Advertising creatives are a notoriously fickle bunch. We spoke to several to come up with the surefire ways to land on their bad sides.
2. Start talking about metrics and analytics.

3. Go into excruciating detail about RTB, DSPs, SSPs and DMPs.

4. Show them a media plan spreadsheet.

5. Let them know that the client cancelled the campaign after they spent a full holiday weekend working on it and now there is new one to get started on ASAP.

6. Ask them to make the logo bigger.

7. Have them push around at least one ad element by two pixels after “final client approval.” Do that four times.

8. Proclaim metaphors are for sissies.

9. Tell them that media is more important to performance than creative and then show them empirically.

10. Take away their Mac and make them work on a PC.

11. Insult their black-rimmed glasses.

12. Tell them that the concept is too derivative of previous advertising concepts or executions.

13. Put them on the phone with a client.

14. Shoulder surf.

15. Critique their work in front of them to a client.

17. Ask if they work in PowerPoint.

18. Put them on a B2B account.

19. Tell them they’d be better off crossing over to the brand side.
20. Change the office dress policy to “business casual.”

Image via Shutterstock
More in Marketing
Cannes Briefing: The AI search crisis everyone’s talking about at Cannes is actually about brand coherence
Cannes search panic, decoded: it was never about search,
Amazon’s latest ad format offers a glimpse of advertising’s agentic future
Amazon’s Alexa+ agentic ads bring advertising into AI shopping conversations, raising questions about paid versus organic visibility.
Cannes Briefing: Cannes is selling AI transformation. Off stage the talk is about the bill
The quiet part of the AI conversation at Cannes: what it actually costs

