Do Not Go Into Advertising, Point / Counterpoint

Is advertising a noble pursuit?  That seems to be the question here.  I will think about this little back n' forth on Gawker, and try to find something interesting to say about it all over the next few days (without endangering any career prospects within the advertising industry).

Making ads can be pretty fun.

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http://gawker.com/5896405/do-not-go-into-advertising

Do Not Go Into Advertising,
by Hamilton Nolan

Advertising is the industry that people who were not lucky enough to get actual "creative" jobs end up in. These people—creative people whose artistic or literary dreams did not work out, often due to economic forces far beyond their control—find themselves in a position in which they are obliged to use their creative talents for purely commercial ends. Selling soap, so to speak. This causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. These people therefore expend quite a bit of time and effort justifying the position they find themselves in, in life. (As do we all!) Having justified their position to themselves, they seek to bolster their justification by attracting others like themselves into their same field. The more creative artists who do advertising for a living, the more of a real, justifiable, creative career it must be. They therefore use their considerable creative talents to sell the field of advertising itself, to their peers.

Do not fall for it, kids. Do not go into advertising.

Advertising is a far more stable career than art, or music, or writing books, or journalism—the fields that many of the people in advertising wanted to go into, originally. Those creative and artistic fields are extremely competitive. They are harder to break into. They tend to be less lucrative. Forging a successful career in any of them through one's own creativity alone is a dream that will come true only for a relatively low number of people. Lots of people want to be famous musicians. Only few will achieve that. For the rest, the advertising industry awaits, ready to use those same creative talents to sell things. Advertising is a field that is not going away. It will take you just as readily as the cold, uncaring whims of public attention will spit you out. It is a profession in which you can build a stable career. It is a good living. And Mad Men. Mad Men. So glamorous.

Do not go into advertising.

Advertising offers the creative person a bargain: You can use your creativity. Just not for yourself. In fact, you must use your creative skills in the service of something diametrically opposed to the ideals that creative people generally espouse. You will sell your creativity, for a tidy sum, to the world's faceless corporations. You, the artist, will paint their faces. You, the musician, will give these corporations their voice. You, the writer, will help these corporations speak poetically. Your creativity is pooled and used to give character to something that has no character: a corporation, a machine that makes money. Your talents are used to give that machine a soothing, attractive halo. This, at the end of your advertising career, will be the sum total of your creative output. This will be your artistic legacy. This will be what all of your poetry has accomplished. A pretty face on the machine. You, yourself, and your own soul are not part of this equation. Your own creativity does not serve those things any more.

Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. We all need jobs. There is nothing wrong with doing something that is not your dream job, out of necessity. But it doesn't have to be advertising. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist. If it doesn't work out financially, at least you gave it a shot. And you never have to stop making art, regardless of your circumstances. Unless you agree to sell your creativity to that machine.

The advertising industry wants you. They need you. Without you, and your creativity, all the corporations lose their faces. They're not pretty any more. They need you, and your creativity, the same way that a vampire needs blood. They'll pay you handsomely. But it will never, ever be worth it. Do not go into advertising.

Unless you're black. In that case, they could really use your help.

UPDATE: Counterpoint: What the Fuck Makes You Too Good For Advertising?

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http://gawker.com/5896519/

Counterpoint: What the Fuck Makes You Too Good For Advertising?
By, Contact Drew Magary

So our own Hamilton Nolan took time out today to explain why you should never work in advertising. He is wrong. Like, really fucking wrong. Would you like to see the list of very talented and successful creative people who have worked in the field of advertising? Here's a very small sampling:

• James Joyce
• David Fincher
• Joseph Heller
• Salman Rushdie
• Augusten Burroughs
• Andy Warhol

There's a reason all of these people flourished after working in advertising:

1. Advertising forces you to get to the fucking point. The rule of billboards is that you get seven words or less. A TV ad gives you thirty seconds to get your story across. A radio ad gives you sixty, if you're lucky. You aren't allowed to run wild with every stupid, self-indulgent concept when you're working on an ad, and that's good. Because I don't want my Snausages ad to turn into a goddamn Franzen novel.

2. Advertising gives you variety. You can work on a serious tampon ad for half your day and then a gonzo comic used car ad for the other half. You work in radio, which is strictly aural. You work in print, which is strictly visual. You work in TV, which is both. You have to work in a variety of different tones: serious, comic, inspirational, sleazy... All of that is good. If all you did was sit around writing shitty heist movie screenplays at home for ten years, guess how much you'll have improved as a shitty heist movie writer?

3. Advertising teaches you persistence. Clients are assholes who take every good idea you've ever had and piss all over them, forcing you to go back to the drawing board and think of even MORE shit. But then, as you're sitting and stewing and telling everyone what an asshole the client is, you usually come up with another idea, and it's often better than what came before. Now, the client will also ending up rejecting THAT idea and reformatting an old Christmas ad instead, but at least you'll have learned that you have a deeper well of creativity than you originally thought, and that your first idea isn't always your best.

4. Advertising teaches you that your creativity isn't so goddamn precious. Take a look again at what Nolan wrote:

Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist.

Yeah no, that's wrong. Your creativity isn't worth anything. In fact, you probably already have a terribly overinflated sense of just how awesome all of your ideas are. "Why do I have to be slave to corporate America, man? Why can't people appreciate, like, the purity of my art?! MY PRECIOUS ART!" It never hurts to work inside a system that knocks you and your bullshit pretension down a peg. You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece. God forbid you work to please someone other than yourself.

There's also something to be said for the confidence you gain when a corporation DOES pay you to be creative. Do you know how gratifying that is? You wrote some radio ads, and someone was willing to give you money for it! That must mean you're good! In theory.

5. You learn to be a creative professional. You have years and years to write your stupid novel, mostly because no one will read it. Working in advertising teaches you to work quickly, on a schedule, and within a certain budget.

There's a new movie out called Corman's World that deals with legendary B-movie director Roger Corman and the influence he had over former employees such as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, and many, many more. Corman's movies weren't the greatest movies ever made. But each director who worked under him learned the more practical aspects of making movies, which allowed them to flourish as film directors later in life, directors who were successful both artistically AND commercially.

I worked in advertising for ten years. It's not the greatest job in the universe, and it's an industry as prone to nauseating self-congratulation as any other. The clients are dicks. The creative directors are dicks. The account people are morons (I know because I was one). It's a terribly frustrating job for anyone trying to be an "artist" or whatever the fuck. But that's precisely the point. You're not an artist. You're just a shithead, and it would serve you well to learn how to work within limits, and with other people's creative input. Who says you have nothing left to learn about how to be a writer or a director or a designer? Who says working in an actual job can't help you become better at what you do? WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

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http://gawker.com/5896531/counter+counterpoint-says-the-guy-who-got-the-fuck-out-of-the-advertising-industry

Counter-Counterpoint: …Says the Guy Who Got the Fuck Out of the Advertising Industry
By , Contact Hamilton Nolan

Ah, Drew. A list of famous writers and artists who once worked in the advertising industry is not an argument in favor of the advertising industry. It's an argument in favor of getting the fuck out of the advertising industry. We recognize Salman Rushdie's name because he didnot stay in the advertising industry. We can all take this as a lesson.

And all those other valuable lessons that advertising teaches? Getting to the point, persistence, a variety of experiences, getting over your own preciousness, being a fucking professional? I know an even quicker way to learn that shit: blogging for a few years. Write, publish, argue, insult, be insulted, repeat. No crying allowed. And no fucking "brand manager" asses to kiss.

You made it out of advertising too, Drew. I am thankful you did, because you have quite a way with cuss words. Now don't go encouraging the angry bloggers of tomorrow to get themselves trapped in that quicksand. "I encourage you all to go to prison," you tell them. "If you should be fortunate enough to escape one day, you'll have great survival skills that can be put to use in something worthwhile!"

HAVE A FUCKING HEART.