Success has many fathers, and in the ad industry it has even more.
Anytime there’s a successful campaign, pretty much everyone even tangentially related to it tries to get in on the credits. (There are probably 200 people who claim involvement in Subservient Chicken and Shave Everywhere.) That way the piece can go in their book, helping them land a new job, make more money, etc. There’s little way of actually checking on this, other than talking to those involved in the efforts.
Look no further than the now-famous Oreo Super Bowl blackout tweet. This was, after all, a tweet with seven words and a photo. As we’ve pointed out, it apparently took 13 people to accomplish this feat. Recognition for the full team is a solid move in awards season. But it doesn’t stop there.
Now, Fast Company is out with its 100 Most Creative People list, a grab bag of folks of all sorts that, in the words of Fast Company editor David Lidsky, are “doing cool shit.” It’s a broad criteria. Two agency creatives, Jill Appelbaum and Megan Sheehan, got on the list at No. 7, ranking above Ai Weiwei, in recognition of their work on Oreo at Draft FCB. The blurb gives the duo oblique credit for the Super Bowl tweet, even though they’d stopped working on the business by then. They’d done the creative for Oreo’s yearlong campaign that involved putting photoshopped images up on Facebook. The thinking goes that that effort “transformed” Oreo into a real-time brand, leading to the Super Bowl tweet.
As one agency exec remarked, “At this point, Orly Taitz might take credit.”
More in Marketing
Marketers may become part of the culture war — even if they didn’t intend to be
As consumers put brands’ advertising and marketing messages under a microscope, marketers have to be keenly aware of how anything they put out in the world could be interpreted — or misinterpreted.
How the writers of ‘DC Heroes United’ are building a transmedia bridge between gaming and TV
As gaming takes a central role in the rise of transmedia content, a team of writers is using DC Comics superheroes to demonstrate the benefits of direct interplay between a TV series and a video game.
Uncertainty over TikTok’s U.S. future splinters creators and agencies
With the possible removal of TikTok in the U.S. as early as January, creators and agencies fall on both sides of the issue: either believing it will happen or confident that the ban won’t go through in the end