The entrepreneurial spirit of creatives. Or lack thereof.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMIAMI.COM

  • What is it with your average creative that he -or she- whines, kicks, screams and throws tantrums yet he -or she- rarely has the rocks to start his or her own agency?
  • How many agencies in America were founded by creatives?
  • How many agencies in the US Hispanic market were founded by creatives?
  • With some exceptions, even in cases in which a creative is a member of the founding partnership, he or she is usually a junior partner.
  • Ok, let’s not even call them agencies since, as we all know, an agency by definition is an entity that creates ad campaigns AND buys media.
  • By this logic, only a handful of real agencies remain on this planet: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and that’s about it.
  • So, how many creatives do you know that have had the cojones to found their own creative boutiques in the US Hispanic market?
  • I don’t have official stats but I can tell you off the top of my head that the number is staggeringly low.
  • How can you call yourself a creative while punching your card every morning at a multinational corporation?
  • What is holding you back?
  • The high salaries?
  • Really?
  • How come?
  • Creative department salaries have been declining steadily throughout the last decade or so.
  • Is it the comfy life of subsidized travel & entertainment?
  • You think so?
  • I beg to differ, creatives are rarely granted generous expense accounts.
  • I have a theory though: creatives hate the pressure of real responsibility.
  • They hate to be CEOs because it forces them to make the tough decisions.
  • Plus, creatives hate to wear the “salesman” hat.
  • Or saleswoman.
  • Most creatives neither want to play the bad cop nor the good cop.
  • They find it demeaning and cringe-inducing.
  • As opposed to the purity of locking themselves up in a room to shoot the breeze, create ideas, play ping pong and complain.
  • Hence the cycle of self-sabotage that prevents creatives from venturing out by themselves or reaching the rarefied atmosphere of the CEO suite.
  • If you add to the equation the time-consuming ego trip of creating truchos to win awards, most creatives’ careers enter a cycle of inexplicably self-fulfilling irrelevance.
  • How odd.
  • Creatives are supposed to be charismatic, charming sociopaths with the uncanny ability to separate clients and investors from their hard earned money.
  • Trust me, it takes one to know one.
  • We need to start putting our money where our mouths are, folks.
  • The little money there’s left, that is.
  • Pronto.
  • We can break free of this karma.
  • Go find a client &/or an investor and set up shop asap.
  • Time’s running out.
  • Every single day you procrastinate will make the whole venture harder.
  • Your mortgage will grow.
  • Your kids will grow.
  • This is ‘merica, folks.
  • The best place in the friggin’ world to start a business.
  • And sell it.
  • Only to start another business.
  • And sell it again.
  • If you read my columns with a certain frequency -or if you know me in person- you know that, even though I am -or was- a copywriter by trade, I consider myself first & foremost an adman and a businessman.
  • Moreover, if you read my columns with a certain frequency -or if you know me in person- you know that I rarely am one to wrap myself in my home country’s flag (that’d be Argentina).
  • Quite the opposite.
  • But I can tell you one thing: all the hot agencies in Argentina were founded by creatives.
  • Same thing in Brazil (no need to list them).
  • To a lesser extent the same is true about Spain and México (anónimo and Beker come to mind in México, Sra. Rushmore in Spain).
  • Aren’t we US Hispanics supposed to be hard charging entrepreneurs?
  • Let me tell you a little story.
  • When I landed in America back in 98, in NY to be precise, I had two pretty firm job offers.
  • The first one was from Y&R, to work on the Sony Ericsson account.
  • Y&R handled the account across the three Americas and they needed a bilingual copywriter.
  • The second offer was from Conill which, as y’all know, was & is Saatchi’s US Hispanic arm.
  • Both offers were quite tempting for a number of reasons.
  • Y&R was one of Madison Avenue’s most venerated cathedrals and I was going to be a part of a very cool creative team led by Nelson Martínez and Randy Van Kleeck.
  • These guys were the rising stars of the agency, in charge of all the cool clients and new business pitches.
  • Nelson Martínez, by the way, colombiano from Jersey, was not only a super nice guy and a brilliant art director: he was the youngest senior VP in the history of Y&R.
  • The pay was not amazing but it was reasonable.
  • The second offer was tempting too: Conill’s offices were located at the very cool sci fi building Saatchi occupies at the very cool intersection of Houston and Hudson.
  • And my boss was going to be a good friend of mine from Argentina, Mariano Favetto, a super nice guy too, who later left to run Saatchi operations in Toronto and Paris.
  • I was torn.
  • I needed advice.
  • So I called another then friend of mine who at the time was working for Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Oregon.
  • His response was as follows: “Do NOT take the job in the Hispanic market. It’ll be very hard to do good creative work, you will never win a decent award, it will be a dead end for your portfolio and your creative career.”
  • From a purely creative careerist perspective, he was absolutely right.
  • The US Hispanic market in the late 90s was not the best showcase to come up with award-winning work.
  • Funny thing is, this same guy who advised me to stay away from a US Hispanic market job, moved to Miami to open his own award-winning US Hispanic ad agency a year later.
  • See, what he did NOT tell me during our telephone conversation is that the then subpar creative output of the US Hispanic market was the very reason it was a superb business opportunity.
  • Brilliant son of a bitch.
  • Motherfxxxxr taught me one big lesson in business.
  • What choice did I end up making, you might ask?
  • Due to immigration reasons, I took an offer from BBDO Miami.
  • At the time I did not have the papers to start my own business.
  • I had to wait a few years.
  • I’ll tell you the rest of the story some other time.

 

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