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I'm in the business. Lots of creatives write and come up with truly great scripts and ideas but when they present these ideas they run into an impossible two part problem
Firstly The client in the US is very different to the client in Europe.
I did a job for a Fiat compact in Europe, it took five weeks form beginning to end there were 5 people who reported to one guy and he had the say. Before becoming Fiat CMO he had worked for BMW and Lotus.
I did a job for a GM Compact and it was supposed to take eight weeks but actually took six months to complete because there were between sixteen and twenty four people CC'd on every email who weighed in with unimportant and frankly irrelevant minutiae. Unfortunately In our very large corporations decisions are made by these huge groups of people all of whom place their own interests (job preservation and promotion) far above the product / brand needs. And everyone's thoughts have to be considered.
The Fiat job involved the Fiat Rally team and was complex and beautiful, and is what led me to the GM job. The GM job involved a soccer mom picking her kids up. After many moons when we eventually reached presentation stage for GM and it was approved by seemingly every VP at the 'death star' for external testing we then we spent another two months making stupid changes before someone who had replaced someone else higher up decided it would be odd to run the Ad shot in the summer during the winter so it got cancelled.
The other problem is a huge reliance on testing. Should a good idea actually get made, the agency then have to run the idea through a series of client sponsored and attended 'focus groups'. Of course 99.9% of people who are full time employed and earning a significant wage don't attend focus groups because they are busy working so they can buy stuff. Those who do attend Focus groups tend to value deli platters and small remuneration. You can only begin to imagine some of the remark sheets I've seen.
America used to have some of the worlds most creative advertising, think of the 60's VW print work out of DDB astonishingly clever stuff. Sadly somewhere along the way that creativity got shafted and the net result is what you see on TV now. The sad thing is at the Cannes ad festival which starts tomorrow US agencies will get less than 5% of all the awards, and yet we have the biggest advertising business in the world.
As soon as clients stop pandering to the lowest common denominator the sooner we will have ads like they have in Europe.
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