King Adz: The art of separating people from their money
King Adz calls bullshit on the ad man and his plans.
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Okay, so back inna day I worked as an advertising art director, and today I was thinking about how (in the 1990s) a lot of my ideas were rejected for being ‘too edgy’ or ‘too street’. Nowadays you can’t spit without hitting an advert, or point-of-sale thingy, or shop window that looks like the client has seen a bit of Banksy (or as they call him, Bansky) and said, “I want one of them…"
The advertising and marketing industries are full of people who shouldn’t be there and have absolutely no talent or real interest other than making beaucoup bucks. These people keep the real talent down, for sure. I’ve been in meetings where the idiots have taken a great idea and made it shit, like a dog pissing on a lamppost, just to be seen to be adding something. I’ve been in meetings where I’ve wanted to sink into the chair and let the ground swallow me up as it is so excruciatingly painful to be there as the ideas ‘bouncing about’ are so chronically naff and will obviously never work in a million years. These kinds were mostly in America. In Europe there are some really great ad agencies (Kessel Kramer, Habbekrats, Mother) and a lot of talent rolling about that can’t get arrested, or a look-in.
I am so fucking happy that I don’t have to do this kind of shit anymore as I’ve got a great agent, publisher and editor who believe in me, love my work and look after me. I don’t have to shklaf for a client who at 3am in the morning won’t let you sleep ’cause they are acting like their shitty ad is a cure for cancer. When in reality it’s just a shit ad to shift some even shittier product. Which brings me to this:
I’m really amazed at how people can be so stupid. Companies keep trying to sell their products by getting free creative from the talents of the world instead of paying for it. What am I on about? Doc Martins’ ‘Design a horrible Boot’ campaign; Mercedes’ ‘GLK Crap Design Competition’… I could go on. And on. And on - but I won’t.
What gets me is that people keep giving them their valuable art, design, ideas, concepts, whatever, for free… So, before you send your work in, please ask yourself, “Is my work not a valuable commodity?”
Why does big business think that the creative should be free? Why is the most important part of shilling something considered so worthless? Why? I’ll tell you, because they know it is so important and yet they know nothing about it and spend all the companies’ money on shit that they shouldn’t (like candles and flowers*) and so when it comes to paying the creative's, they just decided to do a ‘competition’. It’s what’s called the ‘starmaker’ syndrome: Involving the public and giving out the impression that they’re gonna be able to get involved. Famous even. I call bullshit on this and just remember, the client will always want the logo bigger…
Peace+love to you all (except smarmy client-service suits)
(*Coke & Prostitutes)
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The art of separating people from their money (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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