QAdnon

On a chilly fall night in 2003, nearing the end of two years of ad school, I scurried up the steep hill to my tiny San Francisco apartment, eager to show my roommates what two years of long nights and tuition payments had finally gotten me: an ad portfolio.

I had spent years studying the ad masters, discussing theory, idolizing the geniuses at Goodby Silverstein, breaking down every new commercial with wide-eyed awe, crafting hundreds of headlines and concepts in an attempt to come within ten yards of their seemingly unattainable creative brilliance. 

But here I was, outside of the insular bubble of ad school, in front of people that technically mattered more than my instructors: the 99.89% of the population who doesn’t live for ads. 

My roommates thumbed through two years of my efforts in less than two minutes. They lingered on a few print ads politely, then tossed down my portfolio and asked where we should go for a burrito. El Farolito? Or El Castillito? 

In that moment, for the first time since I’d begun my love affair with advertising, I stepped outside of myself long enough to realize that what I’d spent so much time and passion making was … a book of ads. Smart? Conceptual? Strategic? Well-written? To the extent I was capable of those things, yes. But, to my roommates - they were still just ads. Paenes to products that were taking their time away from video games, my wit notwithstanding. The ad school cult deluded me into thinking my roommates would raise themselves off of the couch for ten minutes of rousing applause, before announcing my ads had inspired them to run out and buy several bottles of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. Perhaps my ads weren’t good enough.

No matter - The goal wasn’t to sell products, after all. It was to sell myself to an agency, so I could get a job.

Many years later, after that book had indeed gotten me that job, I found myself stationed inside the large conference room of an expensive NYC hotel. I was at something called a boot camp, where the brightest minds of our agency were locked away for weeks working on the relaunch of a major soda brand, one of our agency’s biggest clients.

Scattered upon the tables around us were all of that soda brand’s newest products, which we were supposed to be drinking and eating, so we could actually learn a thing or two about what we were trying to sell. However, that had zero chance of happening: We were all healthy, enlightened, organic New Yorkers, and healthy, enlightened, organic New Yorkers don’t drink soda or eat processed chips. Truthfully, we weren’t entirely qualified to try and persuade the people around the world who did drink soda and eat chips, but by now - that was far from the goal. The goal was our brilliant ideas, high-end productions planned around beachfront hotels, and recognition. Whatever happened outside of that was beyond our interest. Was the product any good? Did it give the client ROI? Did it not? Who gave a shit? The product was irrelevant. It was just a vessel to achieve our personal glory.

Under my breath, I apologized to my roommates.   

In recent years, an element of our industry has only grown deeper into this insular world. We’ve gone to great lengths to convince ourselves we aren’t making creative pieces designed to sell something or persuade someone. Ads are “storytelling”. Commercials are “film”. Digital is “content”. Companies are “purposeful”. We aren’t selling, we are “branding”. We have countless publications and websites dedicated to highlighting our genius. We give ourselves awards, assuring us of this genius. Humbled and honored, we post these awards and articles to LinkedIn, where fellow industry professionals and clients reaffirm this genius. 

And this is all well and good. Great work and creatives deserve recognition. 

The issue is, for advertising creatives - when we entirely forget we are trying to sell something - when we live too deeply within our self-promotional bubble - well then, we miss the entire point. 

In recent years, I made the choice to move to a small market with small clients and small budgets. I quickly learned these clients have no room for my indulgences or fancy Mad Men speeches. They need to sell things, pretty much now, or they will lose their jobs and go out of business. These are good people, with good products, and I don’t want them to lose their job or go out of business.

It was only in this space I realized I had never been taught how to actually sell something - at least without a two year plan, multiple partner agencies and millions of dollars. There was a general notion, from ad school on, that good ads would sell things in a way bad ads would not. It seemed logical: I’d be brilliant, my ad would get a bunch of attention, and then … sales? But the work of figuring out exactly how my good idea would turn into client revenue was something for people outside the QAdnon bubble, the people and agencies mapping out the “boring” and “direct” work, the ones not mentioned in our case studies. 

Collectively, QAdnon owes an apology to these people. The people outside our cult know that going down funnel is hard. And despite our best attempts to convince clients that impressions are as important as sales, it’s pretty much the whole game. Perhaps ad creatives should brag just as much when work we do actually leads to a trackable sale, rather than an award or PR mention in Business Insider.

For me, I’ve embraced the move from the top of the funnel to the bottom. And somehow, I’m finding it more interesting down here. Does well-written email marketing actually perform? Well, there’s a full analytics panel that can tell you just how much revenue your email generated. What about your paid social video? Was there any ROI? You might be surprised to find you’re not as brilliant as you first thought, at least as judged by real people - But at least I finally have a real metric to compete against.

This is no longer about me and my achievements. It’s about clients and their sales. I can’t say I’m humbled and honored to tell you about my latest social post copy, but somehow, I think my roommates wouldn’t know the difference. Only now, the clients do.