by Matthew Bull (@StixBull) Our industry is losing talented thinkers. An open letter.
A letter from New York.
I just got back from my annual golf tour – 17 years now – with my best mates. It was special to see them as always, and good to be in South Africa.
I spent a bit of time chatting to my one buddy who is in advertising and that was pretty depressing. But that was compounded by the article I read in Financial Mail about the dearth of talent in South Africa.
This is not a local phenomenon. I’ve run agencies in SA, London, and now New York. I’ve been the global chief creative officer of one of the world’s largest agency networks, and the story is the same everywhere. No writers.
Really though, we have to change the paradigm here. The reality is what we need more than ever is people that think like writers, not writers per se. There is so little writing in advertising now (certainly when it comes to work consumers see, as opposed to decks clients see) that the skill of actually writing prose is seldom needed.
So what do I mean by the way writers think? Well, we tend to have a glimpse of the end game and work in short sharp bursts to get there. We’re like the sprinters of the business. Whereas art directors tend to be the marathon runners. Writers have the ability to think spontaneously and rapidly – they see a visual thing and articulate it into words, be they verbal or written.
There is a misnomer that copywriters are conceptually stronger than art directors – that’s just not true. Some of the greatest conceptual creative people I have worked with were art directors. Writers are just more conceptually prolific simply because we have more time to think conceptually than those poor bastards that slog away for hours bringing ideas to life visually.
So I believe we need to re-categorise creative people into being thinkers that express themselves visually, (visualthinkers) and those that express themselves with the written word or verbally (wordthinkers). You will find the pool of talent increases exponentially if you do that. A wordthinker doesn’t even need to know how to spell, or be grammatically correct to be a brilliant ideas person. They just need to be brilliant at expressing what comes out of their head.
What schools have done to our business is to close the door on wordthinkers simply because they try and turn them into being brilliant writers. So we are losing many talented thinkers to, well, to who knows what simply because they don’t write good essays.
The advertising industry needs to broaden its mind about the kind of people it wants to attract. We need to stop being so stereotypical in our categorization of people and what they do in our business.
And we must never forget that many of the great “writers” of our business, like Sir David Abbott in the UK, or John Hunt and Robyn Putter in South Africa, received no formal training in writing at all.
They could just think beautifully with words.
Matthew Bull
Wordthinker.
Matthew Bull (@StixBull) is a partner at The Bull-White House in New York. Before that, he served as chief creative officer/chairman of Lowe & Partners/Lowe Bull and chief creative officer at Lowe Worldwide. Matthew contributes the regular “Letter from New York” column to MarkLives.
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Hi Matthew. I like the sentiment of your article but I would actually point out that as a start up creative agency, we have found and built a strong pool of writers (maybe because we employed some lawyers who we felt had the knack of the creative process and didn’t look at schools) but we’ve found the talent pool is running really low on Art Directors/Designers in Joburg specifically. I find the basics of design/art direction aren’t taught at schools and the visual thinkers know how to do the visual part but fall short when they’re required to do the thinking part. Schools aren’t giving them the challenging briefs. Creating a design for Apple/Puma/BMW doesn’t prepare the Art Directors to think hard enough about what they need to design/art direct.
Just my 2 cents.
Hi Matthew, I lecture at Vega in Durban and agree with you in many ways. As someone involved in a tertiary space I know that there are pitfalls to the creative process. How does one give a ‘mark’ for a creative idea with no execution? How does this then receive some kind of degree when there really is no context to the idea?
I think you may highlighted something which many of us recognise but are, as yet, really unable to make this fit into the requirements of Academia. It is very much the case of ‘the one that got away’ with the wordthinkers of which you specifically reference (no formal writing, no spelling, just a big idea). How we manage to tame the tiger and keep the essence alive is a challenge which we all face. Other than IDEO and think tanks, there is unfortunately not the luxury of just thinking without paying the bills.
Good piece with lots of discussion ahead, at least at Vega, thanks.
w00t! go writers! right on!
Howzit Matthew,
I enjoyed reading your letter – all the way from the Big Apple “nog al”. From my experience some of the best copywriters I have worked with have also been amongst the worst spellers in the building, which always amazed and frustrated me as the suit (of course). Clearly these guys are the creatives you refer to as the wordthinkers, and I agree that they are extremely valuable to the organisation.
I agree with Anton in that correct grammar and spelling is also an essential part of quality communication. Surely with enough hard work and effort at school, the born wordthinker can also be a solid writer who spells correctly most of the time?
At the moment there seems to be a shortage of exceptional, available developers – now that’s a different language all together.
Jason
Wordthinker
1. If you haven’t already, read ‘The Idea Writers’.
2. I know a few ex-copywriters. They left because they had books, movie scripts and plays inside them, yes. The bigger reason, though, was that they just got sick of the industry. In an age where an ‘ideas person’ is a good elevator pitch away from VC funding and making more than an ad, they’re just not going to be attracted to an industry in social decline.
3. Thanks for writing. :)
There’s some discussion worth digging into where comments are winging off on tangents:
> really unable to make this fit into the requirements of Academia.
Why ever not? It is, as it were, not rocket science. And even that you can teach.
> the best copywriters I have worked with have also been amongst the worst spellers in the building
Proper spelling, grammar, syntax = professionalism. It’s unrelated to the discussion.
>How does one give a ‘mark’ for a creative idea with no execution?
The same way clients and account directors do? By evaluating creative idea + its validation + coherence in strategy/objective + execution plan + metrics/RoI analysis. What part of this is harder than giving a mark for a visual execution?
> there is unfortunately not the luxury of just thinking without paying the bills.
Fatuous. Ability to think up concepts and develop campaign strats and plans for roll-out = much of what agencies get paid for. “Just thinking” would be the same as “just doodling” – unrelated to discussion.
Visual thinkers and written thinkers can and do have the same levels of creativity, etc etc, but written thinkers can put down concepts and lay out big ideas incredibly quickly and efficiently compared to visual creatives.
It takes me about five seconds to type up “draw a giant picture of a pink armadillo on a billboard” – it would take me hours or days to do the same thing visually. A thinker can bang out thirty major ideas in detail before lunch; it would take a visual creative weeks to do the same.
Ideas translate instantly to words; ideas translate slowly and painstakingly to images; ideas translate glacially slowly and very expensively to video.
The written word is blindingly efficient at encapsulating and communicating ideas… and can do the same for execution plans.
Here’s a challenge: you draw me a good brand outline or campaign strat.
advertising just hari kiri’d itself… Long Live Advertising…
now. all of you. go rip off some more ideas from boooooom.com or wherever you go to these days to keep yourplagiarisingindustry afloat and get down to some real nonbusinesss!! :p
salut.
Thanks Matthew
1. I’m in love with Roger.
And 2: I agree – spelling and grammar are the building blocks; all credibility goes out the window with careless errors.
(Pedantic comment: It’s people who, by the way, not people that)
My dearest Matthew.
Do not be depressed about the state of advertising in South Africa. We’re merely taking a psychic break.
I have met with and worked with some of the most creative talent in the industry in a career spanning 30 years, and am pleased to tell you that the raw talent I have encountered in the last few months is equal to the Hunts and Putters.
It’s just different. The South African education system may have done vokall for spelling and grammar, but has not stifled creativity.
Thank heavens
Yours faithfully