Advertising Horror Stories

Hey everyone, let’s tell advertising horror stories! I’ll go first.

I was working for a great company on a campaign that was still in the creative strategy phase. Direction, creative approach, you know the drill. Long before this fateful night, I had planned a cross-country vacation that was quickly approved. The trip was only for a few days. But as we got closer to my first day of PTO in months, it became clear that I was leaving for vacation on the same day as a big client meeting. The meeting was pretty high level and I was told not to change my flights, but to take my vacation as long as I worked on the campaign until I had PTO.

Everyone working on this campaign — the creative directors, strategy, production — was happy with where we were going. That is until the creative directors finally showed the work to their bosses who decided that it needed to be first re-worked entirely, and then blown out again as proof of concept. Strategy, scripts, print ads, deck design, literally the only thing they liked from the campaign was the font and the hashtag. And they wanted the whole thing shown at the meeting the next morning. So we all got to work. It was 4pm and I was set to get on a plane at 7:30 the next morning.

So we worked and worked and presented work internally that got feedback and needed re-working. It was midnight and we were working. 2am and we were still working. I was getting nervous about my upcoming flight. Finally at 5am (after 17 hours of straight work), I was told that if I needed to, I could leave EARLY (emphasis on the fact that everyone else was still going to continue to work). I rushed home, threw some clothes in a suitcase and went straight to the airport.

I had been hoping to sleep on the plane, but I had the middle seat, next to someone who had never flown before and was really freaked out, AND there were a ton of storms over the midwest. It was a very turbulent flight and I spent the majority of it reassuring this poor woman next to me that the bumps were normal and it didn’t mean that our flight was going to crash. When I finally landed at my destination, I went straight to the hotel and passed out for about 10 hours. That, plus the time change plus travel equaled one day of PTO and I only had two more before I had to fly all the way back. And in my sleep-deprived packing state, I only packed half of the things I needed to and had to buy a lot of necessities once I arrived at my destination.

When I finally got back in the office and checked in on my team, they changed the campaign even more from where it was when I left. Was that sleepless night all for nothing? It certainly seemed so at the time.

If you read that story and thought, “That’s nothing! One time, I…” please pause for a moment. Let’s reflect on how messed up this industry is that we place so much value on “the work” and so little on human life.

We’re not creating a vaccine for COVID-19. We’re not even inventing a Sham-Wow. We’re making things that people actively try to not look at most of the time. Why does working in advertising come at such a heavy mental cost for the people who work in it?

This tweet was circulating a few days ago and I really had an issue with how this information is contextualized. In advertising today, we’re pitching more than ever. We’re always trying to win more of our clients’ businesses and make more work. But the problem here is the agencies, not the clients.

If we were sitting down to dinner and I asked you to grab me a napkin from the kitchen and you returned with a complete formal place setting, why would you get mad at me for only using the napkin that I originally asked for?

Clients, on the other hand, have also gotten used to this over-pitching and have been known to say things like, “Where’s the big idea that really knocks my socks off?!” to a banner campaign.

While the battle rages between client expectations and agency over-pitching, the real losers are the agency employees. The “boots on the ground” who are stuck re-writing fake headlines on a fake Facebook post that will promote a fake Coachella-like concert series we’re trying to convince Cadillac to host (spoiler alert: they hated the idea in the first place and now they have to sit through 10 more pages of fake work to sell the idea).

The whole experience is dehumanizing. It’s dehumanizing to have your two days-off taken away without warning because of client feedback. To work so many hours on something that’s just going to get killed. To skip therapy appointments because you’re just too busy with work to take care of your mental health. To be told that you can “sleep when you’re on PTO.” Work is meant to pay for our lives… when did it become our lives?

The intense number of hours we work in advertising has become a hazing ritual for the industry. When one generation gets to management roles, they treat the next generation with the same lack of regard for humanity that they were treated with. They say things like, “good work shouldn’t be easy” and “you kids today have it so easy, when I was your age…” It’s become a self-destructive cycle that ends with mental health issues for the workers and the employers getting richer. But here’s a foosball table to make work more fun!

This is a cycle that must be acknowledged before it can be broken. We need to recognize when we’re being tough and when we’re just being unreasonable. To make a commitment to our employees over our clients. We need to learn how to treat our employees like real human beings instead of machines that can be worked and worked until they can’t work anymore.

In my example, it was probably right of the bosses to put the brakes on the project if they were unhappy with the direction it was going in. It made the work stronger and calling it out was their job. But that check-in should have happened sooner in the project. Or the meeting should have been moved to make time to get the work right. Or the expectations for what was presented in the meeting should have changed.

The solution was not to try to get 3 weeks of work done in one night. We’d already worked a full day, yet the leadership team had no problem telling us to keep working for another 10+ hours with little regard to our mental and physical health. We were also all salaried employees, so we weren’t paid for those extra hours either.

This kind of story might be normal in advertising, but it shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t be asking people to give up their lives to sell speakers or burgers or cell phones or sneakers.

We need to stop acting like we’re better than other people just because we’ve been able to put up with the bullshit for long enough to start bullshitting someone else.

To every single person with even a smidge of power in advertising: I ask you to reflect your own horror stories and think about how you would have approached them differently if you had the power. You can’t change the past, but if you make it through the next few years in advertising, there might be a way to make this a slightly better place for the future.