Creative thoughts…?

creativity,advertisment,mercedes,agency,work,xmas,christmas,calendar,munich

Now, as I’m working the fourth month in a ad-agency, I just had to think about the quality they’re offering.
Actually had to think here from the first moments on, but now, after over 4 months and realizing the magnitude I finally decided it’s worth a blogentry^^.

First: what kind of customers do they work for? Most customers are house-building corporations, but they also create some stuff for mercedes, like flyers, magzine-ads, promo-magazines, and the x-mas calendar in munich.

(Taken on 12-05-08)

Looking at the main customers, they really don’t have to bring great quality. Those guys are happy with normal magazines, so creativity isn’t needed. They won’t see any typo-mistakes (instead misspelled words of course^^), so finetuning text isn’t necessary. Now …that’s bad enough, at least from a designers point of view. But the images they’re producing and using are worse. Sure, some photoshopping is done, but the quality is just bad. And it’s pretty worrying that a guy who learned photoshop for fun 7 years ago, by himself, can top the quality of the normal employess in less time effortless. 

It’s bad enough that they’re selling this shit for good, but it’s even worse. 
Today it’s pretty important that your commercials and products look good, even if it lacks quality, so you have to give your customers advices. I guess all of you, who have to work with customers, know how hard it is to convince somebody, who’s really keen on his own idea. That’s even worse when being creative for somebody, as EVERYBODY thinks he’s creative in some way and his own idea is great. Now consider following situation: the boss of a company who’s  long-year cusotmer of yours, has had a really “creative” idea for a xmas card. And this idea is so awesome, that even the secretary who tells you what he wants says that it’s awful.
Personally, I would make a quick sketch and show how bad it’s looking and would say that I won’t produce things which are so bad. But you need some balls for that, I guess…
So what happened in real-life? -We made some nice sketches plus his idea, he still wanted his own and we produced it. But you stand for every product you create with your name… and this indicates that they’re ok with their name being connected to really terrible products.  
Wanna know how the card looks?  Here you go:  
Not that you can’t read it proberly, it’s gonna be sent into several countries and there’s only this one german version.

K….so much about this customer… back to Mercedes.
If you had the luck, and could make the Xmas calendar, what would you do? Wouldn’t you try to deliver high quality and highly  creative concepts? That’s at least what I would do and what I’d expect an agency like ours to do. But no! We’ve made the calendar some times now, (and it comes so unexpected every year … -.- ) and how are they fighting about their pitch? Not that would hire a student to model the building in 3D for a few bucks, where you could easyly insert your ideas…nohohohoooo… not with us! We’ll take a photograph of the building at night, when it’s fully enlightened and have bad light-effects on the whole image and have to make a photomontage with the new backgrounds with bad clipping and don’t even correct the light effects… for a customer who’s seeling worldwide…. 
K…that’s the first “Epic fail”… low quality (and they deliver it in their final products, too…. better quality, but still no good)
Second fail: We don’t score with creative concepts….nah…too much effort and too complicated. We bring  super-new concepts like christmaspresents for christmas…(picture to come)

And it’s always the same shit… one of the bosses is actually preparing for another pitch. This works like that:
No preparation or thinking. Sit behind your employee. Say “recycle this old project, you know”. Opening a bunch of old projects. None of them is what he thought it to be. K, back to the first document. “Change, those colors, would you? And put that and that and that way,would you? Hm…. looks  better with #2 still there, don’t you think? K…replace it with that….nah…not that, the other one.We have to stay with the line. K, change this and this and this and this. Nah, not this. back. We have to create a new smooth line, you know?”etc… He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t have any ideas but wants them realized… ooooook… 

Now all these thoughts brought me back to me,myself and my work. Noticed following: Work I do for myself, is at highest quality I can deliver… but only personal work… when looking at some of the stuff I had to create for studies, it sometimes really makes my hair cur… because it sucks so much. I have no idea why… I know I can do better… but why don’t I?
Luckyly I won’t have to create stuff for studies very much longer, so i can concentrate on bringing high quality stuff to you guys^^

I’m so happy that in 2.5 weeks  this part of my life is over. Cheers