You know how most people have imaginary friends. Well, I’ve had an imaginary boss for the longest time. This boss is a sort of compilation of the best that I’ve learnt, observed and been inspired from in the ad biz.

Whenever I’ve been in a situation when I’m just not driven by the people around me or inspired by the work, I imagine that this boss is looking at me and in a kind of sneering way going, “Huh, this is what you call an idea?” Shakes me up… every time.

I suspect this is also the reason for my problem with authority. (I have to admit it’s only very rarely that I’m impressed with actual people, because they almost never match up to the boss in my head.) But it doesn’t matter, because having this uber-boss, I don’t really need to look outward for inspiration or ass-kicking.

If you’re relatively fresh in the advertising business, I’d recommend you create your own boss too. Make him or her tough, uncompromising (even if the damn deadline’s looming), quite rude with feedback and frankly as obnoxious as you can take.

It’s quite useful, because you’ll find very few people who have the time, patience or the high standards needed to create genuinely good advertising. And then, you need to be very, very lucky to actually be working with them.  So an imaginary boss is probably the best way to go.

A few weeks ago I ranted that brands are becoming wimps in the face of social media bullies. Today my rant is the flip side of that coin: People on social networks are turning into humourless scolds. Forever outraged, forever carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

While reading this Mashable piece on a new Nivea campaign that has everybody offended and has been pulled - Naturally! (See previous post ) - I was with the offended parties till I came to this part:

“A separate ad featuring “a clean-shaven white guy getting ready to toss away his scraggly unshaven head and the words, ‘Sin City isn’t an excuse to look like hell,’” seemed to be overlooked in the midst of the social media uprising…”

Now guys, what is this selective racism-finding?  And if it offends you, why don’t you just discuss it with your family over the breakfast muffins, and well… ‘live and let live’?

Maybe the majority of humanity has always been like this. Maybe it’s only that platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow them to harumpph loudly and set about getting at least one company to retract an ad before breakfast every morning.

I’m just glad I’m not a Junior Creative in an agency in these times. It’s hard enough pleasing the CD, now you gotta please everybody. 

PS: This particular rant was triggered by the Nivea backlash. But better people than me have addressed this topic before. Read: http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-am-offended.html 

The latest social media flutter caused by the PMS themed campaign for Milk has finally made me come out and say something I’ve thought secretly for a long time. Brands have become wimps. They really have!

When I first saw the website everythingidoiswrong.org I thought it was a cliché and not particularly funny, but I wasn’t offended enough to start outraging either. Apparently some people were. And that was enough to get the California Milk Processor Board to back down. Fast.

That backdown has given us dire headlines like “Got apology?”, and Social Media Specialists new ammunition, leading to even more dire articles like “How Social Media Can Kill a Brand in Days”.  Not months, not weeks…DAYS! OMG!! While I agree with part of the article - social media can make the noise from offended people (read bullies) more public, I don’t think the medium or the people on it kill the brand. The brand kills the brand. By trying to be all things to all people and being too wishy-washy to take a position.

In fact the client also says that the campaign was intended to “ignite some social media discussion and conversation.” Well, what did they imagine that discussion would be? Thousands of people going, “Whoo, boy! They really nailed it”?

It’s milk, for heavens sake. Who’s going to hold a grudge against milk? Did they really think there would be a mass boycott of milk based on this, when we’ve lived through the mad-cow mania and much worse? 

Wimps, I tell you!

So Google's launched a new social platform. Again. There's a mad rush among the clued-in, fully connected, always online folk to get on this shiny new train. Again. Once on, they can quickly see and start worrying about how many, or how few 'circles' they're in. I'm sure the experts are writing their very first blog posts on how to plus-size your career using Google + . So far so predictable.

But once you've experienced the UI and admired the slick feedback functionality and played around with those circles for a bit, you've got to wonder, now what? Who do you put in these circles? Because let's face it, how many different types of relationships do you have that don't already have their designated social network. Looking at the hundreds of suggestions that Google is helpfully offering I can't see a single person who I 'want' to be connected to, who isn't already a connection on one or another platform.

Professional contacts = LinkedIn. Friends/Family = Facebook. Interesting Strangers = Twitter.

Like parking spaces and good men, all the worthwhile connections are taken.

To successfully begin my Google Plussing, I'd have to be that person at the party who moves everyone to the other room just as they're sitting down for a chat? I can't be that person even if I wanted to, because nobody ever listens to me; they'd just go on chatting over my head while I keep gesturing that they should join my new 'circle', here. Over here! 

So here's my unscientific and unsolicited advice to creators of new social networking platforms - Before you give me another social networking platform, I need a new kind of relationship. Work on that.

I read more ‘Best Practices’ than novels.

I click on more links to articles about advertising, than articles about movies.

I view more Slideshares than music videos.

I’m a better advertising person than a scrabble player.

Sometimes I’m even a better (shudder) professional than a daughter, wife, mom, sister, friend.

Work doesn't define me, yet I'm better at it than I am at the things that do define me.  

Time was, when you pitched for an account (the whole account and nothing but the account), it was an exciting opportunity, and all the teams in the agency wanted to work on the pitch because that’s when you got to show your creative chops. You brainstormed, you went off-tangent, and you pulled out all the fancy fonts and colours you’d been dying to try out, you ignored the boring brief and the brand guidelines.  You just looked for the ‘wow’. It was like scam work, without the, well, scam. You knew if the business came in, you’d actually have to start all over again anyway, so hey!

But then, things changed. While I blinked - which is another way of saying, I went off the radar to have a couple of kids - clients went out and started getting sundry agencies to pitch for every little thing. A new corporate brochure? Call 3 agencies and ask them to present ideas. A direct mail initiative? Ditto. An online promotion? Double ditto.

Now, I work in a small agency, so maybe this is not entirely the case in the biggies of the ad world. ATL is still sacrosanct, but other than that, pretty much the entire brand experience is up for auction, to whichever agency puts their best ‘creative + cost’ foot forward.

As a result of this, 2 things are happening:

•  Pitches have become boring. They are no longer about exploring possibilities and thinking off the beaten track. Creatives who work on pitches now follow the brief closely, mostly because there’s such a narrow scope that it’s hardly worthwhile to flex that right brain.

• The brand experience keeps getting more and more fragmented with every new communication opportunity that is handed over to another agency. Especially when it’s in digital media.  So, you have Facebook groups revolving around products that don’t reflect the product positioning in the mainstream at all, or online promotions that seem to be running in a parallel universe all their own.

Clients don’t seem to be looking for farsighted solutions any more, just someone who will get the job done with the minimum of fuss and cost, and agencies will do whatever one-off or short term project they can get.

Communication-wise its a race to the bottom. And both clients and agencies are losing out in this myopic game.

Apparently the hapless employee of Chrysler's social media agency who tweeted that shocking, SHOCKING word was fired, and the agency fired in turn by Chrysler. The same brand, by the way, that employed the never-swearin', ever charming Eminem as a spokesperson in its Superbowl spot. 

Just how far removed from real people does a brand's communication team have to be to make a fuss about this?

I confess, I'm one of those skeptics who still doesn't buy the social media kool-aid completely. People don't want to talk about brands on social networks, right? People just want deals, deals and more deals.

Well then, how about these twitterings from my timeline this morning? One set is related to a much maligned telecom brand, being creatively maligned further by a long suffering subscriber. The other, a bunch of brands that are on sale, and faring much better on Twitter through the creative tweets of a fan.

Can brands afford to not listen in?

We’ve often talked about digital being a last minute add-on to the communication strategy, a quick and dirty adaptation of the brand messaging in offline media.

Here’s another not so pretty truth: most digital agencies are also a last minute add-on to execute a specific project.  This is especially true in the case of large clients with multiple products, and a roster of agencies. While the ATL agencies own the brand, the various promotions, contests etc. planned around it are too often outsourced as one-off projects to digital hotshops for extension into digital media. Yes, dear client, this is true of your brand too.

Even if you assume a fabulous brief has been developed (HA!) which captures the ethos of the brand along with the context and objectives, the digital creatives working on the brand are really looking at it as a one night stand. They’ll only focus on what they need to know for that specific project. They most definitely will not reference, much less try to understand previously done advertising and the larger context of the communication. Isn’t it obvious that marketers do their brands a great disservice by not letting the digital agency develop a deep relationship with their brand?

Looking beyond campaigns and promotions, when it comes to developing websites it’s even more essential for the digital agency to be completely familiar with the company, its products, its competitors, its customers and their habits, and of course, how they interact with the brand online. This familiarity does not happen overnight, or even over a few PowerPoint presentations. This is the kind of knowledge that seeps in when you’re working on a brand for a reasonable length of time.  Years ago, when I was working on the launch of a certain brand of juices I could rattle off the exact ingredients in every variant of the juice. And even now, years later, I can spot the minutest change in the wording of the pack copy of that particular brand, and what it means in the context of food labeling regulations in our country.  And that’s just for the packaging. This is the kind of intimacy advertising creatives working on any brand develop over time.

Working on a large website project should also give the creative team a similar depth of knowledge of industry/product/competition, but unfortunately very few website projects allow for that kind of time. A digitally evolved client will create space for this type of engagement with the brand, as well as research and knowledge building, and it will reflect on the messaging and product sell that happens on the website once it is created.

That’s why digital agencies that are in the game for the long run, strive to win retainer-ships rather than one-off projects. Smart clients need to get over their commitment phobia and meet them halfway. 

(This post first appeared on afaqs.com )