When I was at art school in Brooklyn, I was looking for an apartment to share.
One guy I went to see was a bodybuilder with rippling muscles.
He was about 30 and, at the time, that seemed really old to me.
He said he was gay and did I have a problem with that?
I said I wasn’t and I didn’t.
He told me he used to go ’straight-bashing’ at the weekends.
I asked what that was.
He said he’d get a small, gay friend of his to go around various bars and act really camp.
Meanwhile he would wait outside.
Eventually some drunks would start picking on the little guy.
Calling him faggot and shoving him around.
When they took him outside to beat him up, this guy would be waiting.
And he’d kick the daylights out of them.
Fair enough.
He told me was actually bisexual.
He said, in his time, he’d had sex with around 500 women, and 1,500 men.
Fair enough.
I didn’t end up sharing a flat with him.
But one thing he told me did come in very useful.
He said the canteen at my college was the biggest ‘cruising’ venue in New York City.
It came in useful because one of my courses was psychology.
And to pass, we had to write a thesis.
This meant coming up with a question.
Interviewing lots of people.
And drawing conclusions from the results.
Basically, crude research.
For a creative person this could be a dull process.
Unless I could find an interesting and provocative question.
Now that I knew the college canteen was full of gay men that was easier.
I made my title something like, ‘Gay: nature or nurture?”
I had lots of potential subjects to interview.
I’d ask them all about their history, when did they know they were gay, patterns of behaviour, etc?
This is many years ago now, but I remember one thing that surprised me.
The majority of these guys had lived in denial about it for a long time.
They had sex with many times more females than a straight guy would.
Until they stopped resisting and admitted they were gay.
Ever since then, I thought the subject of denial was fascinating.
How we try to impose our will about our self-image on the physical universe.
Without looking at the evidence.
I was in denial about advertising when I was young.
I thought it was just big-business manipulating the gullible masses.
I thought I should be involved in something better.
Like joining the Peace Corps and serving in the Third World.
But the evidence said I was good at advertising.
I was in denial.
I spent years resisting it.
Eventually I came out of the closet.
I admitted to myself that I loved advertising.
So the question was, could I be in advertising and help the Third World?
Well, if you’re creative there’s always a way.
I figured, I could earn a lot more in advertising than I could in the Third World.
And I’d be in a position to influence people’s attitudes more.
So I began donating part of my salary every month.
And the government had to donate the tax on it.
It added up to enough to pay for at least one person to replace me.
Plus I began making press ads, posters, and commercials about the Third World debt.
A huge amount of media and production, all for free.
So, me being in advertising was actually better for the Third World.
A lot of us wish we were doing something else?
So we make ourselves unhappy about our situation?
And by resisting what we’re doing we make it worse.
The best thing is look at the evidence.
And be honest with ourself.
Then stop resisting.
When we come out of the closet, about whatever it is, we release all the energy we previously wasted in pretence and denial.
We can start enjoying what we always wanted to do.
And that’s a better way to spend our time on the planet.
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Hi Dave
Thanks so much for this. As part of my buddhist practice, I’m doing a lot of work at the moment with resistance and denial - just being able to see them both is a huge step and hadn’t really thought about them in the context of my livelihood so this is thought provoking.
Hope all is well with you!
Kate
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
Yesterday I was looking after someone with mild dementia
when my mobile went.
It was my daughter.
She was lying on the floor in the hallway at home.
She had collapsed, and was in tears.
She told me she had called an ambulance.
I stayed on the phone til the ambulance arrived.
Then I phoned the office and told them
I neeed a relief worker immediately.
At the hospital, my daughter needed a series of tests.
An old woman in the next cubicle was playing up.
Trying to smoke in the hospital,
trousers half zipped, dirty, stinking of booze, two black eyes.
No nurse was available, so I stood with her to make sure
she didn’t disturb my wife and daughter while they were taking tests.
She grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes and said:
“Help me.” “Please help me.”
I whispered in her ears “I think you need to go to AA luv”
She looked at me in astonishment and shouted:
“Are you taking the piss?”
I just laughed out loud and whispered in her ear the same thing again.
She looked at me with curiosity.
We can carry a message, but we can’t carry the mess.
I should have known better, talking to a bottle,
but if I have no compassion for my fellow, I have nothing.
A few days ago I got to work and someone tipped me off.
“So and so’s stabbing you in the back.”
They are jealous of me? How sad is that?
Because I took the courage to change the things I can,
the bosses put me on a better client. One who does not scratch and bite.
I’ve got his client, and he’s got mine, but he won’t tell the office the truth.
So now he’s stuck in the shit of his own pride.
I’ve worked in advertising for 30 odd years and can’t get a job anywhere for now.
I’ve taken this job because the family like to eat.
Families sleep better when the bills are paid and sometimes you have to give time time.
However, I thought, hang on a moment.
I’m getting stabbed in the back here for £6 an hour!
I can get stabbed in the back for much more than that!
If I’m lucky, I might even get stabbed in the front, or not at all!
So it’s back to looking for a job in advertising,
but I have a massively altered attitude, which has been changed by taking this job.
A friend of mine sent me a little freelance task.
I didn’t get paid, it doesn’t matter. He has a family to feed too.
Just doing it made me feel xxxxxxx great!
So from now on, I truly know I’m a “shoemaker”,
and I’m “sticking to my last” til my last breath.
Blogging sharpens my writing
(and my spelling, and my grammar, and my thinking).
and it’s free, and it’s fun.
You sounded like Camus’s character Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall for a second there Dave. I know that it is not the case.
Denial is a part of the human condition it is what we do about it that is important.
The moral impasse that most people feel in western economies is very evident. Why feel bad for being good at something that is legal ie advertising and be fortunate (for that what it is) to live in the first world - but people do I hear it a lot.
Anyway you denial story reminds me of the joke “We tell our friends that our daughter is a stripper in Soho, she really sings in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical but it saves the embarassment”
Could you make one up for advertising, me think you
could !
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.com/2009/10/in-reply-to-daves-great-posts-89.html
yes, mind has an amazing ability to lie to itself.
Living in denial. That’s just in seine.
Not too sure about this one Dave, if there is one thing I have learned, it’s that you become good at what you practice. And you practice what you love. Nobody is born good at advertising. Some are born a little smarter than others or more creatively inclined, they learn that rule breaking is a good thing and are never content with the status quo. A lot of these people end up in advertising. This is either because they love advertising more than charity work or because they are scared to do what they love.
You went into advertising (I’m guessing) because it it what you loved, however if you had put all of your time and creativity into world peace or 3rd world debt you probably could have done just as much in these areas as you have done for advertising. Bob Geldof is a good example of this- he wasn’t the smartest cookie in the pot, and wasn’t very good at politics, he was a musician. But he loved the idea of saving the world more than playing in a band, so he put all his time and creativity into that, and look what he achieved.
You should check out the documentary “Peace one day”- an incredible story of just a bloke with an idea for achieving world peace, he was rubbish to begin with but he got better and better, and before you know it, he’s having chats with all of the African dictators, getting medical trucks access to places they’ve never been allowed passage before and achieving days of cease fire in war torn countries. It’s really rather incredible.
So yeah, to conclude, i agree that you should do what you love but you certainly shouldn’t do “what you’re good at.”
Question Dave.
I think I’m good at advertising, having done it for more than 15 years since I left college.
I also like it a lot.
And I think what you say makes a lot of sense.
And here’s where the problem starts.
Few ad agencies subscribe to your ways of doing things.
So it’s becoming more & more tiresome to work for such companies.
So, what would you say I do?
Keep on doing something I’m half good at and love, even if it means getting frustrated?
Confucius said ‘choose something you like and you’ll never have to work a day in your life’.
Funny how despite liking advertsing, it seems to be more and more or a chore.
Help!
Hi P,
Personally, I think if we keep experimenting we find out what we want to do.
First question: what is there in the world that upsets you, that needs fixing?
Second question: how can advertising work to make a change?
Third question: How can you make that happen with no money?
Whatever else, we’re in a unique position that a bus-driver or shop assistant isn’t.
We have access to mass media.
We also have access to everyone who works in mass media.
There’s energy in changing things.
There’s energy in doing something that hasn’t been done.
And in this case there’s no one stopping you.
You are the client, the account man, the planner, the media buyer, the creative.
All you have to do is work out how to do it for free.
That’s an experiment.
Think this can also apply to the client / agency relationship. So many agencies are guilty of doing the same thing over and over in denial that actually what they first proposed just wasn’t good enough or right. Whereas it makes much more sense to open up and try something fresh and, as you rightly point out, enjoyable.
Certainly applies from a new biz perspective whereby you just know that there is no chemistry or ways you can add value to a potential client. It takes courage in conviction to not deny yourself the lure of the potential £££££ but stay true to what your agency really does. The rewards are there.
Thanks Dave, let me take a minute or two (probably longer) to think what really upsets me and needs fixing, without me getting into trouble with the Federal laws.
Hi Dave,
Many thanks for your reply to P,
and many thanks P. for opening your heart.
There’s nothing wrong with Advertising.
It’s some of the people within it.
I just passed a 48 sheet poster on my way home.
I won’t embarrass the agency.
It had a 3-word headline with an AB tone of voice
for a DE market????
Or the French company that’s passing itself off as British!
Has the industry has lost it’s voice?
Has it lost it’s balls?
Dave’s voice, calls out to a vast wilderness of disillusionment.
It’s a deep undercurrent, and we all know it’s there.
P. had the courage to come forward.
There are many others disillusioned with the industry out there too
who are not speaking, or cannot speak. It’s time we heard from them too.
My way of dealing with disillusionment has been to throw myself
into some of the worst jobs imaginable outside of advertising.
This has helped me recharge my batteries.
Looking at advertising with consumer’s eyes,
and professional experience, cock-ups stick-out like great hooters!
Take your average Joe.
He’s tired, bored, fed-up of being passed the same old lin,
annoyed at being talked-down to, or upset at being patronised.
As Jeremy Sinclair once wrote:
‘There has to be a better way.’
And Dave has given us all some food for thought.
Keep the loaves and fishes coming Dave…
…your people are starving.
Lovely posts. Love you all.
“There are many who are not speaking or cannot speak”.
Makes it sound like we’re political prisoners in Tibet, whereas we’re mainly just a bunch of middle-class moaners because we’re not getting paid stupid money anymore to ponce around pretending to be tortured artists.
Advertising used to be glam.
Now it ain’t.
But it still beats scaffolding on a freezing cold winter’s day at B&Q in Swindon at 6am.
That’s what my brother does and I reckon he’d much rather be sat thinking of silly ideas to sell stuff.
Hi Vessel,
You’re absolutely right. I should be grateful for being paid to be tortured.
Some people don’t even have that pleasure to wake up to in the morning.
The mother-in-law has just threatened to come over.
Anyone desperate for company out there, just give me a call.
@ Kevin Gordon; Esq
Thanks Kev.
As they say, the more you care, the more it hurts.
Funny how being resigned to things is one stop short of resigning from the job.
It’s easy to see why people become self-seeking. I’m doing a boring brochure for a global client. My partner is doing something more glamorous - tv and all that. So her attention and energy are on that. And she doesn’t quite have time, energy or attention for the brochure. Meanwhile, the suits want to see the work because they have an appointment with the client. But they don’t want to chase for the work because, well, they just don’t want to be involved. It’s no wonder that the work’s shit. It’s all very well to say ‘pick your battles/briefs’. Unfortunately, at the moment, I just have one brief. “Then we wonder why the work is so bad” recurs.
Hi q,
If partners were not delivering, I used to put them under extra pressure. I’d suggest if they hadn’t the time to do a certaing job properly, perhaps someone from the playpen could help. You should have seen his little fingers move! I had a writer once who just used to avoid the issue. One day I confronted him on it and he went into a loopy blaming it all on the carton of milk he’d bought from Tesco that morning. That’s denial. I said to him, okay, you get another carton of milk, and I’ll get another writer. He did, and I did with another writer and we did some great work. We didn’t always love each other, didn’t always see eye to eye, but a team is usually a marriage of the odd couple. It rarely happens that both get on swimmingly. If it does then that’s brilliant. Most of all there has to be commitment.
Hi p,
I hope you don’t resign until you’ve got another job to go to. I worked with a guy once who was creative but highly disruptive. The boss told me I had to fire him. It was a bit like a call from Darth Vader. I knew he wasn’t going to get a job fast in that climate, so I told the boss it would cost him a lot of redundancy money to fire him. This was a logical argument which the boss accepted. I then tipped him off, telling him the longest I could hold on to him was 3 months. He ended up getting a brilliant job, and was much happier. Years later, I was out of work and desperate. That same man saved my bacon. No matter how bad it feels, it’s never as bad as being out of work. Having been out of work for 6 months I can tell you in all sincerity it is a dire existence beyond belief. Fortunately now, I’m working again, I just have to get back into advertising now, because it’s the business I know an love. It’s not really work at all. Work is driving an Argos van 160 miles in a day from 05.30 am til 6pm, doing 26 drops in a day, trailing 3 piece suites up 6 flights of stairs because the lift is out of order to find they dont like the colour when you get to the top, Oh, and while you’re here can you take the old one away… That’s work. Have fun p.
Hi Dave
@ Jim Powell
Jacques Séguéla wrote a book called ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.’
The story of his encounter with Salvador Dali is far too filthy to repeat here, but it’s very funny…
Ha ha ha Mr Gordon
I never quit without another job. But this has meant being fired but so what? I get paid. Alas and alack, I was retrenchhed and now freelancing. Thanks Mr Gordon.
Good for you P.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS PARTICULAR POST, BUT DAVE ASKED ME TO POST IT. READ ON;
I recently had the privilege of working with an organisation which assists people of varying disability. In preparing my recommendations, I researched best-practices for online ‘accessibility’.
I discovered that a unique font has been created by Fontsmith specifically for the visually impaired and people with other reading disabilities (primardyslexia etc.).
It is called FS Me. Visit http://www.fontsmith.com
This is how they describe the font on their website:
FS Me is designed to aid legibility for those with learning disability. FS Me was researched and developed in conjunction with - and endorsed by - Mencap, the UK’s leading charity and voice for those with learning disability. Mencap receive a donation for each font licence purchased.
That’s a great initiative. However, currently the font is only usable in print and can only be used online as an image-based element. In other words, it can’t be used as online text.
Isn’t that a great shame? So I am wondering this:
Is the font FS Me that much more helpful to those who need it most? If so, should the digital communications industry be lobbying to have it encrypted/encoded for internet text use?
I would love to know what has been done (if anything) and what can be done to make it happen.
It doesn’t make sense that the many government and charity based websites that need to be most accessible can’t use the text that is reputed to be the most legible.
Maybe it has already been debated and a conclusion arrived at. If that’s the case, my friends in the disabled access community are not aware of it.
I know that as long ago as 2003, Wired ran a story (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/10/60834) about a Dutch designer, Natascha Frensch who was close to releasing a similar font, called Regular Reader.
This is an extract from the article:
Without these enhancements, the traditional fonts used on the Web and in newspapers, books and magazines can contribute to letter-reversal errors and other problems commonly associated with visual dyslexia.
According to the U.K.-based Dyslexia Research Trust, as many as 10 percent of English readers have some form of dyslexia, a learning disorder thought to be caused by a combination of genetic, immune and nutritional factors.
Although most children have trouble with letter reversal when first learning to read, dyslexics often continue to have problems as they grow older.
“All beginning readers make letter reversals,” primarily before age 6, said John Stein, founder of the Dyslexia Research Trust. “However, 50 percent of child dyslexics at age 8 complain of visual problems including letter reversals.”
Stein believes specialized typefaces can help combat the symptoms of dyslexia, especially if the fonts are used in large print and do not have serifs, the tiny lines that project from the bodies of letters in many common type styles.
Currently, many dyslexia-friendly websites use the sans-serif Arial typeface. But like other potentially problematic typefaces, Arial uses similar forms for the letters b and d, p and q, and u and n.
Some organizations, like the University of Edinburgh Disability Office, have tried using the Comic Sans typeface instead. But the thick and asymmetrical characters that make up Comic Sans often are considered to be too whimsical for professional use.
However, if you go to Natascha Frensch’s own website for the font, she uses Microsofts Verdana, because her ‘more legible’ font cn only be used as a visual element. http://www.readregular.com/english/intro.html
There’s a lot of activity going on but no satisfactory results. dyslexic.com reports on efforts by Microsoft which fall short of best practice in terms of editable text online. Read about from this link.
http://www.dyslexic.com/articlecontent.asp?CAT=Dyslexia%20Information&slug=67&title=Typefaces%20for%20Dyslexia
They say:
Britain has two million severely dyslexic individuals, including some 375,000 schoolchildren. 10% of people using ‘Romance’ languages are coping with a reading difficulty. Dyslexia is a combination of abilities and difficulties that affect the learning process, displaying a wide range of difficulties. Dyslexia can occur despite normal intellectual ability and teaching, and it is independent of socio-economic or language background. The British Dyslexia Association
There has been growing innovation to combat dyslexia, especially for children, in the form of computer software. However, relatively little design research has been done in the area of typography and type design that might support dyslexics. Read Regular is a typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia read and write more effectively.
Read Regular aims at preventing a neglect of dyslexia, creating a more confident feeling regarding the problems that occur with dyslexia.
As I see it, the big online issue is as follows: most public sector and charity websites have a requirement for self content management. The WAI ratings are self-assessed as long as you follow the guideline. So achieving best practices is not only a variable, it falls short of the opportunity, given that there are fonts available that are more user-friendly than those available to the communications industry. I feel sure that it wouldn’t cost Microsoft that much to make one of these font available.
All you agency colleagues out there in WPP-land, have a word with your global client.