It’s not easy being a “creative.”
The very term implies someone who’s marginalized in a business. Author Peter Mayle wrote that an ad agency’s creative director must have the “combined skills of a jail warden and a wet nurse,” which is not very flattering to the talent.
But you don’t hear that kind of comment so much in direct marketing. DM writers and designers have numbers to make, and they’re less likely to be viewed as children.
Certainly Tom Collins never has been looked at that way. He co-founded the Rapp Collins agency, and has long known how to align creative with results.
So the Direct team was pleased that Tom shared this year’s Andi Emerson Award with Nancy Harhut of Hill, Holliday (see And the Winners Are). He also happens to be a fine writer.
Collins operates on the principle that direct response copy has to sell. (And that can simply mean getting people to take an action.) There’s no place for cleverness for its own sake.
And this bears repeating, because so many marketers fail to grasp it. They create beautiful branding ads, slip in a toll-free number or URL and think they’ve done their job. Tom redoes their work every month in The Makeover Maven.
These days consumers are turning out their own commercials and uploading them to social networks. But we doubt this phenomenon is going to take over the direct marketing business anytime soon.
Another person who has long understood the imperatives of DM is Caples founder Andi Emerson, who steps down as president this year, although she’ll remain on the board.
A great copywriter, she started the program to foster creativity and to honor Caples, who was a mentor to the day he died. And she’s used this bully pulpit to pass on the teachings of Caples, Max Sackheim, Gene Schwartz, Len Reiss and many others.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who worked on this year’s Caples event.
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