Hasta La Creative!

Dabitch of Adland shares a funny tale on her personal site from the dark side of adbloggerdom.

A bloke from the UK calls, I can hear that he’s in a rather noisy spot, cups hitting tables and chatter in the background and he tells me that he has a blockbuster idea for a commercial that would sell every unit of Levis (or whatever) brand they had. It’s that great, it’s so great he almost doesn’t believe it himself, he’s got three outrageuously good commercial ideas and two great ones, and he wants me to tell him how to get them sold.

I didn’t know what to say to the poor chap who “saw my company on the internet at this internet café and thought I could possibly help him with contacts to sell his commercials”.

Strangely, this call is not out of the ordinary. The Swedish art director living in Malmö gets this treatment regularly.

It is a bit odd that this questions has been asked at least once a week recently. My reply is the standard; “animate it, stick it on youtube, hope you get lucky.” The people asking this sincerely believe that one hit commercial might make them rich for life, a bit like those people who dream of doing one novel and retiring. The truth is, a career creating commercials or novels never relies on one or three good ideas, but hundreds of thousands, and you have to work really hard for a long time before you get anything done. Ever.

I love that last bit. It’s so true. And so hard for the impatient to accept.