I’ve been rolling around the ad industry for over 15 years now, and if there’s one thing I can say without equivocation it’s that we are all really, really good at talking. Sometimes, like a blathering slot machine, we discuss meaningful things and spew forth cogent thoughts. All too often, regrettably, we sit in meeting after meeting fooling ourselves into thinking we’re proactively dominating the paradigm or some other jargon-laden wonk term, when in fact we’re merely staging a live-action “Seinfeld” episode about advertising. A lot of talk about nothing.

Unfortunately, we in ad-dom too often forget that a little meeting goes along way, instead believing that if one meeting is good, then two meetings are better. And a third meeting to make sure we were clear about what happened in the first two is awesome. Internal check-ins before the internal review. Pre-call meetings before the client conference call. Post-mortems after said call.

Shut it.

This just in from the Department of Duh: No work gets accomplished during a meeting. A few great ideas might be conceived during a blabberfest, but 99.9% involve disembowelment. It’s advertising, people. Quit talking about it and start doing it. And do you really wonder why consumers don’t want to “join the conversation”? I don’t want to either, and I’m paid to.

Here’s my list of necessary meetings:

1. Initial strategy development
2. Briefing
3. Internal review of work
4. Client presentation

Do you see “Brainstorm with Entire Agency Including the CFO” on this list? You do not.

I’d rant some more, but iCal just popped up with a meeting reminder.

Later,

Fox