Who'd be a Creative Director?

Every year they come...

The eagle-eyed youths straight out of Bucks desperately looking for a job. The advertising overspill. The ones without the estuary accents, expensive clothes and fancy haircuts. The DM creatives of the future. Personable kids who, for some reason or another, have wanted to do this shit since they left school.

These are people who will work for 6 months on an HSBC brief for absolutely no pay whatsoever. Who will commute from Bournemouth so that they may one day earn the privelege of making a mailpack for less money than your Mum makes at Tesco.

Every year they come and sit among us. Working their twats off.

I love them. Because they are following a dream. These kids are full of talent and they don't want to become investment bankers. They want to think and have fun.

They don't want to wear suits, be bossed around or work a strict 9-to-5. They don't want to be divorced from their labour, suck cock or become the kind of general corporate fucktard that so defines the southern middle class.

And good luck to them.

But ... I bet 90% of them harbour some desire to eventually become a Creative Director.

Why is it that we go through hell to try and avoid getting a real job only to give up all the priveleges as soon as the prospect of a fancy title comes along?

No sooner do we finally get our feet under a desk where we can enjoy ourselves, free from responsibility, accountable to nothing other than our work, than we give it all up.

We run towards a world of meetings, and dinners, and being nice to people we hate. A world of costs and profitability and management and taking terms like "time famine" seriously. A world where we have no choice but to take marketing seriously, or learn to lie like a pro.

We lose our cynicism priveleges. We start to BELIEVE THE HYPE.

Why the U-Turn in our lives?

The obvious answer, I suppose is "money". But considering you can earn a good whack as a senior creative, it can't be the be all and end all. I suppose you get to call yourself a Creative Director. But of what? A Creative Director of DM?

Okay. No problem.

Being a Creative Director is a great opportunity to develop talent and stand up for work. If you do it right, you can be held in high regard by the people you led for the rest of your life. I'm not really knocking the job. It's very credible and very difficult.

But that's not the point of this post

The question remains. If we wanted all the money, meetings, bullshit and arse-kissing - why did we not go in for a more corporate job to start with? Why are there not more senior creatives doing the work and then going home to learn how to play the sitar or something?

Are we hypocrites? Or is it just human nature to want to climb the mountain?