GPC Day One...Ouch...

The meeting started today.
Watched, deconstructed and critiqued about a hundred ads/posters/tv commercials/websites/ambient executions/virals/etc… It was a long day, made longer by the fact that a lot of what we saw was painfully incoherent or poorly constructed…
It was a mixed bag of work, but for the most part, a lot of it was indefensible crap…

I found myself getting more and more pissed off, because what we were looking at reflects nothing so much as people taking shortcuts, giving up, and essentially just phoning it in, which results in substandard work that's bad for both the client and the agency's reputation... At some level, when you witness people barely putting in any effort in a team-format, it’s insulting, irritating, and makes the task at hand harder for everyone else… I’m not in a place where I ought to be criticizing ad folks, but you can sense this kind of complacency in art too, and it’s just as bothersome… As a DJ, I’m always looking for powerful, compelling, interesting music that holds people’s interest. I’ll occasionally come across a song that starts off with an awesome groove, only to have the groove go on and on and on, for an eternity, without changing or becoming dynamic or adding anything that makes the piece the least bit more interesting. Basically, you can hear the fact that the producer just cut and paste a whole section of the song over and over because they didn’t have the willpower, time, or energy to refine it or add a new element or craft a more evolved composition. When you start making art you begin to see how the process works in other people’s art....

...Take poetry, for instance. Everyone, at some point in their lives, probably wrote some poetry, or strung together some confessional half-assed rhyme scheme in an adolescent diary. Say a loved one tells you they wrote a poem for you, and then intones: “roses are red, violets are blue, I think you’re awesome, and the world does too.” Are you gonna be bowled over by that wonderful poem? NO, because it’s crap that took no effort, no time, and any clown could do the same thing. That’s what I feel like when I see bad advertising. I think to myself, rather uncharitably, “how on earth does the sleepwalking, underachieving creative director who signed off on that still have a job?” It’s not a good feeling. But hey, YOU watch 200 forgettable ads in a day and see if it doesn’t affect YOUR mood…