Argy Bargy

One of the least glamorous truths about advertising, is that so much of making it is people just arguing with one another.

People who don’t work in the ‘creative industries’ might imagine we spend our days coming up with catchy jingles or simply wandering around Shoreditch wearing Issey Miyake pleated trousers. But in reality, a remarkable proportion of the work involved in the creation of advertising consists of sitting in meeting rooms and arguing.

You might be arguing about the size of a logo, or whether the campaign should target twenty-five-year-olds instead of thirty-five-year-olds, or whether “Discover“ is a better verb than “Find“ on a slide, or whether the dog should be a Dachschund or a Pomeranian, or whether you should advertise on Spotify or on Youtube, or about whether any innumerable quantity of things should be done versus some other infinite number of possibilities that might also be done.

A first order effect here is that if you’re the sort of person who gets uncomfortable with disagreement, who likes everybody to be on the same page, rowing in the same direction, singing from the same hymn sheet or what-have-you, then advertising is a frankly terrible career choice.

Advertising fundamentally involves a process of having arguments. It features constant and incessant arguing. And the funny thing about it is that this isn’t a dysfunctional thing at all. It’s entirely by design.

This is because advertising is a creative industry.

Now, when people hear “creative industry” they tend to think about the more obviously creative bits of that industry. The scripts. The posters. Photography. The jingles. The muppets. The things that go out of the advertising agency and into the world and get seen by real people and are very tangibly ‘creative things’.

But the creativity starts a long time before any of that is even a twinkle in a copywriter’s eye.

Which customers should we target? Which problem should we solve? Should we make people laugh or make them cry? Should we spend the money on television or TikTok or some other media channel? Should we launch in spring or autumn or steadily build throughout the year? What features are distinctive about our product and warrant talking about?

Every one of these questions has dozens of plausible answers. None of the answers can really properly be proved in advance. Some people might claim they are ‘definitively correct’ answers to these sorts of questions, but those people are wrong.

So there are lots and lots of questions that go into making advertising, and those questions never have set answers, and answering those questions involves imagination and creative thinking.

The next thing you have to realise is that even though people imagine the hard part about creativity is coming up with ideas, that part is trivially easy. Having ideas is the default state.

Creativity, or at least the much harder and also more important part of creativity, is really about choosing between which of the many ideas are the right ideas. And doing it while those ideas still haven’t happened yet. David Droga’s famed ‘Box Method’ harnesses this to great effect, aim for quantity when having ideas, then aim for quality when choosing the ideas.

So you would probably say that the opposite sort of work to creative work is procedural work. Procedural work is wonderful because even though it’s very, very boring you don’t have to think about things too much or have any arguments when you are doing it.

If you’re wiring a plug, there is a right way and a wrong way to wire that plug. If you’re calculating payroll, there is a right answer and an illegal answer. Restaurants never need to have creative workshops about whether forks are the best cutlery to use for soup.

Procedure is knowing the agreed method and repeating it faithfully. Which means procedural work doesn’t require many arguments. If everyone already agrees on something, starting an argument is probably just annoying and likely not helpful.

Creative work is different because there isn’t a correct answer waiting at the back of a textbook or training manual. With creative work there are only possibilities. And the thing about possibilities is they inherently want to argue with one another.

Like I just said, having ideas is easy and anyone can do it. Getting down to the one best idea and getting everyone to agree to do it is at the diametric opposite end of the difficulty spectrum. Hard mode. Doom II Ultra-Nightmare. Arguments are going to happen.

So, the more creative an organisation becomes, the more creative the people in it, and the more creative those people are working, then the noisier this organisation gets. And this makes highly creative companies appear kind of dysfunctional to a passive observer who has wandered into them. People are always arguing about what to do, toes are being stepped on, things often get tense because possibility creates disagreement about which possibility is the best.

Now, this is a piece about the essential qualities of argument in the creative process, so it is a little bit weird to pivot into a discussion of children, but I am going to do that now to unpack the central thesis of this essay.

If you have kids, you’ve probably seen them invent games. Or maybe you can even remember this from your own childhood.

The magical thing about this process is that the rules evolve through disagreement. One kid will say that unicorns can’t fly, another will say they can fly, then another will clarify that they can fly if they have eaten magic berries, and then another kid will expand on this point by explaining that magic berries only grow during a full moon.

Most fascinating about this is that none of the disagreements ever cause much of a problem.

The game doesn’t grind to a halt because two children have different opinions about unicorn aerodynamics. In fact, the opposite thing happens. The disagreement is the mechanism through which the socially shared imaginary world gets built.

A hundred years ago, there was this Soviet psychologist, and he had a brilliant name; ‘Lev Vygotsky’, and Lev spent a great deal of time watching children play. Don’t worry though, it wasn’t in a creepy way or anything like that. Vygotsky was a sociologist.

Vygotsky noticed that children ‘negotiate’ imaginary worlds into existence. They’re not stepping into something predefined with set rules. Every game is more like a running improv about what the world is and what is in it and what can happen. Kids are rewriting the laws of physics in these imagined universes on the fly. Can dragons use an iPhone? Is the floor lava? Is this stick a sword? Or a Telescope? Or a magic wand? Or a snake covered in superglue and left to go hard?

The correct answers in this imagined world are completely crap. The floor is floor? Boring. The stick is a stick? Also boring. Dragons aren’t real? Boring. So correct answers are out, more important is having collectively accepted answers. And the game isn’t interrupted by these little arguments. The game is those arguments.

Let’s bring this back to advertising again, and here is my point.

Most of the problems you might see inside creative organisations stem from adults being uncomfortable with the collective disagreement negotiation process which children find perfectly natural.

And usually those adults become uncomfortable in one of two completely opposite ways.

The first group simply don’t like arguments. They’re peacemakers.

They’re forever trying to smooth things over. They want alignment, consensus, everybody pulling in the same direction, singing from the same hymn sheet and all the other metaphors. And sure, we all want that, but these people want it so badly they don’t want to ever venture out into the world of possibility, and therefore arguments, in case they can’t find their way back to agreement again. In the metaphor of the kids game, this would be one kid telling all the other kids that the floor isn’t lava, the floor is floor.

This is catastrophic if you’re trying to produce creative thinking.

If nobody disagrees, then nobody is properly exploring the landscape of possibility. Everyone is simply converging on the first answer that everybody can live comfortably with.

Then there is the second group, and when people wander into this group they develop the opposite problem.

They adore an argument. They’re quite happy for ideas to fight. The trouble is that for these people the idea has stopped being an idea and become their idea. So they want that idea, which they see as ‘theirs’ to be the one that wins.

The conversation is no longer about discovering the strongest possibility. It’s about proving they were the best idea-having-person in the process. So you’re not having a creative argument anymore. You’re now engaged in a territorial dispute. In the kid metaphor this would be like one kid saying that the stick is a sword and then beating some other kid with it until they accept that as the case.

I suppose what I’m really trying to say here is that arguments are only any use at all if everyone involved is trying to discover something, rather than defend something. The moment someone gets into this mindset of protecting their own idea, then you’ve stopped being creative and started doing politics.

Likewise, if everybody becomes so terrified of disagreement that they stop challenging one another altogether, you’ve also stopped being creative. You’ve simply agreed to stop looking.

You need people who are willing to argue that the floor is lava. You also need those same people to accept five minutes later that actually the floor is quicksand, because somebody else has just had a better idea.

Why this feels unnatural to adults is a bit of a mystery, but it’s completely obvious to children. When kids are making things up together, they’re not trying to win. They’re trying to keep the game alive. The disagreements are really just attempts to make the shared world a little bit more interesting.

Perhaps it’s because as adults we get much more fixated on being right, and we forget that being interesting is a much better strategy than being right. If you’re aiming for creativity at least.