Computers

Computers blow. At least I wish they would. Now don’t get me wrong.

A Luddite I’m not. I have no philosophical objection to the advance of technology. In fact, I’m very fond of many recent high-tech devices. Furbys, for instance.

Computers, however, are problematic, for me in particular and the world in general. Let’s start with me. I am a moron. What is intuitive for everyone else is often barely within my grasp, or more likely, just beyond my grasp. Even when I do finally “get it”, I don’t get it for very long. This applies in every computerish arena:
Hardware -- Holy SCSI jumpers! I can’t figure out how to get stuff up and running, nor can I keep the terminology straight. Ten years working with computers and terms like “document”, “file”, “desktop” and “menu” still give me pause at times.

Software -- I can’t even figure out how to load the stuff half the time, to speak nothing of understanding the tutorial (a decidedly unfriendly term, as if someone already knows I need the extra remedial help of a tutor).
And particularly, the internet -- Once I finally decided I needed to get hooked up, it took me literally months of grappling with barriers -- those out there in what passes for the real world, and those of my own making. I tried America Online twice. Both times I got so fed up I cancelled them and wrote angry letters.

I signed on with a different whatever-you-call-these-companies that hook you up with the internet. They were cheaper. Of course, if you want any tech support, it’ll cost you per minute. What a phenomenal ripoff. So, though I can’t get online these days because the internet isn’t home or won’t answer or some such nonsense, I keep on paying my cheaper monthly fee for nothing, while refusing to compound this charge with an additional gouging at the hands of tech support. I told you I was a moron.

But not so much of a moron that I haven’t noticed the profound damage computers have done, not just to my psyche, but to Advertising. They’ve positively savaged the creative process. If you work on an Avid or in a recording studio, you may beg to differ. And, of course, you’re right too. In some creative arenas, computers have transformed the entire process in a good way. But when computers are bad for a process, they are horrid.

Like with Art Directors. For many of them, the computer is not a tool, like a set of markers. Rather, it is their brain. Instead of having an advertising idea involving an image that the Art Director has created using his imagination, too many ADs now rely solely on stock books, award books, a scanner and sophisticated, image-manipulating software. They shortcut the process, adapting or force-fitting some already-existing image rather than creating their own. This is what, more and more often, passes for the creative process. Beautifully executed nothing. And while it’s true this short-cutting process has been around forever, the computer has made it far easier, more commonplace, and somehow more “respectable”.

My friend Darch Clampitt has been working in an office lately with no computer in it. A young art director peered into his office the other day and, in genuine wonder, asked Darch, “ . . . but where do you get your ideas?” This is worrisome. At the risk of sounding like a fogey, I fear we are raising a whole new generation of art directors who are skipping the idea part of creating ads, and going right to the part where they make images nice and pretty, never mind where the images came from or what they say.

Equally troubling is what I call “The Illusion of Completion”. This monstrous computer-generated problem has thrown the entire process of presenting and selling ads out of whack.

Thanks to computers, “computer comp” layouts and TV commercial “rough” cuts look so close to done, especially to the eyes of clients, who don’t do this for a living, that the client can feel shut out of the process. As much as we tell our clients the ad’s not really done and we invite their input, it sure looks and feels done and so for them to offer input seems a little after the fact, or like too much trouble. Plus, after decades of training clients that the more finished the ad is, the more expensive changes will be, suddenly, it’s become just as hard to know when a change will be expensive as it is to know if the ad is “finished” or finished.

On top of that, clients are often baffled, if not enraged, by the fact that they have to pay large amounts of money to get from what appears to be a finished ad or TV spot, to an ad which is deemed finished by the agency. The cost of production, which is already suspect in the minds of many clients, just got a whole lot harder to justify. As much as we constantly work to earn the trust and respect of our clients, computers undermines our efforts in these and other ways.

As computers continue to alter every aspect of our business, we’ve failed to teach young art directors how to use computers as a tool rather than a crutch. We’ve failed to educate clients about changes in the process and thereby failed to manage their expectations. As we play with our new toy, we’ve been short-sighted and self-indulgent. It’s time to stop shooting ourselves in the foot with our nice, shiny gigabyte bazooka. In a future column, I will offer some suggestions on how to disarm ourselves.