Working Hard, or Hardly Realistic

Part of the job description, when you do consulting for a living, is a willingness to confront some uncomfortable truths. They usually lead you to opportunities, but unless you can live with an awkward minute or meeting, you are in the wrong business. So I'm going to peel back the shade for a moment or two here, and point out something that very few people ever admit, at least out loud.

While I pride myself on my worth ethic and rate, I will never feel that I'm working hard enough, or even that I work all that hard. At most of my positions, for most of my life. Let me go a step further on this, dear theoretical reader... I doubt that you work very hard, either.

Now, let's walk this back and give it its proper context. We do marketing and advertising for a living. Rather than, well, brute labor. We're not on our feet unless we want to be, and finagle a standing desk. We're not dealing with unsafe work environments, likely workplace injuries, wearing special shoes for support, and so on, and so on. If we're worn out at the end of the day, it's because that, on some level, we've chosen to be worn out. Either through a stress story that we tell ourselves as a trigger to self-motivate, or because we've taken on aspects of the job that aren't all that necessary, but seem that way, because a stressful job is an important job. Or we've taken the wrong job, and are trying to make it right. (That never works, by the way. Spoiler alert.)

Perhaps you feel that the entirety of the work you do, when you roll in housework, child or elder care, or uncredited work that's outside of your role, gets you to that magical realm of working hard enough to cast aside all doubt. But even then, I submit to the jury of public opinion that technology, in the form of household appliances, smartphones, improved automobiles and so much more, have all added up to take a lot of the work out of our lives.

To substitute, we work hard on a lot of things... that, well, maybe no one has asked us to work hard on. Social media presences. Hobbies. Workouts. Side projects. Keeping abreast of the spiraling number of entertainment options, training pets, getting granular about food intake, and so on, and so on.

Oh, and another thing: when we are working at our highest level, it's not work at all. We're joyously in the weeds of the details, sweating to make a deadline with exhilaration, working a trade show booth while knee-deep in prospects, seeing the culmination of a lot of prior half-speed work race to a conclusion. I've had days where I've seen the sun come up, and it was a surprise.

Which is why a lot of the people who've shared a company with me are convinced I'm a hard worker. But I know better.

The hardest working person I know, or will ever know, is my mom. She raised three kids as a single parent, while keeping a spotless house, while working nights as a bartender. (OK, maybe I worked at her level when I was in college. But not since. The woman's a machine.)

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Changing Nature Of Sex In Ads

Not Seen On TV

We live in fast and changing times.

Usually this manifests itself, in our world of marketing and advertising, in the realm of adtech and martech... but that's not what I'd like to discuss here. Instead, consider the recent Lane Bryant ad campaign. If you can't access the link, it's a commercial that uses plus-sized models, fresh off their inclusion in the Sports Illustrated cover mix, in various strong stages of undress, speaking to body pride issues. It's borderline not safe for work, and has been rejected by broadcast networks as too risque for television.

Now, independent of your personal or political feelings about this direction, as a creative pro, there's just all kinds of win here. I don't know about you, but being locked into the same kind of models has never been a fun moment. Even if you are committed to keeping the status quo and not changing your model mix, maybe they stand out a little more, because fewer of your competitors are digging in the same mine. I can tell you, from painful experience, that finding a good royalty-free model that a client would accept in a relatively tight demographic usually meant that the model would be showing up in similar ads soon.

Now, here's the very fun part... what if it works?

Consider just how different your world could be, and soon. Think about the testing possibilities, the artistic routes not taken, the instant reboot it gives to your design team, photographers, and maybe even copywriters. It probably even invigorates your social media pros, and gives your analytic team something very new to think about.

Because at the end of the day, diversity doesn't just make sense on a demographic level, or from a sense of personal politics. It also frequently makes sense on the spreadsheet.

Interesting era, no?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Marketing and Advertising In Interesting Times

Let's... Go... Fast...

Here's a fun fact: the wildly common belief that "may you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse? Apocryphal. No equivalent expression exists in China. But that's all beside the point. Everyone knows the sentiment, and more importantly, few would disagree with the idea that we are, well, living in those times right now.

Lesser known, but still generally well-accepted, is the belief that works of art, literature, music and more also improve in times of turmoil. The sense of immediacy created by political events that inspire, for good and ill, is good for the creative process. It generates a focus, a primal need to create, that just can't be replicated in times where people are comfortable and content.

Which leads me to how my family and I spent our Sunday night, at the movies, to see the well-regarded animated movie "Zootopia." I won't get too far into the plot of this, because it really is a movie that shouldn't be spoiled, but I'm not ruining anything by saying that it definitely seems to be a creation that mirrors our times. That it does so with a deft stroke, some genuine cleverness, and real craft in the artwork and voice acting is all a bonus. (I'd also consider it surprising, from such a  mainstream movie studio as Disney.) But I don't think it's overstating the case that the era in which we live in makes the movie even more effective than it might otherwise be. (Oh, and special kudos to the filmmakers for naming two of their characters Walter and Jesse. That made my inner Vince Gilligan fan wildly happy.)

This is, of course, a common experience. Television shows got dramatically better once we left an era of limited distribution and competition, and into a realm of more diversity in popular awareness. American pop music had rebirths in the latter half of the '60s and early '70s, matching some of the most turbulent times in the nation's history. British punk music is born during extremely difficult times in the late '70s, and might have had its fullest flower in America 25 years later, during the backlash to the G.W. Bush presidency. And so on.

Where this leaves us, as professionals, is a time where middle ground work isn't going to do as well, and where incremental steps are going to seem, well, pedestrian. It's a time where adtech is giving us opportunities to do things that seem particularly aggressive, both from a distribution and a creative standpoint. Hard "R" content and tough talk seems to speak to more leeway in pitches, and in final execution. And the fact that everything happens at a greater speed is, on some level, it's own push towards redder meat.

No one really knows, of course, how our world is going to change in the next 6 to 12 months, and every presidential cycle comes with its own prediction of "most important in our lifetime." But we do know that with distributed communications technology, social media, and a profit-driven 24/7/365 news engine that is chasing ratings from the sensational, having our messages cut through the clutter, while still protecting brand, has never been more challenging. Just doing what you've done before, or taking very small steps toward optimization, might not be enough.

And on the plus side?

That means you've never had more freedom to experiment.

Interesting times, indeed.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.