Often, account men think they’d like to be a copywriter.
The creative department looks more fun.
No one does much work.
They sit around and play music or look at photography books, or YouTube all day.
And the account guy knows he can write puns.
In fact his messages, on staff leaving cards and birthday cards, are funnier than what the copywriters write.
So he writes a script for a commercial.
And the creative director doesn’t buy it.
So he never writes anything again.
He can’t handle rejection.
He wrote one thing and he expected it to get bought.
When it didn’t get bought he was destroyed.
The creative department is no place for anyone who can’t handle rejection.
Our lives are about rejection.
When you start, you have to do roughly two dozen roughs to get six that you think are good enough to show the crerative director.
If you’re lucky, he’ll pick three to show the client.
If you’re lucky, the client will only turn down two.
And you’ll have an ad running.
Of course, you’ll have twenty three ads rejected as not good enough.
The difference is, you’ll forget all about them because you’ve got an ad running.
They were just stepping stones on the way.
Michelangelo once carved a massive horse out of a block of marble.
He was asked how he could create such a beautiful object from such a massive shapeless lump.
He said, “Easy. I just cut away everything that isn’t the horse.”
Rejected ads are like that to us.
The chips of stone that we have to get out of the way so that we can get to the thing we want.
When I started at BMP, my ratio was about one good ad out of every eight roughs.
In the next offices, the senior teams were doing one good ad for every four roughs.
So I knew it was just a matter of numbers.
If they did four roughs, I’d do sixteen.
Then they’d have one good ad, but I’d have two good ads.
I would look twice as good as them even though I was actually only half as good.
Because no one would see me throwing away four times as many roughs.
Rejection is just part of our job.
The way running is to a footballer.
You run and run, and sweat and puff, for an hour and a half for nothing.
And suddenly you connect, and the ball goes in the net.
Then everything else disappears, and that moment expands to fill your whole world.
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Nixon: “Only when you’ve been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is on top of the highest mountain.”
That’s a great blog Dave - did you ever see the display of Economist work AMV used to have in their reception?
They had a mass of work headed ‘what the creative teams wrote’
then a smaller display of ‘what the creative director approved’
a smaller pile still of ‘what the client liked’
a tiny pile of ‘what made it through research’
and finally just a few finished ads titled ‘what the consumer saw’
It really made the point about how much work goes into making 4 or 5 executions in a campaign.
and it was great tracking through the campaigns backwards, to see where the finished ads had started.
The inability to handle rejection says one thing about us:
——————lack of self-confidence——————-
That’s when you desperately depend on someone else’s approval.
(Also keep this in mind: the more self-confident you become, the less exposed to rejection you are.)
Ha ha Dave. Doesn’t work.
My CD has short attention so if I give him 10 headlines, he can’t decide.
And then the suits blame me for wasting time.
What a lark.
Sorry anca i have to disagree. It probably shows over confidence if anything.
My maths teacher told me when I was 7 that everything was easy when you knew how.
Having learnt that, I have spent the rest of my life trying to find out how to do stuff.
A simple mission, but one that keeps me going…
Great blog.
[...] http://cstadvertising.com/blog/2008/12/17/creative-rejection/ [...]
Oh yeah, great blog …
Rodge, over-confidence is just a thin covering. Can you guess what the very next layer is?
Good post, just one thing, however, could you please replace “account men” with “copywriter,” your prejudices are showing.
Sponge?
Perfect metaphor, Rodge — fake volume, lots of holes.
I thought Mad Men captured copywriter-envy perfectly, when that horrible snivelling account man sneaks his concept in to show the client and Don Draper has to set him straight. Ah, the good old days…
i have a huge problem with rejection. never got used to it.
my solution is to think things to death and beyond. and never present things in a “oh here’s some stuff i was thinking might work. maybe” kind of way. that invites judgement and, therefore, rejection.
PS: still want an Anca t-shirt.
…which means two things, Vinny:
1. You understood that self-confidence keeps rejection away.
2. You actually CAN handle rejection — by avoiding it, but not by running away from it. On the principle “A gentleman will walk but never run”.
Don’t get used to rejection, but if you encounter it, don’t break your stride either. Find a clever way to fend it off. Self-confidence and professionalism seem to team up effectively.
David Abbott once asked a senior how long he had been an art director.
“16 years,:” the art director replied.
Then added, “or maybe it is more 1 year going through 16 cycles.”
Doing lots of work to improve the success ratio is really good.
Unfortunately, sometimes I end up recycling ideas which is really dumb.
One French agency I worked at methodically kept every piece of unsuccessful work.
The next time a brief even vaguely remembering the original came along, we just changed the logo.
Not surprisingly, the ratio wasn’t good.
I mean, if the idea didn’t go through 1st time, what makes me think it would 2nd time?
“Madness is doing the same and expecting diffrent results.”
Thanks Dave.
anca, great analysis.
yes, i pride myself on hitting the target. every time. i see that as the most important part of my job. getting used to rejection would be depressing.
There’s a good conference presentation video here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/agenda.aspx (the “sketching experiences” presentation), where Bill Buxton (Microsoft’s chief designer) tries to explain these creative concepts to techies like me… He’s trying to stop us just running with the first idea (typical techie mistake) - so he explains that, if a creative takes only one idea along to a review, and the senior creatives don’t like it, it basically all becomes personal: “if we don’t like your idea - then by extension we don’t like you…” So he reckons a bare minimum of five equally viable ideas - and the presenter shouldn’t favour any one, they should all have their merits.
Anca.
you wrote: “over-confidence is just a thin covering. Can you guess what the very next layer is?”
so, what is next layer?
I honestly hope you’re not suggesting lack of self-confidence.
Creativity requires confidence. If the idea is good, and you believe from heart it is; it doesn’t matter whether it sells or not because the reward is in cracking the idea itself. I believe it is very important to be objective and honest with oneself; if a creative guy is honest and ruthless with himself, he will present the best of 4 out of 14 he wrote. That saves everybody’s time and increases success ratio.
Bill Buxton’s book, Sketching User Experiences, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007, is well worth buying.
Failure is just one step away from success.
W+K have a good philosophy, ‘Embrace failure’.
One has to be thick skinned in the biz and remember none of it is personal, either way.
Rudyard Kipling said it all: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two Impostors just the same; yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”
If your that confident you present 1 of 14.
…and Mr. Kipling makes exceedingly good cakes too.
this post is so touching…