Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [132]
The simple answer was that I was writing another book. Not another novel but, ironically, a book about the world I had supposedly gleefully left behind. Many who worked with me found this curious and funny, and not just because of the irony, but because, really, who the hell am I to write a book about advertising?
What the hell does Othmer, he of the workmanlike creative career and creeping cynicism, know about the perpetually changing landscape of adland?
After all, I never had my name on the door of an agency. Never ran a big-agency creative department. Adweek never published a picture of me dressed in black, with a ponytail and sunglasses, beneath the headline “Hot Commodity.” I never reaped an IPO windfall, created a famous Super Bowl spot, or wrote a phrase that would become part of the vernacular, like “Just Do It!” or “Think Different” or “Where’s the Beef?”
But for twenty years I made ads. One out of fifty probably ever made it out of the agency. Maybe one out of five hundred ever made it on the air. But some were smart or funny or surprising enough to make bad meetings good. Others made clients with one $300 million foot out the door step back inside to reconsider. Sometimes I sold the proverbial big idea. Sometimes all I did was say something that made someone else’s big idea seem even bigger.
And sometimes I was simply a halfway reasonable, adult mind in an industry that wasn’t always.
Here’s what happened: in twenty years I went from earnest, wide-eyed junior copywriter to big-agency golden boy to disillusioned, bitter corporate burnout, then, briefly, back to golden boy, then to capable veteran, and finally back to corporate burnout, but this time without the bitterness or disillusionment. Because really, there is no reason for a rational adult to be disillusioned with advertising. With medicine, or art, or the Peace Corps, maybe. But saying you’re disillusioned with advertising is like saying you’re disillusioned with politics, or the porn industry.
What did we expect, fulfillment?
During my career I survived some fourteen rounds of layoffs, downturns in the industry and the economy, takeover threats, IPOs, sixteen creative directors, thirteen CEOs, the demise of one great agency, and the ongoing collapse of another.
For this I was given more money than I ever would have made in my father’s well-intentioned career of choice for me: mason’s laborer and, if I played my cards right, bricklayer.
Because of advertising I got to travel the world and meet many smart, talented, and powerful people, from CEOs and artists to four-star generals and Carrot Top.
Because of advertising I got to follow and occasionally lead and make hundreds of friends for life.
When I left advertising a few months before my novel was published, I was indeed ready for a change. But it is important to note that I never hated advertising or felt that I was above it (in fact, I was often humbled and awed by the superior ad talent of others). I had just felt for the first time in my life that I ought to be doing something else, something I wanted and needed to do more.
Then, while doing press for my novel, a funny thing happened. While some questions were about the book, most were about advertising. Why was it such a huge part of our culture? Was it responsible for globalization? The downfall of our youth? What’s the most despicable ad you ever made? The most despicable thing you ever saw?
My answers surprised me. Rather than rattling off witty renunciations of my past and the industry that had employed me, I found myself publicly defending advertising, and then, later, privately thinking about its role in my life and our culture more deliberately and sincerely than I had in the previous twenty years.
The simple answer to my friends in advertising is that I had come back to the scene of the crime because I was writing a book. A guy’s got to make a living, right? The real answer, of course, is much more