On Sunsetting

Let's talk about Underemployment.

It's an affliction affecting many people of my age. Particularly if those people are employed in the creative aspect of an industry that was once noted for its creativity. 

I suppose I count myself among thousands who once created, developed and stewarded brands for Fortune 1000, 500 and even 100 companies, but now find themselves slogging through the mindless tasks and deliverable box checking associated with quote, performance marketing, unquote.

What kind of "performance" are we looking for when it's decided by the A/B testing that involves one headline with the word 'the' and a countering headline with the word 'a'? 

Is the difference between a pale orange background and a pale yellow background going to make a tinker's damn? 

Will it increase market share by .00000073% or .00000072%?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for efficiency. But where, my friends, is the efficiency in having monstrously large marketing departments dickering daily with CTA buttons or the mandated use of the Oxford comma? 

And when did creative decision-making get ceded to the crowd mentality and the make-or-break vote by the tall girl in Accounts Payable or the Night Watchman who always falls asleep at the end of the Jimmy Kimmel show?

It's enough to make a man who has already lost his hair, also lose his will to live. 

Hopefully those tedious days are in the rear view mirror. Lately I've been working on a couple of small projects that eschew the lizard portion of my brain and have tapped into the bigger, finely attuned lobes that require some actual thinking. The lobes right next to the atrophied ones that could at one time solve differential equations in three dimensions.

I'm sorry, but it's nice to hear a creative director tell me...

"Push this even further, make me a little nervous."

"Get back to me in a few days with...."

"Harken back to the late 90's and give me some of that classic Rich Siegel." 

You think I'm exaggerating, but I literally had a former client from ABC call me out of the blue for help on a Top Secret project he was working on. 

I went from being underemployed to overjoyed.

I would return to the drudgery of performance marketing and its incumbent dispiriting nature, should circumstances dictate and my day rate was fulfilled. Remember there is no way I'm ending up in a dirty nursing home. But it's been nothing less than a breath of fresh air to have someone tap me on the shoulder to discuss real work.

And not the picayune differences between an em dash and en dash.