Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp explains why he didn’t get round to writing this till long after the cows came home.

You’ll be less than astonished to hear that generally speaking, creative people prefer to work on projects where they think they’re likely to be able to do something brilliant – preferably, of course, something brilliant and award-winning.

But there’s one kind of creative project where, despite the fact that there’s every intention and opportunity to win awards, creative people still dive for cover like grouse on 11th August when a brief comes in and, if nevertheless cornered and forcibly briefed, will procrastinate, delay, avoid, evade and, let’s be honest, just plain refuse to do a scrap of work until long after the cows have come home, been milked, watched an evening’s television and gone upstairs to bed.

Any ideas what kind of potentially-award-winning briefs are treated so churlishly? No? I’ll tell you: it’s house jobs.

By this, I mean creative projects of one sort or another on behalf of the agency itself. And to say that projects of this sort are at the bottom of the pile would imply an infinitely much higher level of priority than is actually the case. As a rule, they’re so far below the bottom of the pile that you’d need a big yellow JCB complete with back-hoe to unearth them.

I don’t suppose we’re any worse (or, sadly, any better) than any other agency in this regard, but just to give you a few examples:

1. We claim that this very publication, the Invisible Brand, is published three times a year. That’s the theory. The reality is, it’s never appeared more than twice.
2. I’m delighted to say that as of today, our website now contains a first-class selection of our creative work (check it out, if you like, on www.tangible-financial.co.uk. But I’m not quite so delighted to admit that compared to our original timetable, which may have been a tad optimistic, I make it 103 days late.
3. And then of course there was the rebrand. In the last Invisible Brand, I proudly introduced our new name, Tangible Financial, and identity. I said how pleased I was that we weren’t using our postmerger “transitional” name, cchm:ping, any more. What I didn’t say was that the “transitional” identity was supposed to last “from six to nine months” and actually survived for just a shade under three and a half years.

So what’s this all about? Are the projects unusually hellish? Is this talk of creative awards all hot air? I don’t think so. The Invisible Brand, for example, has won more than half-a-dozen creative awards over the last few years, and our agency brochure actually achieved the supreme accolade of inclusion in the creative bible, the D&AD Annual, a year or two ago.

But still, there is a reason. In the perception of the creative people, there’s something getting in the way. An obstacle which, if only it could be cleared, would leave them free to get on with the house job – but an obstacle which, time and again, proves obstinately hard to clear.

What is this obstacle? It’s client work. Real work, for real clients, for real deadlines. And surprisingly, but I hope you’ll agree rather touchingly, our creative people, and pretty much everyone else, always put it first.