Big isn’t always better.
Especially when you’re a creative.
It’s easy, in your career, to get seduced by the big briefs. The ones in glamorous channels like TV. Or that have a big name client or big budget attached to them.
A lot of the time those briefs can be great to work on, but incredibly tough to create great work on.
There’s more eyes on those jobs, more people with more opinions, more worries about the outcome, more mandatories to make sure are ticked off and more chance that the output becomes a pretty, grey, boring, homogenised blandness.
I’ve seen a lot of advertising creatives battle to get onto the big account only to become frustrated when they’re in a constant battle to protect the work.
Or worst, they lose perspective. Thinking whatever work they’re producing must be good because it’s big. Filling their portfolio with small ideas just because they have big logos.
I’m not saying you should avoid those briefs. Just that you need to make sure to keep a strong critical eye on what you’re doing.
As well as using that same eye on all those other briefs, the ones without as much glitter or glamour.
They might not look very shiny at first glance but it also means they’re also not drawing as many eyes. So there’s fewer opinions.
It means you’ve more freedom and more chance to push the creative work to a more interesting place. Make sure that you look at every brief to see beyond the budget or channels. So that you never miss any opportunities.
Treat every brief as though it’s a big one.
It might be big for your book.
