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Not plumbers. Short-order cooks. And account teams have become waiters.
Send it back!
@Freelance 1 - I’m talking about how creatives used to be included in brief development, presented work to clients, produced in-person, and executed their ideas instead of the CMOs’ ideas.
I miss those days and I’d rather creatives got transparency and acknowledgment for their expertise and experience rather than more free snacks.
I wish they treated us like plumbers. My plumber tells me what he/she recommends, and I listen, and let them do it.
I wish, plumbers make bank
They do, it’s just that “pulling an all nighter” now means “pulling a shit-hair-pulp-toilet clog that stinks so bad it keeps me up at night”
Are you talking about when places like GS&P and W+K started "hiring wrong" as in hiring non-traditional creatives?
It was big in the late 90's/early 2000's.
Most of those shops stopped that around 2010 when they began to hire exclusively from Brandcenter grads for close to 10 years.
I understand the metaphor of of using creatives like short-order cooks…but plumbers? 🧐
I think because they’re responsible for getting everyone’s excrement out the door
As an ex-HVAC guy, I can assure that when the plumber needs to be involved, or if we even THINK the plumber needs to be involved, the plumber is VERY involved 😂
Lost me on the metaphor, sorry, truly.
Creative skillsets are steadily being devalued
Better question to ask is when did the ad industry become serial order-takers? But that’s hard to pin down since the root causes are so diffuse. Maybe tick off with Sorell and WPP devaluating their creative shops by opening creative jump balls to the whole network (the joy of media shops being allowed to compete for creative assignments). Then add in the client-side rise of procurement sourcing and the drive to “unitize” the value of an idea. Don’t forget the advent of 60- and then 90-day pay cycles, making painfully thin margins for agencies even thinner. And, of course, the way we’ve failed to address issues ranging from fragmentation to message overload to viewability to privacy to you name it to undercut advertising’s true value.
It always took brass balls or ovaries to avoid the siren call of “whatever you want.” Lately, brass isn’t close to strong enough.
I tend to poke more holes in briefs before plugging them but to each their own.