Interesting or Die: Is Your Work Engaging, or Just Pollution?

Every time you put out terrible advertising or branding, you make it that much harder the next time. 

You wear people down even more. You raise their ire. You train them to expect not to be rewarded when they bother to glance up from their phones. 

You are the uninvited dinner guest who talks about themselves all night, and then vomits on the floor. 

People can entertain themselves however they want now, whenever they want. You are competing with total freedom. 

Sticking a dry headline on a solid background about your product isn’t going to do it. Shooting a no-budget TV spot with flat vector animation or cheap footage and no concept isn’t going to do it. There is simply too much of that to be considered interesting. 

I can watch Inglourious Basterds right now. Listen to any song I want. Read any book. “The crowdsourced workplace management software that loves to party just like you.” 

I’m good. I’m watching Succession while listening to Joni Mitchell and texting my grandma photos of my kids. 

Pollution is cumulative. You don’t feel the effects today or tomorrow, but over the long term they are devastating. 

It’s making all of our jobs harder. Eventually it will make them impossible. 

If your solution is to use ad tech to shovel garbage in front of people more efficiently, they will still be unhappy about all the garbage. They won’t thank you for the efficiency. 

Ad tech and data are brilliant. Use them to make better work. To uncover targets and insights about how your product fits in their lives. Make something about your product that is deeply interesting to people. 

It doesn’t matter how you make interesting work that doesn’t pollute the world. Use freelancers. Use your in-house team. Hire an agency. Do it yourself. Just listen to people you trust when they tell you it’s not good yet. 

We want our clients’ businesses to grow more than anything in the world. That’s how our business grows.