No Time To Be An Idiot

When I got into advertising back in 1992, I was, for lack of a better term, an idiot. And, if you had asked me if I was an idiot, I would have agreed, even though I probably would have just blushed and said “uh… what?”

I was 22 years old and hadn’t seen very many things. I was good at writing, thank the universe (and the taxpayer-funded Union, NJ school system) and had the knack of how to make ads (or “concept”), thanks to my teachers and classmates at the Fashion Institute of Technology, but I was still an idiot.

I was just this big, dumb clump of clay with a thinning head of hair that shuffled onto the NJ Transit train every morning and then up 8th avenue to Ogilvy (Direct) and sat at a desk and went to meetings with people twice and three times my age who knew what they were doing.

They had stories. One had written the best-pulling letter in American Express history. It was the letter that began “Frankly, the American Express Card isn’t for everyone…” My creative director was a woman named Claire who was probably close to seventy and had been writing copy since they used typewriters and would scold me for every little back punctuation mark and lazy sentence.

Claire knew I was an idiot. But she suffered my awful copy and groaned at my puns and, every now and then, gasped at a clever turn as I sat there on her couch just wishing I was at Goldsmith Jeffrey or Wieden & Kennedy but also knowing I had to learn how to not be an idiot before I could even hope to get to a place like that. It was part of her job to suffer me. To teach me. And she did. Even though I couldn't appreciate it at the time.

Even when I did go on to Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners and Chiat New York and BBDO, I still felt like an idiot. Watching Ty Montague captivate a room at JWT or David Lubars talking about what clients want or Eric Silver arguing with Ari Weiss over what was funny and what wasn’t. Watching Cliff Freeman, in his Texas drawl, telling the editor exactly how to make a cut five times funnier. Those were all moments when I was just able to sit there and watch craft happen. That’s what I was doing watching Claire rewrite my copy.

I miss watching people work. I miss being in an office with people smarter than me. I'm freelancing now and working with people on Zoom is good but nothing beats the in-between moments, when you'd really learn just by watching. It upsets me that this generation of creatives may not get the chance to be that moron. Just watching. The idiot sitting in the room with mouth open watching someone with decades on them show them how it’s done and thinking...

“I’m an idiot.”