HIGH WIDE & HANDSOME on AdAge.com

In his fourth arti­cle for Adver­tis­ing Age, our chief cre­ative offi­cer explains how the empha­sis ad agen­cies place on port­fo­lios is doing every­one a disservice. 

Watch­ing Mad Men a few weeks ago, I was both­ered by a scene in which an art direc­tor, refer­ring to a planned pub­lic­ity stunt on behalf of an agency client, asked an all-too famil­iar ques­tion: How am I going to put this in my book? When the most recent episode began with an aspir­ing copy­writer pre­sent­ing his book to a dis­in­ter­ested Don Draper, it fur­ther rein­forced my frus­tra­tion with the impor­tance our indus­try places on portfolios.

My expe­ri­ence with the process began in 1995 when I grad­u­ated from a small state col­lege in New York and decided to pur­sue a career as a copy­writer. After a few infor­ma­tional inter­views, I quickly dis­cov­ered the sense of utter worth­less­ness that came with not hav­ing a “book.” A book, I soon learned, was syn­ony­mous with a port­fo­lio, which, from what I could tell, was an anti­quated term for an expen­sive case that con­tained over­sized, lam­i­nated, felt-backed prints of ads that had never been pro­duced. Of the sev­eral thou­sand words of wis­dom I was able to extract from the hand­ful of cre­ative direc­tors who were kind enough to meet with me, “spec” and “book” seemed to account for nearly half.

After nine months of rejec­tion, I landed a job at a small agency in Syra­cuse. It wasn’t my pal­try spec book that enabled me to secure the posi­tion, but rather an assign­ment given to me by the shop’s cre­ative direc­tor. He was the first depart­ment head who seemed more inter­ested in my thought process than my lack of a mono­grammed metal case. Naively, I thought the days of obsess­ing over my book were behind me; in real­ity, they had just begun.

At the time, port­fo­lio schools were begin­ning their rise to promi­nence. My first two years of real-world expe­ri­ence were, in the eyes of most cre­ative direc­tors, dwarfed by the two years of out­put that recent port­fo­lio school grad­u­ates could dis­play: books filled with spec ads for indi­ges­tion reme­dies, con­tra­cep­tives, ath­letic shoes and snack foods. My work for the number-two man­u­fac­turer of elec­tri­cal out­lets and switches was, by all accounts, less com­pelling. It appeared that if I wanted to advance my career I would have to afford myself all the com­pet­i­tive advan­tages enjoyed by port­fo­lio school graduates.

In the years that fol­lowed, I met count­less cre­atives who also feared that their books—filled with real work for real clients— would limit their career oppor­tu­ni­ties. Con­se­quently, our col­lec­tive efforts began to shift from doing what was best for our agency and its clients to doing what was best for our books. We rushed through full-day photo shoots in the hopes that there would be time to sneak in a shot for a spec ad. We sped through com­mer­cial edits so there would be ample oppor­tu­nity to cut a longer ver­sion for our reels. We tore through client work so we could tend to spec cam­paigns for famous brands or local bars. And when we had ideas that didn’t involve tra­di­tional forms of media, we asked our­selves the same ques­tion Peggy’s part­ner did: “How are we going to put this in our book?” After all, we’d been trained to believe that our expe­ri­ence had no redeemable value if it didn’t fit neatly in our port­fo­lio cases.

Five years into my career, I real­ized that my pur­suit of the book that would get me a posi­tion at a big-time agency had deprived me of learn­ing the skills I would need to actu­ally suc­ceed at such a job. I decided it was time to stop build­ing a book and start build­ing the knowl­edge I would need to sus­tain a career.

In the decade since, that deci­sion has repeat­edly been val­i­dated. Not sur­pris­ingly, when I began focus­ing on what was best for my clients, the work was more fre­quently approved and more fre­quently pro­duced. In the process of cre­at­ing more real-world cam­paigns, I learned all the things that get over­looked when doing spec work—things that impact how a tar­get audi­ence other than agency cre­ative direc­tors responds to advertising.

Unfor­tu­nately, cre­atives today con­tinue to be obsessed with—and cor­rupted by—their books (which, of course, are now web­sites). And it’s an obses­sion that con­tin­ues to be counter-productive to cre­atives, agen­cies and clients. The good news: we have the abil­ity to change that behav­ior. All we have to do is start pri­or­i­tiz­ing the steak over the sizzle.

My eight years as a cre­ative direc­tor have con­vinced me that there’s no cor­re­la­tion between the qual­ity of a creative’s web­site and his or her abil­ity to con­tribute to an agency and its clients. In fact, of all the free­lancers I’ve hired, the ones with the best books have often been the least capa­ble. Per­haps that’s why they’ve invested so much time erect­ing a façade of talent.

I’m not impressed by an art director’s Flash intro, and I couldn’t care less that a cre­ative has shot with a famous direc­tor or been included on a long list of cred­its for some­thing that won a Gold Lion. What gets my atten­tion is an art direc­tor or copy­writer who can talk about a client’s busi­ness: shift­ing media strate­gies to reach new cus­tomers; repo­si­tion­ing a brand in response to cat­e­gory trends; decreas­ing the over­all cost of an acqui­si­tion. Sure, I love stun­ning typog­ra­phy and a clever head­line as much as any­one; but they have no value in this busi­ness unless they’re part of a thought­ful response to a brief.

Admit­tedly, many of the well-rounded, busi­ness savvy cre­atives I’ve described have mediocre web­sites; but often it’s because their port­fo­lios are not their top pri­or­ity. I recently spoke to a cre­ative direc­tor friend who’s look­ing for a new job. In my 15-year career, he’s among the smartest and most tal­ented peo­ple with whom I’ve worked. “How’s the search going?” I asked. “Not well,” he replied. “I’ve been told by numer­ous ECDs that I need to hire a stronger web designer for my site.” I refuse to accept that his tal­ent will be dis­missed in favor of can­di­dates who count a pol­ished web­site among their top qual­i­fi­ca­tions. After all, it’s the per­son, not the web­site, that an agency hires. If you agree, and you’d like the con­tact infor­ma­tion for the best avail­able cre­ative direc­tor I know, send me an email. I don’t know the URL for his online port­fo­lio, but I’d be happy to give you his phone number.