Why we should all be afraid of “hard work”

As a planner I am confronted daily by quite a lot of nonsense (I’m guilty of using quite a lot myself, obv). There are a few words in fact that I’d like to ban entirely from the advertising lexicon – the word “lexicon” for starters. Terms like “paradigm” (overblown and pretentious) or “millennial” (essentially rendered meaningless by overuse/misuse) would be a couple more for the chop. I would also love to eradicate words like “empowering” and “enabling” from B2B copy too. But if I were only allowed to erase one term from all the vocabularies of agencies and clients it would be the term “hard-working” in reference to creative work.

Now this is not because, contrary to what my mother might tell you, I am afraid of a bit of graft. It is because it seems in the last few years to have genuinely come to mean “ugly” at best, and “total and utter garbage” at worst. Seriously.

“These are the hard-working ads”.
“This is the more hard-working part of the task”.
“I see that as more of a brand project. This needs to be more hard-working”.

People used to misuse the terms “tactical” and “direct” in the same way. But I’ve observed that this more modern phenomenon is more insidious and infinitely more dangerous in the pursuit of effective creative work.

I was always taught by my rather outspoken and occasionally foul-mouthed Gran that hard work was a good thing. But in the case of the industry it appears to have taken on the meaning of something that we should hide away, rush through or not take much notice of. The “hard-working” ads are treated like some embarrassing dribbling relative who only gets wheeled out once a year on Xmas day.  We are constantly asked to ignore our instinct, training, experience and logic in order to look the other way whilst ugly, bad work is created because it is (only) “the more hard-working ads”.

Now I might be mad but I would argue that if you want something to work hard (or even just work) then making it shit is not a good idea. As I think I’ve said before, a lot of personal experience and observation in night clubs of the early '90s taught me that if you want to attract someone it is best to be good-looking and attractive.

I’ve seen - literally - books and books of evidence that prove that creatively interesting, aesthetically pleasing and carefully crafted work is more commercially effective. But I haven’t seen so much as a sentence that proves the opposite.

I recently re-read Feldwick’s incredible book ‘The Anatomy of Humbug'. If you haven’t read it then immediately stop reading my nonsense and go and buy a copy. Seriously, do it now. But if you have read it then you know from Claude Hopkins to Rosser Reeves no one has ever suggested that doing ugly, bad ads is a good idea. Let alone a commercially effective one.

It is totally contradictory and counter-intuitive. Where is it written or proved that doing ugly, rubbish ads works better than doing attractive, good ones?

• “We’ve only got one shot at this” so… make it a bit rubbish?
• “We’re under commercial pressures” so…make it a bit rubbish?
• “This need to sell” so….make it a bit rubbish?

I’d argue that logic (and basic common sense) would suggest the very opposite:

• If you’re under serious commercial pressure, do something good
• If you want people to take action, provoke them to do so with something interesting and impactful
• If you’ve only got one shot, aim for a bullseye

Martin Wiegel from W+K Amsterdam recently wrote that we should all spend 2016 “saying no to crap”. Here, here. But I’m arguing from more of a commercial imperative than a creative sensibility.

Everyone from Brainjuicer to Les Binet will prove to you that being creatively interesting and original is the most commercially effective thing you can possibly do as an advertiser. You can’t bore people into buying from you. But also I’d argue you’re unlikely to get them to buy from you either by offending their eyes with ugly, cluttered crap.

Creatively brilliant work is the hardest working work there is.

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