Join us Sept. 14-16 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders
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
‘Inside, most of them are dumpster fires’: Confessions of a frustrated indie agency ad exec
From surprise corporate card cancellations to phantom return-to-office mandates, one former indie agency exec talks about the chaos behind the scenes.
The case for and against the ‘programmatic-ification’ of the creator economy
Creator marketing is racing toward AI ad-stack automation, but risks turning trust into inventory.
Digiday+ Research: The marketers’ 2026 guide to retail media marketing, including The Home Depot, Milani Cosmetics and Tinuiti
As the retail media landscape continues to evolve, marketers are rethinking where they invest, how they measure success and which retail media networks deserve a larger share of budget.

