Pens Make Me So Anxious

At approximately 4:30 last Friday I feel like I officially became a full-fledged member of McKinney and this past week has been exciting, stressful, encouraging, etc. You get the point—it has been a roller coaster of a ride. Allow me to explain:

Up until Friday, our assignments — which were real — had a very slim likelihood of seeing the light of day. There are a lot of factors and steps that go into having your work chosen for use, but really the biggest obstacle for me is my inexperience. I am essentially competing against a handful of co-workers who not only know the clients better, they have years of background doing this sort of thing. I have only decided to pursue copy writing in the past month.

Anywho. So in this meeting, myself and one other intern were briefed on our assignment. This means we are told what we are doing, when the deadlines are, shown examples of similar pieces we could use for reference and overall just given guidelines to follow. Perhaps a better definition is that of Pat Fallon in "Juicing the Orange": "The tightly written situation analysis that provides direction to creative and media teams." There are silly rules in place that prevent me from giving out full details of who the client is and what specifically the piece will be, but I can go ahead and tell you this is a print piece that will run in a major national newspaper. What makes this really compelling is the fact that we are the only people working on this ad. In other words — I stand a 90% chance of having my work published (I will definitely be getting a copy and posting images for those interested)! Yaaaaay!

So why were we chosen to handle this? I think it was a culmination of a couple of things:

1) This item is considered "hot" — meaning it was brought to McKinney without prior knowledge and has to be completed in a very narrow window of time. More than likely the rest of the staff here was slammed as usual and no one could really invest the time/effort to completing the assignment.

2) And this may be a long shot — but I like to think that I/we have a proven track record so far. I have visibly shown those I have come in contact with my desire and enthusiasm to have an impact here and to be as resourceful as possible. To date I feel like we have turned in some good ideas and have proven to the teams I work with that I am capable with the tasks I am given. This is further legitimized by the fact that I am devoting all my time this semester to interning there. I want to get as much as possible out of this internship and I think that shows to them. So maybe they have some confidence in giving me work for those reasons — but really it is probably reason #1.

Anyway, as stated prior, this has been a crazy busy week. One of the many great things about this assignment was that it really had us going through all the motions along the steps of the way. While insightful, it also provided the most headaches as I have learned just how tedious this process is. I will do my best to enlighten you on how all of this works:

1) We are briefed. I already touched on this.

2) You begin work on your assignment. In this case, with it being "hot," the deadlines were pretty much all on Monday. So when we got in on Monday, we immediately began the initial bit of brainstorming. This particular assignment has us developing a headline and some body copy newspaper advertisement. At every step along the way, ideas must be approved by the Group Creative Director (GCD.) This is to ensure that the ideas are good enough for the client so that they aren't like "Hey, this agency we picked has really bad ideas." If something is wrong with the campaign, it is his/her neck on the line. So Molly (the other intern I am collaborating with on this) and I developed a list of potential (head)lines. Typically this list is pretty broad so that initially a tone and direction can be decided on. These meetings with the GCD's are where the name of this post come from. You have all of these ideas collectively written/typed on paper, and he/she sits there with a pen that paces up and down the paper...I sit there, anxiously hoping that my ideas get the desired asterisk inscribed to their left indicating approval. This is what I work for, a 14-point asterisk.

3) That brings me to step three, which is rather difficult as you have to brainstorm solutions to the line issues. Is this clever? Does it garner attention? Is it meeting the goals of the campaign, AKA, is it what the client is looking for? These are just a few of the many issues one must consider in hopes of having work selected for use. This usually goes through multiple rounds of revisions to iron out all the wrinkles concerning said issues. The hope is to present the client with options they have a hard time deciding on because they all clearly and effectively communicate the desired message to the audience. Another thing I noticed is different GCDs have different tastes. I haven't quite decided if their visions necessarily reflect that of the client, or if the client just assumes that the ideas presented are the only potential option. I just haven't had enough exposure to this step to really form an opinion on the matter but I would imagine it is a combination of both. I will get very frustrated if my approved lines are constantly being turned down by the client for not being in line with what they are looking for, but thinking about it now I imagine the GDC would not have a job for very long if that constantly happened

This is just wishful thinking most of the time. The clients always have suggestions to help ensure that it is what they are looking for. This is normally both good and bad. One the one hand their insight really helps the creatives narrow the focus of the message — at least for me. I love constraints. This is where you really have a chance to shine. How can I creatively create a memorable and successful piece, given the restraints that are in place? I love that challenge. Without direction I would have problems deciding on a place to start.

4) To date, this is where the process usually ended for us. Our ideas rarely were given to the client and even if they were chosen, I assume that someone else cleaned them up and got them to where they needed to be. But we were it. We were the creative team responsible for the ad. Furthermore, as the creative team, we were responsible for not just the copy, but for the layout as well. This comes off a bit deceiving as while we did the layout for the ad, we really had a template that had been used before since this was an ongoing campaign. In other words, copy goes here, image there, etc. Regardless we still chose the images we thought would work, what sizes they should be and then they are presented to the art director (The art director is the one with the eye for design. We hammer out the majority of the grunt work and he just fine tunes the little details or lets us know if something is not working.)

Now — what is maddening about this whole thing is that if at any point something needs to be fine-tuned — the process starts all over. We work, present, revise, repeat. Over and over until it is ready to be shown to client to judge. The "final" first round (this is all ironic to me as I swear we must of had like 8 final pdfs that I thought were "ready," but every time there was some little detail that needed to be fixed) was not ready to be shown to client until 7:30 Monday evening. I had been at McKinney from 8:45 and stayed until 7:30. Minus the havoc this is reaping on my diet, I could spend every waking moment of my life working on these things. I absolutely love it.

Now for something completely different for a moment to break up this exhaustive account. I stumbled across the source material for the cover of the new U2 album. I really haven't like anything they have put out in 20 years, but I still find them quite fascinating and at the very least — engaging. The image was taken by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and is a beautiful example of minimalism. I have always been a fan of geometric compositions and strong contrast and this is a nice example of both.




5) Where was I...um...so the first round is given to the client to review over night. The whole time, the account managers are handling all of this. They are the ones who represent McKinney and operate all the business ends of things. Without their services, the creatives would miss all deadlines, and probably not get anything done. So because of them we show up in the morning with all the information (hopefully) telling us what we need to do to fix things. Ideally they like what is present, but just want a few things touched up. I cannot emphasize enough how much detail is spent on every word. Every little adjective matters as it can alter the message being communicated.

This was a unique situation as the client we represent is communicating not just for themselves, but for one of their clients as well. So we do revisions to give to our client so they can turn around and present their client. Confusing right? Again, this is very tedious as even if our client likes what we have done, if their client doesn't like it, we have to revise yet again. And this is really where you can tell who is good at their job. If our account manager and GCD know their clients, they can tell us early on if we should pursue a certain angle. And if the representative our client represents knows their client, we can hopefully hit the nail on the head in the sense that our message is what they are looking for.

6) So again, as this was a "hot" assignment, all of the above happened on Tuesday. Our job was to ensure that everything was what our client was expecting so that it could be presented to his client that afternoon. And just like every step along the way, I thought this was where the road ended — I neglected to mention that this is not the only thing that we were working on. I had other deadlines for another account but every time a new bit of revisions were needed, I had to literally cancel meetings to focus on addressing their concerns. This stressed me out only because I was scared that by moving meetings I would be angering the people I was answering to for those other assignments that were also somewhat time sensitive. This was somewhat short-sighted logic as of course they would have had experienced the exact things that I had as well. So it really was no big deal — it is just important to inform them of changes as soon as I found them out.

These latter steps usually just involve minor adjustments but I really was looking forward to having this assignment under my belt. It was one of those cases of we could see the light at the end of the tunnel...but something always kept getting in the way. At this point everything has more or less completed. The representatives for the clients will now present the finalized pieces to their bosses who have the ultimate say in what is selected. Everything we do is micromanaged so that their choices are as clear as possible. I can only speculate at this point but I imagine that once a selection is made it goes to print.

Again, this has all been very exciting for me. I must admit that when I first found out that the stuff we were going to work on was going to be published, I selfishly became concerned with ensuring that I came up with ideas that would go to print. I honestly didn't care how much of it was mine, just as long as I could say "I did that." Or at least part of it. What I have learned is that everyone ends up having their fingerprints all over the work. This happens a number of ways; an example being that maybe a team member has a great idea, but just needs just a little help articulating that idea into something substantial. So really, I have learned not to worry over the glory of being published because anyone who says they were solely responsible for an advertisement in this business is most likely lying. This is a team based enterprise where ideas germinate best with the help of others — and that is where the glory lies to me.