Times Have Changed, But Brains and Sofas Are Still Important
I’ve just started watching ‘Mad Men’, the TV drama about a New York ad agency set in the early 1960s – in which everyone smokes and drinks ALL the time (even at work) and women are there to look pretty and take minutes. As someone who just visited New York, is obsessed with vintage clothes, AND works in an Online PR Agency (surely the modern day New Media equivalent of the old ad agency), I’m finding it particularly resonant.
We’ve come a long way in the marketing industry since those misogynistic days, and watching the series has made me appreciate the kind of creative job I do even more. I was especially tickled by a scene in the second episode, where one of the male characters is giving a new PA the grand tour, and tries to encourage her ambition by saying that a few female copywriters do exist, even if only to write about ‘Lady’ products.
Thankfully noone at C&M is about to imply that my contributions as the token girl in the office should be so restricted, but it does raise an interesting (if out-dated) point about how all our brains are wired differently and sometimes suited to different tasks. Whether it be a male/female, radical/traditional or experienced/freshfaced combination – every member of a creative team will come to a campaign with a unique mindset and that’s exactly why it’s so important to bounce ideas around rather than working in isolation.
This is really just a ‘note to self’ that the best creative ideas are the ones we come up with as a team, all guns blazing, and that different perspectives are a good thing. As an agency on the cutting edge of this new thing called Online PR, there are no hard and fast rules or tested theories for what we’re doing, and we need to keep our heads together to make sure we’re crusing in the right direction.
That’s why every campaign we do kicks off with an ‘all hands on deck’ ideas-generating session. Thanks to the brainstorm-friendly C&M retro sofas (another leaf we took out of the 1960s Ad Man book) these are invariably pretty productive. Gotta love them vintage sofas. Now all we need is for everyone to follow Roger’s lead with some old-school snappy-dressing and we’ll be away…
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