Everyone thinks that working in advertising is like being in a fun factory. The reality is that it's much more factory than fun these days. The outsized personalities and outsized profits of my early days in the business have been homogenized, sanitized, processed, and downsized over the years -- and even more so by the current recession.
The day-to-day practice of advertising involves two under-staffed and under-siege bureaucracies slamming into each other as they create and produce mountains of marketing communications materials in a myriad of formats to satisfy the needs of regional, national, or global brands. Agencies and clients are risk-averse organizations focused on running high-volume production processes that are fast, cheap, and efficient. Young, eager, smart talent fuels this game where 85 percent of the time and effort is dedicated to cranking out stuff and just 15 percent is spent on strategic thinking, big ideas, and occasionally snappy, memorable, or effective ads.
Driving the ad game are a set of personality types that vaguely resemble those on "Mad Men" -- characters who can be counted to think, act, and talk in predictable ways under almost any situation. Agencies have traditionally attracted people with broad interests, short attention spans, and little ability or tolerance for corporate life. Iconoclasts, wise guys, alternative thinkers, smart alecks, frat boys, hippies, geeks, neurotics, and hot women have traditionally populated agencies. The cast remains mostly the same, though the intensity, texture, and range of behaviors have changed dramatically over the years.
As a follow-up to the recent look we took a predominant client-side personalities, here are five ad types you are sure to encounter, whether you are working in an agency or hiring one.
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