2) If the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement is only on our immediate work, we will have failed to fully embrace it. Not to get too deep on it, but even though our work is commercial the creativity involved is often deeply personal. Beyond adding more diverse voices to the ranks of the industry’s creators (which is the most important, long-term proposition), this is a moment for those with creative decision making power to examine our own biases and bring a more empathetic approach to everything we do. If we change who we are as people, the work will be authentically impacted.
4) Besides the ongoing comedy series of Facebook, trying to sell America a home video (totally not surveillance) device, the best thing I’ve seen this year is HBO’s “Betty.” For the most part it seems to have been overlooked, but I found it to be funny, moving and up lifting. It’s about a group of young women skateboarding through New York City and has an impossibly good soundtrack. You should watch it and you should never put a video camera made by Facebook in your house.
5) Agencies talk about courage. Clients have it. In March we were working will Stella Artois to launch a wildly ambitious summer campaign. Then, if you were reading the news, a few things happened that made this more difficult than usual. The client had every reason to pull back, but they never wavered in their desire to do something epic despite the circumstances. It took a tremendous amount of teamwork and trust to launch the “Daydreaming in the Life Artois” campaign, but it all started with a client willing to take a risk.
6) Using history as a guide, I feel comfortable predicting that I will not make it past page 50 of “Infinite Jest” by the end of the pandemic, no matter how long it lasts. Beyond that I would say one of two things are possible: Like Europe after the bubonic plague, humanity will emerge from this and experience a second renaissance where creativity, art and science expand our consciousness. On the other hand, the result could be more like 1918 when the Spanish Influenza combined with the First World War created such economic and social devastation that fascism rose around the world. So what I’m really saying is: wear a mask and go vote!
