Divas and Divos Everywhere

An advertising agency gathers all of its employees in one large room for 3 hours. A huge presentation is given, defining the future of the company, the structure of the game, and the role of each group within the new plan: creative, account planning, media buying, account management, digital, linguistics, strategic planning, print studio. At the end of the meeting, two creatives (don't get me started on the use of this word as a noun) walk out together, and one of them says to the other:

"At the end of the day, all this is fine and dandy. But if the creative concept were not amazing, who cares about your media buy, how you handled the client, the correctness of language, the strategy. All of it really means nothing without us."

True as this statement is, let me propose a few others that are equally true.

• If you have an amazing campaign, published through the most effective media, targeting the perfect audience and at just the right time, and you publish a typo or a voiceover with a grammatical/language brain-fart on it, people will remember your campaign. But not because it was amazing, but because of your embarrassing mistake, which, by the way, just cost you credibility, on top of all the thousands of dollars in re-printing/re-producing.
• If you have the most amazing campaign, brilliant idea, beautifully redacted, perfectly proofread, flawlessly printed and produced, and no one sees it, or it is seen only by the non-consumerist Piraha tribe in Brazil, who cares?
• If you had to contact the client yourself, nurture your relationship with said client, organize and manage bookings of talent, studio, engineers, research markets and consumers, negotiate media time and fees with vendors and clients alike, when exactly would you expect to think and produce your awesome idea?

Don't take me wrong, it's not that I don't whole-heartedly agree with the creative's point of view. After all, I am a creative, and I've been creative my whole life—or what else do you call being a musician?

As a matter of fact, I hate the common doctrine that insists that no one is indispensable. I would like to propose instead that we all are. What a novel thought! We are all indispensable.

And why am I writing this on an opera company's blog? This false divo attitude is precisely what coópera seeks to eradicate. I say "false" because there's nothing divine about thinking yourself better than the orchestra, the wardrobe people, the planners, the marketers, the chorus, in the same way that there's no value in thinking yourself easily replaceable. 

I think it is a much better production, in every sense of the word, if we understand how intrinsically and incredibly necessary we are, and how intrinsically and incredibly necessary all the other parts are as well, and therefore consider ourselves lucky—truly lucky—to be so amazing, and to have found all of these other amazing people, to have been able to gather them in one place at one time, to form such an amazingly well-oiled machine that is therefore built to produce greatness.

I don't know about you, but I think this is what advertising and opera are all about.

Laura