12.17.19 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
I am breaking up with my career in advertising and it is rough going. For the last fifteen years I have had the amazing opportunity of working with people who are cooler, smarter, harder working and more creative than most. They are faithful to their teams and their talents. We have all asked too much of each other and we have all consistently delivered.
Once a woman I was making small talk with at a party asked what I did for a living. I told her that I worked in advertising and she said “Oh WOW! Good for you!”. I wondered, like…what the hell does she think it means to “work in advertising”? I will never know what she thinks, but I know what it’s like.
It’s fun. On our best days we have long conversations about how we see people. We talk about consumers the way 14 year-olds talk about crushes. We see people from so many views. We love people. We ask them questions, we watch them out in the wild, we quantify and qualify their behaviors, we spy on them online. We really want to know what they want and need and what they will want and need next once we have filled their immediate needs. We try to speak their language and sometimes invent it. We make art for them. We write poems and music for them. Humans inspire us and we try to inspire them.
We also love our clients. We get excited about the wave of success that our clients ride to get to our shore. Nobody is talking to an ad agency unless their businesses have been at least a little fruitful. Nobody knocks on our door unless they can see untapped potential in the market place and they want to us to help them reach that potential.
I have seen the insides of dozens of industries and business models. I have worked with maybe hundreds of teams over the last fifteen years. My colleagues and I make it our business to understand the culture and motivation of not only our client’s but their other partners, their competition and their consumers. My relationships with my clients gas gifted me an outrageous amount of information.
On our best days in an agency, we talk about truth. We debate what was true. We look at data and try not to lead it into fulfilling our own agenda. We find the places where the truth about the present aligned with the future, our own gut(s) and how people see them selves.
On some days we would argue and try very hard to keep our cool. When we had disagreements about creative, we would each stand our ground for as long as possible. With few exceptions, we don’t compromise. We all know that the worst most beige and dispassionate work is made of compromise. We care deeply about creating great work that feels good and makes a difference for our clients.
On the hard days, we stay up all night meeting a deadline. We don’t miss deadlines. We will miss our families, our meals, our sleep and our showers before we miss a deadline.
We spend our days answering our client’s questions and our nights doing our work. There is a single-typed list of work that needs to be done as long as the Mississippi River. It is not getting done. There is another list that is at least that long that runs my personal life. I lost that list. That stuff is hard, but that isn’t so different from any other job.
What was hard for me was spending my days manufacturing desire. When I worked in bars, I would come home a little buzzed and smelling of smoke. When I worked in an agency I would come home with excess desire. That turned out to be unsustainable. The yogi in me understands what a poison desire can be - It is definitely dangerous.
I think that we have to be very careful about how we spend our time. At least I do.
I have been watching people and the world very carefully and I have concerns about how much desire is generated and what it does to us. Our oceans are filled with desire. Our icecaps are melting from desire our schools are being shot up with guns and bullets of desire. Desire has in many cases has replaced public interest and even decency.
As a marketer I have studied desire from one point of view. As a mom and a yoga teacher I have witnessed the impact of desire from a different point of view. Desire can manifest itself as frustration and restlessness. While living in an environment of excess desire, it is hard to unplug from our devices and dig our feet into the earth, hear the sound of our breath, and be ok. What we fill our lives with matters. When we fill our lives with desire, there is no room for contentment.
So for me, this career that I loved, was not in alignment with the life I wanted to live.
I have so much love and gratitude for the salary, opportunities and personal development provided to me by this work. It has been difficult to walk away from something that I have grown to like and even more difficult to think of what is next.
For now, I am trying to slow down, notice my breath and allow space for new possibilities.
