Who cares?

This is a slide from my Copy School presentation. Sure, there’s natural talent and qualifications and craft and graft and ‘writing tips and techniques’ and everything else that can make up a great creative. But the one thing that’s become clearer and clearer to me the longer I survive in this industry is that there’s one intangible that rules above all. And it’s something you can’t teach, buy, train, or MBA your way to. Giving a shit.

Just being someone who (genuinely) cares.

The most prolific people are never content. They’re eternally restless. The work is never good enough. An in many ways, it’s what brands actually pay agencies to do. Not to push pixels around and ‘respond to briefs’, but to care about a particular output or function in a way that they never will. That might sound like a jarring statement, but it’s really not. Who else reading this has stood in the studio with the Head of Art at 2am pasting up corflute boards for a bunch of concepts that are just gonna get thrown under the bus anyway? (I can still smell the chemicals, which is, I’m sure, a very good thing.) Who’s locked up the edit suite and filled the recycling bins with beer and wine bottles with the producer after agonising over the timing of an edit for far longer than anyone will ever appreciate? Who’s slept on the agency couch during a pitch that they aren’t getting paid for and may never have ever had a chance of winning because of a line in a procurement sheet?

And, just to be clear, I’m not promoting overwork or burnout or hustle culture or the, at times, masochistic nature of this business. I’m celebrating people who care this deeply about making good work. Because it’s what’s always been the bedrock of great brands, great agencies, and great people. (Suits, strategists, creatives, and ESPECIALLY - clients. Clients that care make this job one of the best jobs in the world.)

I know we sometimes feel like hard work. But, mostly I’d like to think, the ‘difficulty’ that people feel towards creatives and agencies isn’t because they’re simply pains-in-the-ass to work with - it’s because they really care. They care so deeply about what they’re making. I think it’s worth remembering now and then. (Even when, sure, sometimes we probably fight the wrong battles. But it often comes from a place of really wanting to make the best piece of work possible.)

I’ve been thinking about this lately because the future of our business has arguably never been more in question, and with it, the secondary notion of “Who actually cares, anymore?”

Brands are investigating AI (as they should), holding companies are throwing people under the bus in preparation (which will not be forgotten), and our LinkedIn feeds are littered with ‘marketers’, a term I’m using loosely here, revelling in the death of caring (and people’s livelihoods) by eagerly posting shit like ‘Creatives are dead! I just made these ads in 3 minutes!’ with a picture of a bowl of soup and a headline that says something like “WARMS YOU UP ON A COLD DAY!”

The thing is - not caring has always been fast and free. A shit headline over a product shot has always taken 3 minutes. In fact, I could sketch you up 4 or 5 in 3 minutes, likely faster than you could make them with AI. They could probably do it even faster in the 60s. ‘Not giving a shit’ isn’t a technological advancement, mediocrity has always existed, it’s just being democratised at a scale we’ve never seen before. And a lot of unambitious people are blithely showing their hand.

Something that brands and agencies alike are going to have to soon reckon with is that some of our previous points of strength are about to wither. AI is going to knock down barriers that have previously existed in terms of speed and scale of execution. A single operator will soon be able to create what in the past required an entire team. An idea that would previously be only in the scope of legacy players is now within anyone’s reach. Everything is about to be flattened. ‘Having an idea and making stuff’ will be a hygiene factor. And this isn’t objectively a bad thing. There’s gold in them thar hills. It’s all equally terrifying and exciting. But as David Droga once said,

“You can’t pay people to care. You can’t teach people to care.”

As we reach a new collective parity on what we can create and put out into the world, our points of difference are going to shift. And that’s the bit that the ‘race-to-the-bottomers’ don’t seem to see quite yet. That the very thing they’re rejoicing in is what may wipe them out. The excitement companies are feeling about certain time and cost barriers falling is temporarily masking the concurrent disintegration of the very moat keeping the wolves at bay. Because if everyone can do what you’re doing in 3 minutes, it’s of no tangible value. And, suddenly, the intangible things that can’t be so easily bought or taught start to make all the difference.

Like caring.

Really, really caring.

The way we make things has always changed. From cave paintings to oil portraits to photographic film to synthetically-conjured videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

What hasn’t, is that the best ‘nothings-into-somethings’ that we manifest are made by people who give more of a shit than anyone else. And whether we all inevitably get washed away in a tidal wave of 0’s and 1’s or not, the best of us will keep caring more til’ the very end.

And those are the people that I want to keep working with for as long as the wheels stay on this thing.

So here’s to giving more of a shit than anyone else.