The entrepreneurial spirit of creatives. Or lack thereof.
June 21, 2016
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMIAMI.COM
- What is it with your average creative that he -or she- whines, kicks, screams and throws tantrums yet he -or she- rarely has the rocks to start his or her own agency?
- How many agencies in America were founded by creatives?
- How many agencies in the US Hispanic market were founded by creatives?
- With some exceptions, even in cases in which a creative is a member of the founding partnership, he or she is usually a junior partner.
- Ok, let’s not even call them agencies since, as we all know, an agency by definition is an entity that creates ad campaigns AND buys media.
- By this logic, only a handful of real agencies remain on this planet: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and that’s about it.
- So, how many creatives do you know that have had the cojones to found their own creative boutiques in the US Hispanic market?
- I don’t have official stats but I can tell you off the top of my head that the number is staggeringly low.
- How can you call yourself a creative while punching your card every morning at a multinational corporation?
- What is holding you back?
- The high salaries?
- Really?
- How come?
- Creative department salaries have been declining steadily throughout the last decade or so.
- Is it the comfy life of subsidized travel & entertainment?
- You think so?
- I beg to differ, creatives are rarely granted generous expense accounts.
- I have a theory though: creatives hate the pressure of real responsibility.
- They hate to be CEOs because it forces them to make the tough decisions.
- Plus, creatives hate to wear the “salesman” hat.
- Or saleswoman.
- Most creatives neither want to play the bad cop nor the good cop.
- They find it demeaning and cringe-inducing.
- As opposed to the purity of locking themselves up in a room to shoot the breeze, create ideas, play ping pong and complain.
- Hence the cycle of self-sabotage that prevents creatives from venturing out by themselves or reaching the rarefied atmosphere of the CEO suite.
- If you add to the equation the time-consuming ego trip of creating truchos to win awards, most creatives’ careers enter a cycle of inexplicably self-fulfilling irrelevance.
- How odd.
- Creatives are supposed to be charismatic, charming sociopaths with the uncanny ability to separate clients and investors from their hard earned money.
- Trust me, it takes one to know one.
- We need to start putting our money where our mouths are, folks.
- The little money there’s left, that is.
- Pronto.
- We can break free of this karma.
- Go find a client &/or an investor and set up shop asap.
- Time’s running out.
- Every single day you procrastinate will make the whole venture harder.
- Your mortgage will grow.
- Your kids will grow.
- This is ‘merica, folks.
- The best place in the friggin’ world to start a business.
- And sell it.
- Only to start another business.
- And sell it again.
- If you read my columns with a certain frequency -or if you know me in person- you know that, even though I am -or was- a copywriter by trade, I consider myself first & foremost an adman and a businessman.
- Moreover, if you read my columns with a certain frequency -or if you know me in person- you know that I rarely am one to wrap myself in my home country’s flag (that’d be Argentina).
- Quite the opposite.
- But I can tell you one thing: all the hot agencies in Argentina were founded by creatives.
- Same thing in Brazil (no need to list them).
- To a lesser extent the same is true about Spain and México (anónimo and Beker come to mind in México, Sra. Rushmore in Spain).
- Aren’t we US Hispanics supposed to be hard charging entrepreneurs?
- Let me tell you a little story.
- When I landed in America back in 98, in NY to be precise, I had two pretty firm job offers.
- The first one was from Y&R, to work on the Sony Ericsson account.
- Y&R handled the account across the three Americas and they needed a bilingual copywriter.
- The second offer was from Conill which, as y’all know, was & is Saatchi’s US Hispanic arm.
- Both offers were quite tempting for a number of reasons.
- Y&R was one of Madison Avenue’s most venerated cathedrals and I was going to be a part of a very cool creative team led by Nelson Martínez and Randy Van Kleeck.
- These guys were the rising stars of the agency, in charge of all the cool clients and new business pitches.
- Nelson Martínez, by the way, colombiano from Jersey, was not only a super nice guy and a brilliant art director: he was the youngest senior VP in the history of Y&R.
- The pay was not amazing but it was reasonable.
- The second offer was tempting too: Conill’s offices were located at the very cool sci fi building Saatchi occupies at the very cool intersection of Houston and Hudson.
- And my boss was going to be a good friend of mine from Argentina, Mariano Favetto, a super nice guy too, who later left to run Saatchi operations in Toronto and Paris.
- I was torn.
- I needed advice.
- So I called another then friend of mine who at the time was working for Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Oregon.
- His response was as follows: “Do NOT take the job in the Hispanic market. It’ll be very hard to do good creative work, you will never win a decent award, it will be a dead end for your portfolio and your creative career.”
- From a purely creative careerist perspective, he was absolutely right.
- The US Hispanic market in the late 90s was not the best showcase to come up with award-winning work.
- Funny thing is, this same guy who advised me to stay away from a US Hispanic market job, moved to Miami to open his own award-winning US Hispanic ad agency a year later.
- See, what he did NOT tell me during our telephone conversation is that the then subpar creative output of the US Hispanic market was the very reason it was a superb business opportunity.
- Brilliant son of a bitch.
- Motherfxxxxr taught me one big lesson in business.
- What choice did I end up making, you might ask?
- Due to immigration reasons, I took an offer from BBDO Miami.
- At the time I did not have the papers to start my own business.
- I had to wait a few years.
- I’ll tell you the rest of the story some other time.