I was looking through a few creative portfolios yesterday, and as I was doing so I thought of an article I read recently in the Wall Street Journal about cubicle culture and how many professionals never see any results from their work aside from changing numbers on a computer screen or paper. It begins:
"When David Fahl worked for an energy reseller, which bought and sold energy from generating companies, he noticed that getting things done right wasn't always as high a priority as making deadlines, meeting deliveries or being on budget.
"You can get all those things done without doing any good work," he says. It wore on him and didn't give him a sense of accomplishment. "Not even the marketing people could come up with a plausible explanation for why the company existed," he says.
Sounds pretty bleak, eh? I thought so too. And I must say, despite all it's shortcomings, there most definitely are a few reasons why it's great to work in advertising. The results are one of them. Everything we do, everything we work on (well, minus all the stuff that gets axed), all the stuff we dream up ends up somewhere. People see it. It makes people buy something or use something or discover something.
Sure, you may say, you make stuff -- but don't most people dislike it? Don't most people hate the advertising that assaults their senses at almost every turn? Here's what I say: They don't hate advertising, they hate bad advertising. People love good advertising (I bet you giggle at those Sonic TV ads that Barkley keeps pumping out). That's why good advertising almost always sells.
And hey, even if people do dislike advertising, answer me this: Is it better to be disliked or to not exist at all?
Check out this Sonic commercial. It's definitely my personal fave:
And for the more studious/industrious/smarty pants readers, here's the Wall Street Journal article about how much the corporate world sucks.
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