Hasta La Creative!

Ad agencies are maybe possibly sometimes a little ridiculous. But you clicked on this blog, so you didn’t need us to tell you that.

Take it from the anonymous “young” person who spoke to Digiday about the culture at his/her agency for a post today:

We play nice, but we’re in a catty environment. Nobody wants to help each other. As an industry, we’re always at each other’s throats, or at least at each other’s collarbones. There is a culture of gossip that’s hurtful. Agency people are incestuous. The gossip follows people around. There are people who go to eight agencies in five years and come out with negative stories. People are real assholes.

Well that one hit close to home. Thankfully, there is a whole subset of agencies that take the time to produce pieces specifically making fun of their own business beyond all those Ad Council shorts. One of them is Portal A. The L.A. and S.F. digital studio does work for real clients, most notably its annual YouTube “Rewind” series, but in our minds it is still best known for its spoof of the Dove Real Beauty campaign from four years ago.

The latest in its Ad Hoc series (which started with the Dove video) is a self-explanatory collaboration with our friends at Adweak titled “Genius at Work: Inside the World of Modern Advertising.”
“We work with brands all the time, but AdHoc has been our chance to take a step back and have some fun with the absurdity of the ad industry,” said Portal A co-founder and executive producer Nate Houghteling. “AdWeak was the perfect match for us because they’re doing the same thing but with a different angle. Luckily for both of us, there’s plenty of nonsense to go around.”

See, they only poke fun because they’ve been through it themselves.

The Adweak team’s deep cynicism comes from years in the trenches, and we have little doubt that the good people at Portal A have spent more than one afternoon trying to come up with a good hashtag for a soap brand … or a hotel chain, or a tablet, or a bunch of little emoji-like things that Twitter used to make its service more exciting to people who aren’t 45-year-old journalists obsessing over the latest White House press conference.

For more of the same, Canada’s Strategy calls on the top agencies north of the border each year to create their own parodies of the ad business. Here’s BBDO on adding shits to your sheets.

One thing we would like to ask some of these unnamed spoof specialist agencies: why don’t you share your client work? Like, the stuff that pays your bills. Are you embarrassed by your day jobs, or what?