Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [124]
This includes a strategic-planning track (communications strategy), a new track in building a better client (brand management), and a track that encompasses all things interactive (creative technology). The new building and new name were the administration’s way of announcing that the acclaimed creative factory is now a full-service, 360-degree branding factory. In addition to providing a more diverse curriculum, the new tracks allow students to work in teams that attempt to replicate the real-world agency environment.
“In MBA programs, students don’t have the opportunity to work with writers, planners, art directors, and account service people,” Don Just, head of the brand-management track, told me in his office after class one day. “They’re not exposed to the full breadth of the advertising process. Here they work in groups that mirror what’s going on at the best agencies today. They are constantly exposed to dozens and dozens of projects with teams outside their discipline in environments they can’t control.”
In the real world, creatives and clients are always at odds. Even more than account people, clients are blamed for everything wrong in a creative person’s life. Boyfriend left you? “Goddamn stupid client.” Late on your rent? “Well, if only the friggin’ client would’ve just understood that having a talking anemone is brilliant…”
If the clients of the future could better understand the creative side of things, and see that we’re not all a bunch of commerce-averse, artsy prima donnas, and if the creatives of the future could see that clients are not soulless dweebs, then theoretically the process would be less contentious and the work would be much better.
In a perfect world, in theory, this made infinite sense.
But in twenty years in advertising I’d never seen anything that remotely resembled such a place.
Is Too Much Verisimilitude a Good Thing?
A tour of the Brandcenter’s new digs with its director and professor, Rick Boyko, the former chief creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather, revealed the fusion of two eras in architecture and a literal link between advertising’s history and future. The reimagined 1870s brick building that now houses the offices for a faculty that has more than a century of award-winning agency/client experience is the former carriage house for Richmond’s swanky Jefferson Hotel. Attached to the carriage house is an ultracontemporary geometric structure of light and vibrant color that contains most of the student-friendly space.
“I thought this would be semiretirement,” Boyko explained as we checked out a new focus-group room that will be used by the future agency planners of the communications-strategy track. “But the last four years I’ve worked as hard as ever.” The focus-group room looked perfect, better than most professional suites in which I’d logged countless hours, watching people slowly kill my hard work. But Boyko wasn’t pleased. The sound system that was to link the observed with the observers on the other side of the glass was not working, rendering the room, for the time being, useless. I offered that it could still be used as a focus group for mimes, but Boyko didn’t hear me or didn’t want to. Not only was Boyko, a former art director, involved in every aspect of the planning, design, and construction of the new buildings (right down to the stylish urinals in the men’s room, which he proudly showed me and which I felt obliged to photograph), but he donated $1 million of his own money toward it, and he wanted it perfect. Which is the opposite state of the conditions at most of the real-world agencies (including every one I ever worked at) that the Brandcenter aims to replicate. To truly nail the agency vibe, I thought, they should plant a couple of bitter, disillusioned middle-aged dudes bitching by the gourmet coffee machine.
As we walked through the student lounge (partially financed