Universal Truths: And other BS criteria for great work

When I first started out in the early ‘90s my first Creative Director and just about every creative with more than a couple years in the game told me that the goal of every copywriter should be to do great work. I asked them “what makes ‘great work’?” Almost to a man their response was “work that wins awards.” When I asked them what wins awards they told me “universal truth.”

Universal Truth. Universal truth is the one thing that everyone who sees an ad can agree on—the moment of realness, that wording, that common bond, the moment, that visual that everyone understands... Universal Truth knows no target audience. No boundaries. Universal Truth is so good that you just “get it” even if it’s not for you to get.

So being a loyal junior ink slinger, I studied the awards books and went to awards shows: Local screenings of The One Shows. The Obies. The Clios. The ADDYS. My goal on every assignment I got was to make awards show judges tell their friends, “you gotta see this one!” Then I’d get a gold pencil. Or a gold lion. Or a carved glass/metal abstract art paperweight-looking thingy. Then my agency would dust off some shelf space, take out an ad in the trades with the word “great” attached to me. Then I’d be set.

But one year while thumbing through an awards’ annual for inspiration, I crossed an ad featuring a young black male in a tracksuit and track shoes with a neck full of medals surrounded by trophies. The big bold headline read, “If you want to see how fast he can really run, wait until his girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant.” The ad was for an adoption agency or an abortion clinic; I forget which. All I remember was that the ad had won a gold something-or-other.

I starred at it over and over, and at the kid who wasn’t much younger than me at the time; I tried but I couldn’t find any universal truth in it. All I could find was bias and a genuine dislike for awards shows.

Over the years I crossed countless more ads that featured blatantly racist, sexist or culturally biased angles; and like that trackstar ad, that work either won, placed or showed in awards shows.

Every time I cross work like this—award-winning or not—I can’t help but think about how overwhelmingly segregated the advertising industry remains; and how the so-called gatekeepers of what’s great and what’s universally true are still almost exclusively white men and white women who couldn’t be more out of touch if they tried.

I think about all the work that passes through their doors, gets client approval, hits the airwaves and makes insertion dates and either annoys, bores, irritates, or outright insults ethnic consumers and audiences of color.

I think about how so much of that very same work is regularly seen as “great” or “cool” by people who just don’t/won’t “get it”. I also think about work done by ethnic agencies and how so many of our anglo colleagues are equally annoyed and/or clueless about the need for it and for the people creating it.

And I think that this dynamic might be the only universal truth left.