Early in my copywriting career,

I had a very difficult client.

It was Canadian Airlines (RIP) and they were in the 'very hard retail' stage of their business cycle. It was the first time I'd ever heard the term "bums in seats", and Canadian Airlines needed as many bums in as many seats as possible.

I was working on a brief where the message was "12 flights a day to Chicago" and it was filled with rental car information, deals on hotels, and 'taxes not included' legal type out the wazoo.

There was, in other words, no way on God's green earth that this ad could be good.

Yet there is always that tiny little flicker of hope that lies in every creative person that thinks maybe, just maybe, you could squeeze something interesting through. That if you were just smart enough and persuasive enough, you might be able to get the client to bite on something interesting.

(NOTE: If you think that this is one of those stories where somehow, against all odds, I managed to do that, I didn't.)

I worked and worked and worked on doing something interesting, ignoring the mandatory "12 flights a day" headline and all the assorted extras. And sure enough, the client hated all of it. They also, to be honest, kind of hated me by association. I didn't know what to do. I needed to do better work for the sake of my career, but I also knew that this client was predisposed to hate anything but "12 flights a day".

Which is when something magical happened. Something that literally changed the trajectory of my career.

I gave up.

After banging my head against a wall for a year trying to get a tough client to buy something good on a tough brief, I took the "12 flights a day" brief and essentially regurgitated it into the ad they wanted. It took about 20 minutes - from brief to finished mockup. Just to show I was trying a little bit, I put something slightly cute in the body copy. Something like: "Only Air Jordan flies to Chicago more often." (Get it? It was the 90s and Jordan was crushing it with the Bulls.)

When I showed the client the ad, they were thrilled. Their relief was palpable. It was approved in about 10 seconds, and I got massive kudos for the "Air Jordan" bit. It was a completely terrible ad that everyone was delighted with. It looked a lot like this.

At this moment, you would be right to wonder how this changed my career.

Well, I believe that I mentioned that it took 20 minutes to do the Chicago ad. Which meant that I had 7 hours and 40 other minutes of an eight hour day to devote my energies to briefs that were opportunities to do something interesting.

My partner and I dashed off the "12 flights a day" ad before it was even 9:30am and our brains and schedules were then opened up for the rest of the day to devote to briefs and jobs that needed real creative thinking.

The thing is - you only have so much creative energy in any day.

And to use much of it against a brief that doesn't have the remotest chance of being good is a fool's exercise. The better plan is get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible, so you can then get to working and thinking about the thing that does have potential.

Or as a colleague of mine said when I told him this story not long after: "Yeah, well, you know what they say: If you have to eat shit, don't nibble." Right?

That advice ran completely counter to what I had been led to believe by well-meaning creative directors who had said things like "everything's an opportunity." That delusion was partly fed by that myth we'd all heard of the 'terrible brief that turned into a Cannes Gold Lion'. And sure, that has probably happened, but much like Halley's Comet has happened, I wouldn't count on seeing it tonight.

The reality is that in an age of web banners, snipes, display ads, and 100 social posts a week, everything is not an opportunity.

Sometimes, all it can ever be is "2 Flatbreads for $12" or "Kids eat free on Tuesdays" or (yup) "12 flights a day to Chicago".

My old creative partner Steve would say this to me when we had a few jobs going at the same time: "Ok, Job 1 will be, at best, a 4 out of 10. Job 2 could be a 9 or better. So we're going to go at Job 1 hard for two hours. Whatever we come up with is what we're showing the client. We're going to spend the rest of the week on Job 2 because that could be great."

It was creative triage - a way to manage the enormous amount of creative volume that every creative person has to deal with in the digital and social age.

But, you might say, what about the client on Job 1? If they're not getting your best thinking, aren't they getting ripped off?

No, because if the best a banner can ever be is a 4 out of 10, it doesn't need your best thinking. It barely needs any thinking. The client doesn't want or need anything more from that banner than the offer, the price point and the legal. So just spell it properly, lay it out neatly and professionally, and get it out the door.

But Job 2?

That one where the brief is: get people excited about flying again after two years of global lockdowns and travel restrictions.

There's a word for those kinds of briefs.

It starts with an "O".