If there are two lessons I learned from my mercifully brief time as a digital copywriter (read: eBay tweeter, bottled water Facebook status updater), they are that getting fired can be a good thing and that people who work in creative departments tend to screw around a lot.
Yes, the hours are long and the dress is casual–but agency creatives also spend a lot of time staring at the floor in meetings that they totally didn’t need to attend or sitting at their desks leaving comments on Gawker properties while pretending to come up with headlines for the new fast food client’s social campaign. Or so we hear.
The point here is that a couple of young, bored creatives really got into a side project, released this week, in which they made fun of dumb trade press listicles like this one, haha.
Lex Singer and Jesse Yowell, who are both McCann employees, obviously spent a fair amount of time creating their “500 Under 500” for the ad world, poking fun at both the industry’s general sense of self-importance and the lists created to reinforce it. They then proceeded to do the natural thing and set up tweets that mention each of the winners (they’re almost halfway through the list with 230 such tweets to date).
Does the fact that your friendly neighborhood agency spies–as well as many of our colleagues at Adweek–appear on this list have anything to do with us posting on it? Fucking duh.
But we do have to give these dudes credit for, say, calling Leo Burnett’s Gordy and Brian “Two rising stars who overcame the challenges of being white males in the industry,” picking the best possible picture of Droga5’s Ted Royer and crediting Pete Favat with “the kindest eyes we’ve ever seen.” Those were all from the first two pages, because that’s about as far as we could dive into the list this afternoon.
Now someone do this for media. Seriously–our industry doesn’t get slammed nearly as hard or as often as it should, which is probably because we all make so much more money than we deserve.
Oh, and did you know that Singer is the son of ad critic and former Adweek employee Barbara Lippert? Neither did we!