Mescall slams industry blog sites

Have you seen that website where members of Australia's legal profession go online to post critiques of each other's work, cutting each other down with bitchy invective and scything commentary?

Of course you haven't, because lawyers are way smarter than that. Why would they engage in a practice that does nothing but devalue their own profession, and ultimately degrade their own standing in the business community?

But for a long time now, the advertising industry has done exactly this. It may have gotten a lot worse now, thanks to various blogs which allow for anonymous commentary on our work, but the attitude has always been there.

In pretty much every advertising/marketing publication in the world (including this one) you’ll have the obligatory "rate this campaign" section. Usually it's senior creative people and (more recently) clients holding forth on other people’s work.

Usually the comments from clients are pretty measured, although it could be argued that unless you know the objectives of a campaign, it’s pretty hard to pass judgement on it. Especially if you’re not super-experienced. But more often than not, the commentary from the creative guys (on six ads) goes something like this: shit, shitter, okay, shit, pretty good, shit.

Go onto the blogs, and under cover of anonymity, the discourse is far worse. On the blogs, stuff that goes on to win metal in major shows is shit. Stuff that is easily in the best 5 per cent of anything on TV is shit. Stuff that does a job, and does it well is shit. Actually
I’m being overly polite by using the word shit, but maybe your kids read this (they’d be pretty weird  kids, but hey).

We’re probably all guilty of being overly harsh on other people's work (myself included) because I suspect that’s just the way we’ve been brought up in the business. We’re encouraged to speak our minds, to have an opinion, to not hold back. Basically, the ethos in advertising is to call a spade a fucking shovel. But, ultimately it’s self-defeating, all these slings and arrows.

Standards are hugely important, and that’s why we have awards shows. We need to not only celebrate the best stuff, but learn from it. We should laud the best work, and hold it up as an example of what’s possible when both client and agency are determined to be both brave and uncompromising.

But why the hell do we embrace the opposite of this, and publicly slander everything that, in our opinion, doesn’t measure up? We all understand that every human endeavour will produce outcomes that are great, good, okay, below-par and awful, don't we? Is there any point in tearing down in very public forums anything that isn’t either very good or great?

I can't think of a single profession where this kind of attitude and behaviour is more entrenched. Except maybe for the mafia, if The Sopranos is anything to go by.
But at least on The Sopranos they kept the character, and literal, assassinations to themselves. In advertising we, well, advertise them. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

People can do what they want, but I've decided to make a deliberate attempt to opt out of being critical of other people’s work in public forums. In the agency, at the pub… nothing's off limits and no criticism is too scathing.
But does our industry really need to take every opportunity to publicly pour scorn on our lesser moments? Do any of us benefit from this kind of behaviour? I think we already know the answer to that. 


John Mescall is executive creative director of Smart