BenAnyan.com

The most notorious client mantra I’ve heard goes; “Activation, not masturbation!” The thinking is; let’s be ruthless in ensuring that no decision is made for our pleasure and for the sake of feeling good at the expense of efforts that actually and truly reflect the sentiment of our clients.

This ties in to the my most brutal feedback, which came a few years into my career. “Ben, you wrote these radios for yourself. I don’t think it reflects the reality of the guy hustling in a troski to get to work or the mason on the construction site. It doesn’t work.”

It was a chilling feedback that came in at a time I was on a fast rise at the agency. I suddenly felt what it must feel to be at the brink of redundancy. Because if your clients cant see an understanding for her customers’ tensions in your creative solutions, you’re as useful as a gun to a monk.

This isn’t a one-off thing you commit against and that’s it, it’s a major component of a very recurrent theme; creative complacency. This is when you start churning work that almost exclusively reflects your limited world view.

To be good in advertising, you must be good at thinking through the mind and feeling through the heart of your target. It’s not easy. At all! That brutal feedback put me on a course where this transcended a promotion pre-requisite to a precious hobby. 

 If your clients cant see an understanding for her customers’ tensions in your creative solutions, you’re as useful as a gun to a monk.

When a movie is good, I marvel at how the writer was able to write such apt dialogue so fitting of such diverse characters. When I browse social media I relish the opportunity to observe what defines people. Even behind the filters and all the contrived things shared, if you look hard enough it’s possible to see unfiltered glimpses of people’s vulnerabilities and tensions.

In advertising you are lucky to work on different brands with different consumer portraits and it’s intriguing when you switch from an ambitious young trendy’s mindset to that of a hustling mum and then of an accomplished business owner in one day’s work.

That’s also why I love side gigs; you get immersed into diverse industries and need-states that continuously prove how little you actually know. For example I can have insightful conversations about Dentistry in Ghana, the Civil Society Organization set-up, the Insurance, Banking & Finance, Telco, FMCG, Farming, Fintech industries and it’s all because of the rich network of clients I’ve been privileged to work with. 

My mainstream and side gigs have opened my eyes and expanded my world view much more than anything else could. There is still so much to be immersed in, but the journey of activation vs masturbation is a never-ending one.

PS: Originally written in JAN 2021 @ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/activation-masturbation-benjamin-anyan/

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