For the next few words, I am going to get a little Anthony Bourdain on you. That’s sort of a warning if you don’t like him, and an appetizer if you do.
Branding schools are wonderful. The VCU Brand Center here in Richmond is the best in the world. It is the Culinary Institute of America for aspiring chefs who want to cook ideas. But spending that kind of money doesn’t make you creative. I say that while having some of my best friends in the business teaching classes there. They are damned good at what they do. It doesn’t mean you will be.
When I got into this business, the training was simple: have big enough cojones to stand toe-to-toe with people who think your ideas suck and stare them down with better ideas until they think you’re a genius. You can train people to suffer through impossible situations (and if you get into this business, you invariably will), but you can’t educate someone into being talented or determined beyond the point of sleep depravation and moronic adjustments to brilliant thinking by people who are more likely qualified to be bussing tables than helping sauté concepts into char. I know this because I’ve ruined my share of ideas.
It’s not your education that will help you survive in this business for 30+ years. That diploma only gains you admission into the show where people whom you think are less talented than you can abuse you for more hours a day than you get to see your spouse. After you get your foot in the door and people start slamming, it’s up to you to take the pain until you have calluses the size of Shaq’s 23-wides. And here’s the ugly secret: it’s not just about great ideas.
You have to be able to routinely watch your great ideas die day-after-day and come up with more great ideas. And in most joints, you have to do it faster than the team in the next cube. In branding schools, you get two years to polish your best work. Be lucky enough to land a job working with clients who are on a tight budget and need to sell something yesterday and you’ll have two hours.
Bourdain’s colorful descriptions of his profession in books like “Kitchen Confidential” and “Medium Raw” are cynical, harsh, brutal and not far removed from branding. The difference between the two is, the menu and the equipment changes every three hours in branding. Oh, and the waiters, bartenders, customers and sometimes total strangers who wander in fresh out of a focus group like to come into the kitchen and help you cook the meal. I’m trying to imagine Bourdain, Emeril, Mario Batali or Bobby Flay working like that. Would Paula Deen bitch slap you into her convection oven if you tried to tell her how to do her job? “Y’all know it, honey.”
In this business, it’s all part of the gig. Unfortunately, I’ve never dealt with too many cooks in the kitchen very well. Those who have worked with me are nodding right now.
None of what you’re reading here means I’ve done it all right. I have seldom done any of it right. My resume is hardly one to envy. So what you read here is not wisdom, it’s that ugly stain called experience. Survive long enough in tough environments under great pressure and you get some of it.
I didn’t go to an ad school. There weren’t any at the time that I can remember. I barely had enough money to go to college, and lied my way into my first job, learning how to do it under fire from good and sometimes bad people who were willing to overlook my ignorance. I stayed too long in my first job. I stayed too short in several. It never got it just right. You won’t either.
Making a living (in this business or in any business, for that matter) is a bitch more often than not. I did nothing but radio and print for four years before I did my first TV spot. I did some strange digital and social media things that probably made sense to only a few people. I was an enigma – a Minotaur: part art director, part writer – misunderstood by both sides and ridiculed equally. What I know, I found out at the sharp end of a deadline, not in a classroom. We’re not talking glory days here. We’re talking 16-hour days, a habit that has few upsides, especially for your health and family. Perhaps it is why I don’t watch Mad Men – for the same reason I don’t look at Playboy. It all seems a hell of a lot more glamorous than reality.
Some call it talent. Others call it luck. It’s just storytelling and storylistening, however you do it or with whomever in whatever media or lack thereof. And until sitting down to write this post, I’ve never given it much thought. I was too busy doing it day and night to analyze the process – if there is a process, and I suspect there isn’t. Perhaps you should invent one. Then you can sell a book about it. And watch technology kill your process in three months.
To do well in this business you have to have both talent and luck, but never rest on either. And mostly, don’t put too much faith in guys who have done it forever and write stuff like this.
Your experience will be completely different than mine or that woman over there or the dude sitting across from you in that traffic meeting. Besides, this business changes so fast you don’t have time to read the new software manual. It changed from when I wrote the first sentence up there because this post is too damned long. But some things haven’t changed. One of them is change itself. Embrace change. It always changes. Grab change like a skunk and wear its smell like perfume. And know this while you’re trailing the vapors: You will work 16-hour days. Your brain will never really rest. And there will be days when you will have more fun than anyone should be allowed to have and get paid for it. Those days are why we do this.
Going to a great brand school is the cost of entry. Having killer ideas is expected – hourly. But selling those ideas will help you make enough to pay off your loans. Learn to sell your ideas. If you don’t learn anything else in brand school, learn that.
