The industry is hiding – behind committees and ‘collective responsibility’
A camel, they say, is a horse drawn by a committee. Well, nothing wrong with that, in principle. A camel is one fine animal and would beat the handsomest of stallions hands down when it comes to endurance, load and the ability to avoid a heatstroke. Except that, well, a horse it ain’t. Worse, it is a horse that’s off brief, when you consider what the committee had been tasked with in the first place.
Moreover, and if you were to follow up on this thought, you would probably find that the committee will later pat themselves on the back, wave their ticked boxes triumphantly and then blame each other furiously come racing day.
Committees – or any given body of people entrusted with a single task – are nothing more than the coward’s way to eschew responsibility and dilute it in a morass of rounded agreements that neither upset nor satisfy anyone. They are to mediocrity what photoshop artists are to Kim Kardashian’s anatomy. They are also, sadly, the way that our industry increasingly makes its decisions.
Say what you want about dictatorships, the fact is they get things done – for good or evil. Collective decisions, on the other hand, “democratise” the whole process by celebrating the lowest common denominator. In advertising, this is exactly what happens: workshop after workshop,
Say what you want about dictatorships, the fact is they get things done – for good or evil.
pitstop after painful pitstop and tissue session after tearful wipes, ideas are commonly rounded and ground by a riskaverse collective to such an extent we hardly ever see paradigm-shifting stuff anymore. Why? Because fear of failure is nowadays so pervasive in marketing that every step forward has a conditional RFP attached to it. Think about it: when was the last time you saw a large-scale piece of work that polarises opinion? When was the last time you really wondered, “How did the client approve this” with awe. One of my favourite pieces of all time is Bernbach’s ‘Funeral’ ad for VW – an ad that celebrates a popular brand by using, well, death. Today, if an agency were to ever consider such a thoroughbred of an idea, the committee’s answer would be pretty straightforward: “Make it a wedding”.