Are we having fun yet? Yep.

So far, so good. Tangelo Ideas is fun.

Some of my longtime friends in the industry, and some of my clients (and certainly my reps) have asked me why, just why, I wanted to open an agency. After all, directing is fun, and the pay's not shabby. An agency will be a ton of work. An agency will be hard.

Yeah. And fun.

The first reason Tangelo Ideas had to exist: Nobody was going to do everything I wrote about in Use A Stick. But somebody had to.

The second reason: read The Universal Jerk, a post I wrote about a month ago.

But the third, and probably most important, reason is: Fun.

I have fun when I'm thinking differently than anyone else. I have fun when I'm making advertising I'm proud of, and that sells lots of stuff for my clients. And - no surprise here - the thinking differently part leads to the rest of it. As a director, you get to do that sometimes. But not all the time. Sometimes you're just cleaning up messes. Sometimes you see things that could be so much stronger - but won't, because, ultimately, it's somebody else's baby. Unfortunately, it all too often looks just like all the other babies out there, no matter what you do.

I'm no Pollyanna. I've been here before. I know things can, and will, get ugly from time to time. But it seems Tangelo Ideas has a different enough story to tell, that the kinds of clients we want to listen... want to listen. They want some of the new thinking we're bringing to the table. That's encouraging. Encouraging is fun.

Plenty of people have told me that clients don't want new thinking. They just want to do what they're doing. Truth is, we don't want those clients. The real truth is, the people we really want to work with aren't "clients" at all. They're revolutionaries. Big scale, little scale - doesn't matter. The ideas matter.

And that's what's so fun.

technorati tags: Advertising Marketing Creative

Comments

[olivier blanchard]

Amen!

[DUST!N]

Glad to hear some ENCOURAGING words! Hopefully ugly won't show it's head anytime soon.

All the best.