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.
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