I’m sure you know the feeling. Your toes wriggle their way into warm sand. Or you close the back cover on a brilliantly written book. Or you flick on the dishwasher after a particularly successful dinner party.

You know, happiness.

Happiness is one of those emotional levers adland is constantly searching for. Researchers run quant and qual looking for it. Creatives trawl through client’s products and their long list of related benefits for something which makes their customers happy. Better still, something a non-customer will see and think, “That would make me happy.”

Need proof?

Find a car ad that doesn’t feature a driver smiling as they settle behind the wheel. Rewatch Cadbury Gorilla and see how it provokes the feeling of opening that purple wrapper. Disneyland wants us to visit ‘The happiest place on Earth’. Coke urges us to ‘Open happiness’. Maccas has sold millions of ‘Happy Meals’. (Side note: Is that because it makes the kids happy? Or because the kids shut up that makes the parent happy?)

But here’s my question: If we’re so good at promoting happiness, why do so few adland people see it within themselves?

I was recently reminded of my own working mantra in a long conversation with some non-advertising folk. While working at a big agency, I’d get home after another day of arguing about propositions or concepts or executions and my wife would ask the same question, “But are you happy?”

My answer was always; “Happiness is the enemy of ambition.”

It’s a bit dark, right? But once you get happy, I mean truly happy, you stop pushing for the next goal. You stop looking for the next big idea or metal winner or pitch closer. That little flame, which drew you to the industry, goes out.

And I think you can see it.

Look in the eyes of the cast of characters in a large creative department. There’s the creative who won awards early in their career but lost their edge. There’s the middleweight who’s happy to specialise on an account other creatives avoid. There’s the senior ACD or CD who’s backtracked to doing more of the work (but kept the title).

I hope they’re happy, I really do. But that never made me happy.

Importantly, it was also never right for those I admired and hired. David Ogilvy famously said, “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

One of my recent ‘a-ha’ moments was when I was putting together a slide featuring creatives I’d hired as juniors who are now CCOs, ECDs, CDs or VPs. It was a long list of people I truly admire. And they all have one thing in common. They’re still pushing. Still looking for the next idea, the next opportunity, the next challenge.

And that makes me happy – at least briefly.

Rob Morrison is a rarity in advertising – a grey-haired creative. Rob’s experience includes time as a Creative Director at Ogilvy, BWM (now Dentsu Creative), George Patts (now VML), Campaign Palace and Wunderman. He now runs his own consultancy – morrison.collective.

Here are two more opinion pieces from Rob Morrison:

Cover image by Yuyang Liu on Unsplash