the ad industry and the toronto maple leafs
There are lots of ways to tell if an opportunity is at hand. The best of them all might just be the feeling that more can be done for less. I’ve never felt so strongly a sentiment towards the ad industry.
Once you hit high school and the options around “When I grow up I want to be…” start to expand beyond astronaut and professional athlete, advertising becomes a very real and attractive option. And so it should - how often can one wake up every morning and unleash a wrath of creativity the world has never seen? Where else can revolutions begin with ideas conceived at the crossroads of two seemingly unrelated observations, that by some stroke of dumb luck, happened to come together in a moment equal in brilliance and simplicity? And to be paid for this vocation!?!
But as I basked in the glory of my television’s glow, I always wondered why so many ads were plain and bad (or more accurately, plain bad). Too many times they tried (too hard) to impress me. Too many times they left out the little things that I had come to know as the brand’s signals. It was, and still is, heart-wrenching to know that people paid good money for an ad that I will never remember.
This just made advertising more attractive. There was an opportunity to do more for less.
There are a lot of us who share a frustration with the status quo model of responding to RFPs, landing clients only to backpedal creative, or compromising where compromise means ‘lost in obscurity’. We still believe that advertising is a beautiful marriage between commerce and art. We know that technology has made “mass media” something you earn, not something you can buy. And most importantly, we respect the notion that, like astronauts and athletes, advertising is not for everyone and those that are busy soaking in the sun should move aside for those who live and breathe their craft the same way a talented athlete shows up first for practice.
And yet, as we plead for chances with the biggest names in the business. As we work for free - not because we believe in the strategy, but because if we don’t, then someone else will without asking these questions. As we extend our patience to support the assumption that all these coffees and missed markets are in the name of something great that is just around the corner… As we do all this, we put our faith and fire in the hands of fatter cats. And while we hope that they are still reaching for the top, we cannot kick the sickening feeling that maybe… just maybe… they are full.
Ladies and gentleman - your Toronto Maple Leafs.
Comments
Leave a Reply
- Subscribe to ideas for conversations
-
find it
-
about
Someone who talks a lot, listens a lot, sings on the streets and loves big ideas. If you need a discipline or two for piece of mind, try Marketer and Entrepreneur. If you need a title to legitimize why you'd waste your time here, I can't help you. I work with people on fire for the things they love.
-
recently written
-
categories
-
monthly archives
-
blogroll
-
admin