The Futility of “Help!”

Another Reason Your Creative Team Went Quiet

Wolves, world-ending deadlines, “good friends” — only a few claims that will get you into trouble and things like theatre fires to avoid. All somehow begging.

A really good way to demoralize your creative team comes with a very simple ask: “Do whatever it takes. This is very important.” You see, for a creative team, this is a bit like “calling in the Marines.” The “suits” call, we gear up, and when we hit the beaches, we fight ’til the end, whatever the outcome. So, when the team is working in unison, generating ideas, making the spectacle, and ready to bail you out of whatever situation the brief has gotten you into — your call for “help” means we’re the team who won’t leave you behind and has a plan to keep you from failing. Your word has power. Use it wisely.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research shows that companies with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share.

The project had already spiraled out of control. A remote account team in the network had decided to take on a pitch without properly briefing Creative — instead, they only asked for a couple of visuals, disregarding the real needs of such a brief. The ask was complex and needed a strategic approach to bring an experiential objective to life. The “suits” decided to latch onto a client direction that, while appealing to the client because it was theirs, did little to actually get them a spot in the second round of this three-way race to win.

What happened is that the client liked the idea but sent the team back to the drawing board.

In traditional agency structures, it’s the account team’s job to work the entire account, translating client desires into a brief with strategy, then briefing the creative team who’ll have limited client contact outside of initial meetings and presentations. When resources are scattered, with different languages and agendas, communication is key. But honestly, transparency is even more important: just accept that on both ends of the call, despite the smiles, it’s all “fuck those guys” once it’s over. Of all the things that can screw up relationships, it’s the unspoken assumptions that do the most damage. Account teams are thinking about billable hours and how they’ll affect the budget and P&L, while creatives are thinking about the hours they might waste on a losing pitch. Creatives will fight tooth and nail to win, while the suits might celebrate success, but still see it as a loss due to budget constraints. Of course, losing is losing, no matter how you slice it. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to find a new line of work, one that isn’t built on ideas. A study published in the Journal of Advertising Research confirms this misalignment, finding that conflict between account management and creative teams is a common issue in agencies, often stemming from differing priorities and communication breakdowns.

A study by Fierce Inc. found that 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.

Many of us who’d seen this banana republic of a concept knew it would require some sort of incursion to bring order to things. The suits had gathered, seen that the other suits’ plan had little beyond some borrowed equity shininess, and the call came to bring the fight to our competition. Strategy, copy, schedules, insights, art, gathering of reels, and generation of sample animations began coming to life. Hundreds of messages were exchanged across borders with constant updates of shared documents. Then a message came from a previously silent suit who claimed they knew best. And “best” was a single page with a timeline — something that would be a given and not answer the client request for detailed, logical, and on-brand advancements from the first round. The request was clear: “Stop.”

Confirmations were made with those in this outpost office, along with an explanation making it clear that once the Marines turned the boats around, it would be too late to save the presentation, and the suits were on their own. Phone calls were exchanged, apologies made, and Creative had the weekend they’d planned to spend working back to themselves.

Amongst so many mistakes made by amateurs, this one is a big one — and not for the reason you might think. Sure, they’ll lose the pitch and probably get a stern lecture from the higher-ups, but what they’ve really lost is trust.

The suits, on saying “stop,” hoped the creatives’ feelings weren’t hurt. They weren’t. Creative professionals have a look of disarray to the outside but are in reality some of the most disciplined people in the chain. We know how much, how far, and exactly how long winning takes, and mostly when to calculate the costs of both winning and strategically losing. We don’t take it personally when you go against your own best interests. We get frustrated right up to the point of not caring. We’ll continue to answer the calls of help, but next time, you might not get the Marines, but a group of Scouts armed only with cookies and questions.

While the overarching points of this lesson are about trust, professionalism, and respect, the biggest might be in accepting what you don’t know and accepting the hands that can save you. The real lesson here is that it’s easy to think that there are people that care too much, but your real truth comes when they stop caring enough.

Google’s Project Aristotle research identified psychological safety as the most important factor in building high-performing teams. High-performing teams at Google had one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake.

In the end — a very long end — the little republic fell. It was the kind of fight where there was more talk about how well the battle was going than actually winning it. And that client’s idea that very much resembled one from a child’s party? It was too specific and off-brand for their company. Duh.

A study by Adobe found that companies that foster creativity are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers in terms of revenue growth.

Is there any bit of a happy ending to this little tale of wolves of the where and when breed or is this a story of many sequels like some bad airport novel? Different motivators and different individual goals make for tension, and once we place distance, cultures, language, and even levels of experience into the mix, it would seem that finding an agreement on how much value to place on something and a willingness to do anything to succeed is a good start. “Fuck those guys” usually comes from prior experience where somebody thought “overwhelming” force made the win feel like a loss to the suits, or somebody forgot that losing doesn’t actually lose much more than “face” if you didn’t have anything to lose anyway. But when we acknowledge these differences and work towards understanding, we create space for collaboration instead of conflict. The real lesson, don’t call the Marines when you just wanted to order some cookies.