, not what it is).
Some writers have this attitude too, saying they keep fixed hours when they must be at the typewriter, whether they feel like it or not. [Note: this is successful writers, who publish regularly - some might call them hacks, like Stephen King. Hobbyist writers don't need this.] There's an old writer's saying that nicely sums this up:
I love this part: "Creativity and drudgery are not mutually exclusive, Richards deduced as he toiled away. Instead, they enable each other. A good idea can come from anywhere. Expressing it in a way that jumps off the page—fresh, elegant, exciting—requires, first and foremost, relentless hard work."
Is this a case of enforcing strict work hours and conditions as a "performance management" technique to ensure employees aren't slacking off? I imagine it is difficult to know whether someone in a creative job has actually performed as much work as they claim to have done.
The other plausible reason for strict work conditions that comes to mind is for highly collaborative jobs. Jobs where you're not paid to work on your own and produce result X, but rather, you're paid to be part of a team, continually bouncing ideas off each other to produce result Y. I guess it would be similar to pair programming -- with more than 2 people involved.
Other than the reasons above, I can't see much reason for forcing people to work in a strictly-enforced rule-based workplace. Have I missed something?
People are so caught up with office hours (which I think work because they expect people to come early but leave on time) but the real gem is rigorous quantification of tasks in 15 minute increments. It's like the Pomodoro technique at double speed.
“I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline,”
The stricter schedule in advertising vs work whenever probably has little to do with it. Advertising by its nature is more predictable, it doesn't have long term, world changing impact. The ultimate problem of selling is easy enough to crack, even if a campaign flops you try again. They're satisfied with their efficiency so no need to invest in neuroscience yet.
In software/science/math there is more variety, some problems are hard to crack. There is also more motivation to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude, to disrupt the market, like Google/Facebook do. Ad agencies don't develop new tech, only adapt to it, so they're vulnerable to obsolescence. At some point advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and tech will outpace the rate at which most agencies can adapt.
There are agencies that spend crazy hours polishing up their work, or more often mismanaging. But the end result of such effort is more polished work, not necessarily effect, or a larger quantity of work thrown out on a whim. In technology the end result of crazy hours has more potential impact.
How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.
In the short run, yeah. In the long run, the Internet has fundamentally changed the value proposition of ad agencies, and their old core competencies aren't that useful anymore.
I'm reminded of how in high school and early college, every teenager thinks that the way to get your ideas heard is to shout louder. But if you actually look at effective leaders, ones that change the world, the quality they share is that they listen more. That's what the Internet provides us: a way for brands to listen more to their customers. And when you have that, you don't need an industry that grew up around being able to shout louder.
Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers.
Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.
Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional advertising to me.
When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation based ads that have been around for even longer.
Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as "you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly "this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10 seconds".
A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing 10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge the advert. I can see this becoming more common,
pherhaps even to the point where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about the brand of washing detergent featured".
I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would).
I think it will be a very long time before we have good enough data mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we would probably be mostly redundant anyways.
That type of crud is done by people who come from old media companies and think of the web as a hot new thing in 2011.
Agencies charge for how much production work they can do for the commercial - video shoots, retouching, flash, etc. This doesn't necessarily deliver conversions but no one is taking it seriously because the web is seen as secondary to print and TV.
Bad user experience is just that, bad. On TVs it's tolerated because you don't have as much choice as you do online. TiVo's major selling point was it let you skip commercials.
Apple's iAds have good UX, so do many ad network startups like http://decknetwork.net You don't need to be annoying to use targeted display advertising online.
The advertising business is blooming with new technologies, in all the fields you mentioned (just take a look at sample projects of any of the major agencies right now). Designers for websites, interactive ads display, apps, and much more. The pie has just gotten bigger with more technology, with new positions.
And believe me, the ad industry has known about brain science since the 1920s. Google "A Century of the Self" and Edward Bernays. And direct marketing has had astounding data mining capabilities for decades ("Being Direct" by Lester Wunderman is a good reference here).
Well again I haven't looked at the job/revenue numbers, I wouldn't go by personal impressions.
The gimmicks in Century of Self are the standard of today's obnoxiously annoying advertising. It's hard to say how well those tricks worked in their heyday, but they're certainly less effective in today's over-saturated markets. Those approaches relied heavily on guesswork because data gathering and analysis wasn't always available. Focus groups can't keep up with brain scans and behind the scenes data gathering like Facebook's.
The industry certainly knows about brain science but most people don't have a good grasp of it. Most are involved in shmoozing clients and doing production work. This work is then judged subjectively by clients and art directors. A/B testing hasn't gained much popularity in that process.
Considering this is obviously and forthrightly shown to be a very unusual method of managing employees in the first few paragraphs of the article, common sense would tell you that this could not be evidence for anything like that.
I fail to see how coming to work at 9 and leaving at 5:30 would've failed the company. Having time to do relaxing stuff in the evening and get more sleep can help the brain unwind and foster clear thinking and creativity.
Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x.
Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.