Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

If you work as a cre­ative, chances are your job isn’t nearly as glam­orous as you imag­ined it would be in port­fo­lio school. Like the kid shoot­ing hoops in the dri­ve­way, or prac­tic­ing his pitch­ing  on the mound, you most likely imag­ined your­self becom­ing the hero by apply­ing your skills against adver­sity. Instead of sink­ing the cham­pi­onship win­ning goal like Michael Jor­dan or shut­ting down the bats in the World Series like Curt Schilling, you prob­a­bly saw your­self accept­ing a Cannes Lion and then hav­ing your pick of jobs any­where in the world.

You may have even seen some­thing like this hap­pen to a few of your class­mates who didn’t even seem all that spe­cial back in the day. But for some rea­son, you’ve spent your career in var­i­ous cubes crank­ing out ads for tam­pons, frozen peas and tele­phone call­ing cards while they jet off to Cannes or take a job in Lon­don or Ams­ter­damn as a hot-shot CD.

And for the thanks you get for this? You get fired when a big account goes away while the prodigy team gets a big­ger office. Are the stars against you? Nah, it’s just the odds.

Unfor­tu­nately, agen­cies don’t need more than one super­star to hit clean up. They need 24 play­ers that can step up to the plate and get on base on any given day. Even A-Rod had to give up short­stop to play on the Yan­kees. Do you really not think there’s folks at Goodby and W+K doing ban­ners and door hang­ers won­der­ing when a killer brief is finally going to hit their desk?

For every oppor­tu­nity there is to receive a dream assign­ment, there are thou­sands where the client just wants some­thing ser­vice­able, and it’s up to you to strug­gle to get some­thing that meets the brief and exceeds your CDs expectations.

To make the sta­tis­tics even tougher for you, once you leave port­fo­lio school your choice of part­ner is no longer yours, it’s your bosses. How are you sup­posed to win a gold pen­cil when you can’t even pick your part­ner? All I can say is a cou­ple peo­ple do it every year. That’s right, a cou­ple.

Does this mean cre­atives should be resigned to putting out crap? Hell no. Think of all the great movie actors deliv­er­ing great per­for­mances who never get the recog­ni­tion of Tom Hanks or Myrle Streep. Or Musi­cians who crank out ground-breaking music who will never, ever be nom­i­nated for a Grammy. Do they sit around and whine about it like a bunch of pansy cre­atives? Maybe they do, but they still per­form their craft the top of their abil­i­ties day in and day out.

Also cre­atives, it’s not enough to be cre­ative in one dis­ci­pline any­more. Art direc­tors need to have some typog­ra­phy, tra­di­tional design skills, web and flash pro­gram­ing knowl­edge besides actu­ally being able to art direct awe­some print, broad­cast and web con­cepts. A writer, I’m often called upon as a pho­tog­ra­pher, social media and dig­i­tal expert as well as lead­ing the agen­cies social media pres­ence. None of these other tasks increase the chances that I will become a super­star but they do make me a reli­able util­ity that the CD or agency pres­i­dent can call on when needed.

And in the end, what do most cre­atives get out bust­ing their ass on mediocre assign­ments, never being rec­og­nized for your genius, and sneered at by unap­pre­cia­tive account exec­u­tives. You get to be cre­ative every day you go to work. I’ll take that any day.

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This entry was posted Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 1:32 pm and is filed under advertising, creative. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.