Curatives wanted
December 9, 2014
By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM
- When judges make mistakes they lock them up.
- When surgeons make mistakes they bury them.
- When ad people make mistakes they run them on national TV, tweet them and post them on Facebook.
- Judges enjoy the luxury, if you will, of having high barriers to entry to their profession.
- Law school et al.
- You won’t get to occupy the bench by watching Suits or Damages.
- Or by reading John Grisham novels.
- Surgeons?
- There’s no way to become one other than grinding through college and residencies for a good, grueling 10 years.
- At least.
- Full time.
- Not even nurses who’ve witnessed thousands of surgical procedures have the professional clearance to operate on a patient.
- It’d be outright illegal.
- Advertising?
- It’s easier to become a creative or account exec than, say, a plumber.
- You need to be certified & insured to be a plumber.
- Being an ad executive poses no hoops to jump through other than… owning a laptop?
- Suffice it to say that the under signer, yes, yours truly, used to be a… professor…? at the very HQ of the prestigious, world-renowned Miami Ad School.
- Anyone can write a script for a TV spot or pre-roll.
- Not to mention a tweet, a Facebook post or the proverbial tagline.
- Design & art direction software is becoming easier to operate by the hour.
- It used to be a craft reserved for classically educated artists.
- Now, it’s the field of self-taught teenagers.
- Ditto writing computer code.
- Filming, editing, CGI?
- Well, there’s an app for that.
- Our profession, if we can call it so, has the lowest barriers to entry one can imagine.
- It’s gone DIY all the way.
- The average human being is exposed to thousands of commercial messages everyday day.
- Why can’t he or she make he or her own?
- Millions of people self-medicate on a daily basis, for God’s f*****g sake.
- What holds them back from creating their own ads?
- After all, we humans learn from observation.
- I have never seen a surgical procedure of any kind.
- Even when I was physically present in the operating room, I was asleep or high as a kite.
- I saw thousands of ads though.
- They all look the same.
- Some anonymous actor or celebrity says something about a product or pretends to use it.
- An existential orgasm ensues.
- The anonymous actor or celeb has seemingly never experienced such an amazing SUV / snack / insurance / burger / mobile gadget.
- A voice-over closes the pitch with some inane tagline ripped from a self-help bestseller plus a call2action.
- Logo.
- Oh no, that paradigm is dead.
- We don’t bribe actors or celebs anymore to sell our wares.
- Well, I mean, we now call them influencers and they deliver their scripted lines on social media feeds.
- There go the barriers to entry.
- The floodgates are open, folks.
- When I started out as a copywriter, someone thought it was reasonable to pay some 20something snarky-pants six figures to come up with, say, ten plausible storylines for TV spots and 20 decent lines of copy for print purposes.
- Per month.
- Today, we need to do that every day: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine.
- We’ve said it all.
- Again & again.
- No matter how we slice it, the message hasn’t changed, the litany is the same.
- On multiple, mind-boggling social media feeds.
- Speaking of which, here’s the good news.
- Now more than ever, the medium is the message.
- McLuhan’s mantra is truer than it ever was.
- Let the new platforms shape your message.
- Don’t run magazine ads on Instragram.
- Don’t run TV spots on Vine.
- Don’t run slogans on Twitter.
- There’s nothing to “create” anymore (if there ever was).
- To borrow the pretentious verbiage of the art world, we now simply curate what already exists.
- We’ve become “curatives”, for the sake of coining a catchy idiom.
- Our job is to keep our ear to the ground, spot trends, identify pipelines & windows of access into the culture.
- It’s all out there.
- We just need to see it first.
- There’s nothing to invent.
- To paraphrase the Hollywood saying: “nobody knows anything”.
- In our racket we should adapt it to “nobody creates anything.”
- Anyone who says they do, well, they is lyin’.
- In ya face.
- Shamelessly.
- Programmatic?
- It’s just the flavor of the month.
- It’ll fall victim of the law of diminishing returns, like everything else.
- Like AOL, like Yahoo!, like Facebook.
- We will just become immunized and we’ll need to find something else.
- Not for the faint of heart.
- Only humans with a sweet tooth for risk can do it.