Chief
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Coach
In hand salary?? plz help
Visual Storyteller
You tired? Just do this. You’re welcome ☺️
Additional Posts in Advertising
Any tips from social media managers?
Pro
What’s your creative side-project?
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yes.
Pro
I think creative minds (of the human variety) need idle time to arrive at the best ideas and the litany of pressures on the industry these days, including those created by clients, no longer allow for that. This also is why the industry is turning to robots.
When I was a junior, I was writing for a brand Twitter account, and my CD looked at my pages of lines and said, "you know, in my day we'd have like 6 months to come up with one funny line to sell the client." Spot on.
Things were funnier in the way back when because commercials were one of the only widely consumed forms of short form comedy. Like there was even a TV show devoted to showing them: Worlds Funniest Commercials.
But now we have more short form comedy content than we could ever consume. And it’s high quality. YouTube. TikTok. More socials. Etc.
Combine that with brands needing their work to solve more business objectives, client anxiety around humor and smaller budgets… there are less funny commercials.
So it’s a combo.
Short form comedy content changed drastically in the last 10 years.
Client appetite changed.
Well, this post is not funny. Can you make it funny?
Chief
Can I jam on it for a bit?
I’ve found that the holding companies’ push to keep profit-earning elements of production in-house, particularly editing, and decoupling the editing from the director in order to save even more money, kills whatever comedy was inherent in the director’s body of work in the first place, presuming that there’s any comedy left after the legal department and the accounts team didn’t kill it off out of fear first.
The latter.
Funny creatives left advertising and went to be social media creators. They realized you can be making oodles of money working with brands instead of getting 9 layers of internal approvals saying what can and can’t be shown the client.
Comedy requires risk. Self-deprecation, edge, silliness, perspective etc. Nobody gets to be funny without putting themselves out there somehow.
Which clients increasingly refuse to do. And while it’s cowardly, it makes sense when a singular inane comment on socials can get a campaign pulled.
Safer just to do a mild hint of a gag, but overthink it to the point it’s delivered with a perfect smile and clumsy edit to cut around the bemused background talent’s reaction that their CMO thinks is “too negative”.
funny script isn’t it enough. they also have to spend all the budget on a celebrity who’s gonna butcher the punch line and gets cancelled for dumb reason in a few months