It’s all very simple. I have been in this industry for 30 years. It has evolved and turned into being much more advanced in many ways, but there are some things that have gone missing in the past 10 years of it. Worstly, the amount of work coming out of agencies has shrunk.
In the years of 1996 – 1999 my agency Paradiset with a staff of 45 at most, produced hundreds of ads every year and in 1997 only we delivered some 75 new tvc’s for major brands.
Agencies may appear to be more professional these days, but we spend way too much time in meetings. As the ECD I see it as my duty to make sure the creatives get time to do what we were hired for in the first place – to deliver creative work that can move cans from shelves, get cars out of show rooms, get insurance policies to multiply…
We seem to have grown so afraid to do wrong. We spend hours and hours talking about how to make it right, rather than perfecting things in practice. Michael Jordan didn’t talk his way to become the best basketball player the world has seen. He practiced the game until he became the best. There are no short cuts – the more work you do, the better it gets.
If there’s one thing that successful artists have in common, it is volume of work. The Swiss master sculptor Alberto Giacometti made over 1600 of his typical thin figure bronze sculptures. Ingmar Bergman wrote hundreds of plays, directed most of them and wrote and directed close to fifty films, all this WHILE heading the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, Neil Young has recorded over 50 records in his 45 year old career and has toured almost every year, Willie Nelson has written 3000 songs, toured a million miles…
That is why I want our creatives to do MORE and MORE work! That’s how we move from doing OK work to do excellent work. And excellent work pays a lot more than OK work. No creatives can be drawn into meetings unless it’s absolutely necessary, no creatives can be in meetings with account people or clients on Fridays.
By Björn Rietz, Executive Creative Director at the Stockholm marketing agency, gyro