Not too long ago I was engaged in a rather interesting conversation with a very good friend who decided to go completely off the subject and claim ‘ad-people’ were honest-to-God snobs! I was taken aback because as much as we’d sat down on many an occassion to bitch about society in general, we’d never made comments about each other’s trades or professions (he’s a printer).
So I asked him why he thought that and he said: “don’t take it personally but no one outside of advertising can ever seem to have a decent conversation with you people without being made to feel like a complete ass!”
According to him whose name shall not be mentioned, us ad-types claim to know it all. You talk about food we’ve eaten everything there is to eat and we’ll probably lecture you on what you should and shouldn’t eat. You talk about clothes and we’ll tell you that what you’re wearing sucks because we know the current trends that are being set by the world.
You talk about movies and we’ll probably rate your favorite TV or Film star down in the pits because we apparently hated their last film and thought it to be a mock up version of mission impossible without all the good parts, if there were any.
You talk about travel and we’ll tell you where you should and shouldn’t go because we’ve visited all these places and know what they’re like.
It seems we have a tendancy to judge first and question later, something to do with the visual based approach that then links to the documented approach, so on and so forth.
As he continued at random speed about the things we say and do and the way we live our lives and how we look down on those who don’t get us because we think they’re unworthy of the world I began to wonder… are we really like that or is it just the way this industry has moulded us?
I mean, it is important for us to understand how everything works, when we work on food brands we need to know what the product tastes like and when we work on fashion brands we need to know what the latest trends are. But does knowing these things make us greater snobs and lesser people or are the other folks just jealous of our bank of knowledge?
Did that last statement sound snobbish?
