A hero can be anyone to someone – from an old school ad legend to whoever wrote the code that lets people copy & paste, from the first person to fire them to Kim Kardashian. This year’s series of discomfortingly open op-ed briefs has begun. And it’s a beauty; heroes can be the last type of person you’d expect.
A Hard-Arsed Hero, by Paul Nagy CCO VMLY&R
The most influential creative leader I ever had was also arguably the worst.
He was brutal; his creative direction rarely extended beyond, ‘Nup – go again’; and he clearly took great pleasure in making people – especially myself – uncomfortable.
I was quite junior at the time, and the creative department had a geographical hierarchy, so it was a long walk past every other member of the creative department to present work.
I remember one day making that walk, clutching a print ad in my hand. The brief had been to highlight that our client’s video camera was actually smaller than the competitor’s model, and I had an image of both products to work with. The headline I’d written was: We’re dwarfed by the competition.
A far-from-brilliant pun, but at the time I was relatively happy with it as I walked past all the seniors I idolised – clenched sphincter engaged – to see what he thought.
After a long, silent pause, successfully designed to make me even more uncomfortable, he plucked the work out of my hand as though it were something I’d fished out of the bin. A brief look at the page over the top of his glasses, the entire table of senior creatives pausing for a moment to hear the verdict, then, “I hate it, but let’s see what the pig thinks.”
At which point he picked up a small plastic pig from his desk and brought it up to his eye. By looking through the pig’s butthole, you could view the world through a little kaleidoscope built into its mouth, and for a few seconds, he scanned the page through this lens, giving the pig time for a second opinion.
Another long pause. “Pig hates it too. It’s a pun.”
My work was then dropped on the carpet and ripped into small pieces with his feet. He took a long time and great pleasure in doing this. Then he turned back to his computer and started working again, leaving me to literally pick up the pieces and shame-walk back to my desk.
I tell this story – one of many like it – not for sympathy, but to highlight the fact that sometimes our harshest judges make the biggest impact. I know this probably reveals a lot about me psychologically, but the more indifference he heaped on me, the harder I worked to impress him.
And it worked, I guess. He moved agencies a year later and poached me to join his team.
In truth, he’s actually a really funny guy who demanded great work and we are still good friends to this day. I never tried to lead like he did (I couldn’t if I tried), but he was a very effective leader, and although pure evil in many dazzling ways, he swooped into my career and bludgeoned me into a better creative.
So while classic heroes are all “swooshy cloaks” and “save the world”, in this case, my hero was a little more “panel-beater-of-the-soul” kinda thing.
Not pretty, but certainly made an impact.
