Something like a statement of intent

I've been an advertising copywriter for three years now, and in that time I've encountered a number of oddities in the way we do what we do, elephants in the room that I think cripple us as creatives and through us our clients, rendering engaging, persuasive work the exception rather than the rule.

There are too many factors at play to list exhaustively, among them industry-wide structural problems, the way the people who fill the various roles across the industry are incentivised and trained, and the ever-present individual ego. Not all of them are soluable. But the one thread that binds together all of the obstacles to effective communication I've encountered so far is sloppy thinking.

Too many of the presumptions we work from are unchallenged, too many of the concepts at play in our world are vague and amorphous. We don't make distinctions that need to be made, and I'm fairy sure we make some that aren't sustainable.

There will always be a part - perhaps a fairly large part - of our thought process as creatives that is unobservable and unquantifiable. That's as it should be. It's a big part of the fun. But there's more reasoning in our jobs than we let on, especially in the way we evaluate an idea once we've had it, and the ways we craft if from the initial glimmer to the finished product.

This blog, then, is to be my attempt to get my own head straight about what i think about what we do every day.