YACK on: Fishing for ads
Grant Sanders
Commercial scalloping is hard work. Make no mistake about it. It's the kind of work that you have to love to do. You have to love to get up early in the morning before the sun rises. You have to love the smell of gasoline mixed with salt air. You have to love to use all of your muscles.

I have approximately two hours of experience on a scallop boat. My friend Ackboater (not his real name) took me out on his boat two seasons ago and he got his limit in about 90 minutes (those were the days) and I learned the difference between a nub and an adult. And in that time, I gained a huge appreciation for what a commercial scalloper does. And although I've often wondered what it would be like to earn an honest day's pay with a boat and some dredges, It's not very likely I would ever trade in my laptop for a scallop boat.

Why?

Because writing advertising (which is what I do to pay the bills) is not hard work. Make no mistake about it. Like scalloping you have to love it to do it. But you have to love different things. You have to love to get up in the morning at the crack of 7:45 - preferably after someone else has made the first pot of coffee. You have to love the smell of xylene-based markers on vellum layout paper. You have to love to use all of the muscles in your hands and wrists and part of your forearms. That's pretty much it.

Scallopers wear special clothing to keep them warm and dry on their boats. They are pretty exposed out there in their open boats. We ad people sometimes wear suits and ties to keep from being exposed as the casual slobs we are most of the time. Today, for example, I'm wearing a zip-up long sleeve t-shirt, a fleece vest, jeans and PF Flyers sneakers to work off-island.

Scallopers sometimes work alone in their boats and sometimes have a culler with them. I will sometimes work alone, like this week when I was writing radio promos for a well known TV network sitcom. But other times I'll work with an art director. (A copywriter is the word guy. The art director makes the ad look nice. But generally speaking, a writer can suggest a visual treatment and an art person can write a good headline form time to tome.)

Similar to scalloping, you really don't know what you're going to net when you go to work as a copywriter (I've graduated to the title "Freelance Creative Director," but I'm really a copywriter at heart). If you sit down and fish for ideas in a certain place, you may find that there are no keeper ad ideas there at all, and so you have to pick up and move to a different place in your mind where the ideas are just waiting to be scooped up.

Also similar to scalloping, you can be done in an hour or it can take all day to come up with your "catch" in the ad business. It just depends upon the conditions. In the advertising business the conditions are spelled out in what we call "The creative brief." Sometimes the brief is clear. Written smoothly and succinctly like a calm, still, clear November morning. And it's easy to tell from reading it what needs to be done to create a good ad. And off you go with a cup of coffee in one hand and a marker pad in the other to write headlines and come up with ideas for images. But sometimes, the brief is choppy and uncertain. Full of windy client prose, a squall of legal requirements and constantly changing conditions. Writing to such briefs can be rather arduous. Your footing is questionable. You get tossed around a lot from meetings to conference calls trying to gain some clarity. And in the end, hauling a good ad back to shore is difficult - and exhausting.

When a scalloper is done with his catch, he takes it to the marine department to get inspected. The marine department guys check to see if there are any seed scallops mixed in with the adults. They want to make sure the boxes are not too full, and that the fisherman has adhered to all of the rules. In the ad business, we have account executives to set the rules and to make sure we all play by them. These people make sure that we've gotten our limit of client features and benefits in an ad. That there are no frivolous claims mixed in with the meatier information and that we've stuck to the instructions spelled out in the brief. Interestingly, however, it's the creative people - the copywriter and the art director - who usually work the hardest to make sure the creative boxes are not crowned by too many 800 numbers and logos that are way too large.

Just as scallopers complain sometimes abut the marine department and its rules, we creative fishermen sometimes piss and moan about the AEs (also referred to with a sneer as "suits") behind their backs. But generally speaking, we all know we are part of the same business and the same effort to bring a good product to the marketplace. And for the most part, it does not get too rancorous.

There's no equivalent to "opening" in the ad biz. No need for shanties. No health regs. No hand washing or huge trash barrels full of shells and scallop guts. No mounting pile of discarded refuse to attract the gulls and repel passers by.

Still, much of what we do not bring to market does truly stink. It reeks actually. Like scalloping, we only bring the good clean saleable products to our clients to buy. The really awful ideas - the monkey dunk of advertising - end up in a heap in someone's file cabinet or in the recycle bin. Thankfully, these heaps are not picked over by flocks of gulls. Although sometimes you will find a junior creative person diving into an old pile of ideas to see if there's anything worth salvaging for a different project.

Sometimes when we bring our ideas to a client, he buys them and pays us for them. Somehow, like scalloping, it never really seems like it's enough. Clients want as many ideas as they can for the lowest price possible and there are times when we ad people really take a beating. The margins in the ad biz are only around 20 percent for the best run ad agencies, so you can see why so many agencies come and go. There are also times when we work really hard and the client turns us away when we present our ad ideas. They tell us to go back and fish for more. The ones we presented don't smell right to them.

That can be rather disappointing. That's when people like me begin to fantasize about getting up at 5 a.m., and putting on big boots and foul-weather gear and reving up the old scallop boat to haul some dredges off of Pocomo.

Then we snap out of it and go get another cup of coffee and the remnants of someone's birthday cake in the creative department kitchen.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and he is a 22-year ad industry veteran with a number of prestigious awards under his belt. Which explains the unsightly bulge. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of the Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.