I think you just need more time.

This was probably the most common piece of feedback from my first CD, Alex Fenton.

“I think you just need more time.”

I always knew what it meant. Because deep down, in the pit of my gut, I knew my ideas weren’t fully formed, or marginally off the bullseye, or just completely and utterly clutching at straws.

I’ve seen a bunch of agencies begin to offer 24/48 hour turnaround times lately, one even claimed 7 if I remember correctly with, of course, AI being the justification.

I’ve also scrolled by some angry, dismissive, perhaps scornfully jaded in the past, marketers berate how agencies ‘take too long’ on LinkedIn.

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen any great work pouring out of these entities/people. Not yet, anyway. They might’ve achieved the below though.

“Shit that arrives at the speed of light is still shit.” - David Abbott

Because that’s the thing with time, isn’t it? The stampeding pace of capitalism has bent, stretched, ripped and torn at the seams of every resource it can get its hands on. But you can’t alter the fabric of time. Sure, you can argue that you can ‘do more’ within its confines, but it doesn’t change the overarching effects that time has on the creative process and the quality of its output.

Have you ever had an idea so goddamn amazing that you had to just drop everything and write it down? Like a lightning bolt has just ripped through your entire being? Sometimes I wake up at 3 in the morning and furiously write them down or punch them into my phone. Then I roll over and go back to sleep, briefly feeling like some sort of god-like mystic channeling brilliance from the far reaches of the universe.

Then, the next day, I excitedly look back at it and think - “What the fuck is this?”

Yep. I’m sure there’s at least a few people nodding along. And this, my friends, is because most ideas are shit. Especially first thoughts. ESPECIALLY first thoughts. I think it might’ve been David Chase, writer of the indelibly iconic Sopranos, that set a rule that, no matter what, ‘the first five ideas we come up with always end up in the trash’.

Time isn’t just needed to ‘come up with ideas’. Time is needed to let ideas breathe. Evolve. Marinate. Live. Die. Decompose. Resurrect. Grow new limbs. Grow tentacles. Become something else entirely.

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” - Albert Einstein

Time quite literally changes how ideas sound, look, and feel. A few hours. A few days. A few weeks. If they hold up, they hold up, but quite often - they don’t.

And, for all the ‘24-hour-campaign’ agency leaders and client-side marketers reading this, just understand that this is the gauntlet you’re choosing to run. Buzzwords, cost-cutting, and technological advancements aside, by removing time from the creative process - you’re going to market with the crap that landed in your competitor’s trash can.

It should also be noted, I’m not suggesting this as a subjective theory, as one of the people in all of this that DOES THE WORK, I’m simply just letting you know that’s what you’re getting. You can’t cheat time. I can come up with an entire deck of ideas in a few hours, with or without AI. In fact, I got paid very well for it when freelance. But that kind of arrangement has a firm ceiling on the output you’re receiving. Pace of conception does not alter the pace of assessment.

Think of it this way. Imagine we’re running a car company. A bunch of suits have invested in some new tech to ‘get to market quicker’. And the engineers (the people that DO THE WORK, the people that MAKE THE THING) are saying ‘but we need time to test this stuff to make sure it doesn’t break’, but you choose to ignore it to save a few pennies. Imagine we’re in the aeroplane business. Imagine we’re Boeing. (Don’t have to imagine that one, we’re watching it play out in real time, aren’t we?)

Decisions made in the world of spreadsheets eventually have to enter the world of reality.

“As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing, better. No longer enough to be efficient.” - Edward de Bono

And, funnily enough, I say this as someone running an agency that’s routinely praised for how fast we work. Because we’ve been doing this for a long time and we’re damn good at it. But some things still require more time to get right. And that’s something we try to protect as much as we can. Sometimes you have to push a meeting. Sometimes you have to pull an idea.

And, collectively, as an industry, as we all soon reach a new technological parity, I imagine ‘time to craft’ will actually become more of a differentiator than ‘speed of shit’.

It’s the most precious resource we have. So let’s not forget it.