The advertising industry needs to “stop being stereotypical” about talent if it wants to retain it. That’s the opinion of Matthew Bull, former chairman of Lowe and Partners, founder of Lowe Bull agency in South Africa, and now a partner at The Bull-White House in New York. He’s written an open letter on the topic, in which he makes an interesting distinction between “wordthinkers” and “visualthinkers”.

A letter from New York.

I just got back from my annual golf tour – 17 years now – with my best mates. It was special to see them as always, and good to be in South Africa.

I spent a bit of time chatting to my one buddy who is in advertising and that was pretty depressing. But that was compounded by the article I read in Financial Mail about the dearth of talent in South Africa.

This is not a local phenomenon. I’ve run agencies in SA, London, and now New York. I’ve been the global chief creative officer of one of the world’s largest agency networks, and the story is the same everywhere. No writers.

Really though, we have to change the paradigm here. The reality is what we need more than ever is people that think like writers, not writers per se. There is so little writing in advertising now (certainly when it comes to work consumers see, as opposed to decks clients see) that the skill of actually writing prose is seldom needed.

So what do I mean by the way writers think? Well, we tend to have a glimpse of the end game and work in short sharp bursts to get there.  We’re like the sprinters of the business. Whereas art directors tend to be the marathon runners.  Writers have the ability to think spontaneously and rapidly – they see a visual thing and articulate it into words, be they verbal or written.

There is a misnomer that copywriters are conceptually stronger than art directors – that’s just not true. Some of the greatest conceptual creative people I have worked with were art directors. Writers are just more conceptually prolific simply because we have more time to think conceptually than those poor bastards that slog away for hours bringing ideas to life visually.

So I believe we need to re-categorise creative people into being thinkers that express themselves visually, (visualthinkers) and those that express themselves with the written word or verbally (wordthinkers). You will find the pool of talent increases exponentially if you do that. A wordthinker doesn’t even need to know how to spell, or be grammatically correct to be a brilliant ideas person. They just need to be brilliant at expressing what comes out of their head.

What schools have done to our business is to close the door on wordthinkers simply because they try and turn them into being brilliant writers. So we are losing many talented thinkers to, well, to who knows what simply because they don’t write good essays.

The advertising industry needs to broaden its mind about the kind of people it wants to attract. We need to stop being so stereotypical in our categorization of people and what they do in our business.

And we must never forget that many of the great “writers” of our business, like Sir David Abbott in the UK, or John Hunt and Robyn Putter in South Africa, received no formal training in writing at all.

They could just think beautifully with words.

Matthew Bull
Wordthinker.

[Source: MarkLives]