15 spots left to join us for the Digiday Publishing Summit

Join us Sept. 14-18 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders

SECURE YOUR SEAT

20 Surefire Ways to Anger Creatives

Advertising creatives are a notoriously fickle bunch. We spoke to several to come up with the surefire ways to land on their bad sides.

1. Make them work on banners.

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.

16. Defend the 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

Lifestyle brand Stanley 1913 adapts its marketing for the AI search era

The marketing it was doing worked well, but only for a human audience. The brand needed different approaches to ensure it was picked up by the AI platforms.

Walmart finally lets advertisers exclude certain search terms

Walmart Connect said it would give advertisers the ability to exclude specific search terms for sponsored-products campaigns through “negative keywords.”

Build or buy: Inside indie agency Mod Op’s AI infrastructure

Mod Op is betting that building its own AI infrastructure can deliver more value than simply licensing off-the-shelf tools.