Reconciling my Liberal Guilt with Corporate Schemes for World Domination

Ahhh…every three months another meeting, another flight to another country where another conference room awaits my company’s eclectic cross section of outspoken creative directors and insightful management heads… I’ve often been asked by people looking to get into advertising how I got such a great job, and the answer is, I was in the right place at the right time and met the right people. It’s taken me awhile to see things from that perspective, because for a long time I thought it was a mistake. I thought advertising was EVIL greed-based schwill designed to manipulate the masses, and by participating in it, I was complicit in all the sins and excesses of capitalism. This, I realize now, is my liberal guilt acting up, and the logical result of what happens when you spend your formative years surrounded by loud angry leftist intellectuals who take their ideas and positions far too seriously. I’ve since made peace with my place in the world, as I’ve come to realize the undeniable role that effective communication plays in selling an idea. In this day and age, in the era of Obama as a candidate & Shepard Fairey as one of his propagandists, I think it’s self-evident to anyone paying attention that good marketing is essential if you want any message to come across clearly in a crowded and often incoherent media landscape…

But I haven’t always thought that. For a long time I resented my profession, and believed deeply that it was keeping me from success as a musician. I looked at it as just another day job that would pay the bills and suffice while I pursued my real passion at night, which was to be a rock god and DJ and front a funky band and breakbeat crew that would take over the planet through sick beats, subwoofer bass tones, and sweet seductive melodies to seduce the innocent. Upon reflection, perhaps that’s not the most realistic goal to have, but it sure sounded good at the time... Actually, it still sounds like what I want to with myself... But alas, these days I’ve realized my lifeplan circa age 19 needs to be recalibrated. Suddenly I’m 30, have been holding down this gig at Leo Burnett for a decade, and have been compelled to take this job seriously, as a lifelong career. The music has blossomed and grown and become a viable path in itself, but it goes hand in hand with what I do as an archivist, coordinator, and writer at Burnett. My aesthetic as a musician and my evolution as an artist both owe an enormous debt to Leo. When your company sends you to Bahia in Brazil, Miami, Mexico City, Milan, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Madrid, you cannot help but pick up pieces of beauty and perspective from these places that influence how you see and paint and interpret and reshape the world around you. Our souls are all evolving frescoes perpetually tagged by the cultures we come into contact with, and I for one am grateful for the privilege of seeing and experiencing corners of the planet I wouldn’t have made it to without my job.

So….after years of inner turmoil and conflict about advertising and how empty and artificial it can be, and endless internal debate about how brands and companies can negatively transform societies and civilizations, I’ve come to the realization that I just don’t care to turn this paradox over anymore in an endless spin cycle in my mind. I've read my Naomi Klein and while I agree, I also know that you see things differently when you're inside a media machine. I'm done with living in a toxic stew of self-righteous self-appraisal. It’s a function of the folly of youth to pass sweeping moral judgments on complicated subjects, and I see things differently these days. The old business models are dying. My boss likes to say that “we’re not an advertising agency anymore, we’re a 21^st century creative communications company.” I can just see my anarchist buddies rolling their eyes at what is clearly corporate newspeak from within the Ministry of Truth. There's truth to that, I guess, but there's also truth in what he's saying. We exist in a new digital landscape where media affects how we communicate, how we understand, how we live. The Ad industry spent the 20th century finding novel ways to force feed people messages, to cultivate brands through conquest and semi-selective persuasion techniques. Today people have the ability to choose what they want to hear. They choose what they want to see. They choose what they believe in. They choose who they support. They choose what they buy. There's now a critical mass of conscious people on the planet, and the market is forced to account for these people. Knowledge and information are power, and there are enough bloggers and watchdogs in the world to keep industries accountable. That is essentially one of the countless compelling reasons why the ad industry is changing. Companies really can't cram horrible commercials down people’s throats when people have Mute buttons beneath their fingers and Tivo remotes in their hands. Today, agencies like Burnett are striving to facilitate an ongoing conversation between people and the brands they like. Everybody buys things, right? Why do you buy what you do? Somewhere in your decision making process, you make a choice. My job is to understand that choice and help make the market respond accordingly...

hmmm... enough runimations. Here's a spot from LB/Lisbon this year for Amnesty International. How can I possibly not love my job if i get to run with the people who produced this?