Working on Madison Avenue can be challenging. There are as many setbacks as there are achievements when you are playing the Ad Game.
My idea was to create something like a game of snakes and ladders. A work buddy of mine, Bob Sayles, and I decided to actually make a board game of it.
I was inspired to create this after another friend committed me to write an article in the NYU Media Ecology Review magazine. They wanted to know about the process of getting an advertising idea to air. When I started writing it, I was struck by how hard it might be to follow without some graphic support, so I enlisted Bob’s help. It really helped the article communicate better.
It was a tabletop game; you roll your dice and move from square to square. It used a move forward, fall back according to the instructions on the square where you landed. We designed it so it was more likely you would fall back than to move forward.
The concept was to emulate and make fun of the highly bureaucratic process that getting advertising approval had to go through in a big New York agency with large packaged goods clients. Although we had only seen the tip of the iceberg, we had a good idea of the damaging process things went through.
I thought out the concept; Bob drew it out and made it real. This was before computer graphics so he actually had to draw it out on a large sketch pad.
To get copy on the drawing, we had to engage Werner in our typesetting department to generate each little caption. Bob then pasted each one on his inked drawing. Once we were done assembling it, he took the finished game to the photostat department in the basement of the agency for them to make a high-resolution copy of the game.
At that point, we got our large Photostatted copies dry mounted on a cardboard backing. Voilà, we had created our own board game. Or at least a satire of one.
Do get all the people in these departments to contribute some effort and supplies to a non-paying project required exploiting our relationships with each department. There is a whole lesson in working with other departments that we had had to learn. Moral suasion was our most effective tool. That and treating everyone with respect as much as possible every day we interacted with them. And that was regularly.
Each department in a huge agency runs on its own. Until you got to very senior levels, no one could tell other departments what to do. You had to learn to work together as part of the ad game. An excellent life lesson to learn.
If we failed at any one step, we had to “Return to Go” and plot a new course around the uncooperative person. Hey, there could be a game in that!
Many of the steps in the Ad Game actually happened to me later in my career. Others were rumoured to have happened to someone else. Some of the process is covered in Overcome AD-versity.
There was one notable exception: the “Star Caught in Bed with Sheep” square. It was meant as a joke to indicate that use of celebrities in advertising comes with a risk that is not under your control. While it was meant as a joke, celebrities have certainly rained on many an ad campaign’s parade over the years. While these disasters have happened on brands after I had worked on them, I have been lucky to jump that square.
Overall, the game shows how many external variables can derail advertising development.