By Ben Lambert

Contradictions

SCA is brilliant, seeing next year’s intakes SCABs makes me envious of the journey they are about to embark on. I’d love to do it again, I think I need to.

But there’s one big problem with SCA, and to be fair it’s a problem with the industry.

Contradictions.

The school is blessed with the amount of talent we get to learn from, the issue is they all have an opinion, and they are all different.

Having ran on the book crit treadmill these last weeks we’ve really learnt this:

“Love it”
“Hate it”
“Really nice insight”
“You’ve completely missed the mark boys”

Just a small selection of advice.

It’s showing, as always, in all the Cannes predictions:

“We need to award ads that actually sell”
“It’s all about making the world a better place with our communications”

Just last week we were told that a book at last year’s Cream awards scored an 8, two 10’s and a big fat 0. These opinions aren’t just slightly different, they can be polar opposites.

But this doesn’t have to be a mind fuck, it just means you have to be decisive. You have to set your sights on your goal and in a militant manner march towards it.

It was only last week Alex and I decided what work we wanted to be doing, and where we wanted to do it.

But immediately it’s given us a vision for our book. It’s given us direction and drive.

Better late than never.

And even this new direction has contradicted other advice.

“You should have a portfolio for each agency, tailor made for each creative director”

But as we are discovering and as Mikey wrote a few days back, you need to do the work you want to do. A book isn’t just a collection of work, it’s character, it’s personality, it’s you on a page.

It’s why when we make ads we have a specific target audience to get under the skin of. Without a demographic to have a conversation with, we shout our message to everyone, and no one listens.

Our goals need to be single minded, not just our ads.