Outsiders wanted

A closed shop is a phrase I remember from growing up in strike-crazy Britain.

It was a union-controlled workplace that never allowed any non-union or other affiliated worker to be employed. When I came into the ad world I found there was a reverse form of the closed shop in which people working in categories of advertising were not deemed capable of working on anything else.Those who worked on retail were only good enough to work on retail accounts and direct marketing creatives could only work on direct response business. FMCG (fast moving consumer goods –as opposed to slow moving consumer goods??) were never to go outside their world and so were creatives working on pharmaceutical accounts. The terms `above the line’ and `below the line’ defined areas as rigidly policed as the first class and steerage decks on the Titanic. No intermingling allowed. And then came the internet –thank you Al Gore. The opportunity to spill creatively into

this new world should have been like the hammers knocking down the Berlin Wall. But quite the opposite happened. Another closed shop set up. This time the division was between digital and traditional. Thirty-second dinosaurs versus the Web people. Anther first and second class caste system. It was like living in a bad B movie. To survive you had to understand both worlds, which

becomes intuitive, as the whole world has shifted to embrace all platforms all the time. 

Retirees are as conversant,if not more,than 16 year-olds on Facebook.  Now we creative workers consider ourselves `integrated’ because we think in ideas and apply the ideas to various platforms. The catchphrases come and go but   the important things remain constant. Creative ideas rule. Storytelling rules. Generating excitement rules. Because these truths are held to be self-evident a more encouraging trend has emerged. Now a lot of closed shops, those categories defined by insiders, are being invaded by outsiders. Agencies with beauty accounts, once seen as the domain of beauty specialists are opening up to having creatives with no category experience as they work to invent new ways of reaching a tired consumer. Healthcare agencies, which were once a secretive realm of code speaking illuminati are now admitting general market creative directors to breath fresh life into the work. Are these outsiders freshening up the gene pool of thinking or are they barbarians at the gates? They’re both.And both are good.