The Scourge of Conferenceroomitis

Conferenceroomitis is an affliction suffered by marketing staffs and creative teams across industries. The primary symptom is clouded judgement: forgetting that nobody else in the world works for your brand or gives a shit about it in any real way until they have to. And conference rooms are the perfect vector for this terrible plague because they’re often full of shit, both real and imagined.

What we all have to remember is: we’re getting paid to care. Nobody else is.

All too often, I’ve seen strategic and creative decisions being made as if the entire world exists within the confines of a brand’s conference room. Questions of “storytelling” (“does this ladder up to the red thread nobody on earth notices?”), of “voice” (“does this gel with the TV ad that came out 6 months ago that everybody muted, or the pre-roll that everybody skipped?”), and “I like it, buts” for reasons more theoretical than actual.

Obviously these are factors for careful consideration. But that consideration must be made with the open range of media and consumer experience in mind. What matters most is the work; a good idea must be permitted to flourish in order to compensate consumers for their time spent with the content. To wit: entertainment value. It’s the least we can do.

Good ideas have met ignoble deaths because somebody getting paid to fret about boiler plate considerations got in the way. And what that ultimately meant is: the audiences we are trying to reach got stiffed with bad content. At the end of the day, our audiences, the only people who will never set foot in those conference rooms, are footing the bill. It’s up to us to make it worth it for them.