My new coronavirus-era gig doesn’t pay a dime, but it’s a total sanity saver—and I love it.

I never thought of myself as a political writer. As a matter of fact, there was a time in my life when I didn’t think of myself as political at all. For decades I’ve been in advertising, which is by nature commercial, not political.

Yet here I am, lead writer on the Shahid Buttar for Congress campaign.

If you don’t know Shahid (pronounced “SHAH-hid”), he’s running for Congress to represent San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi’s current seat. A progressive Democrat who’s also a privacy protection attorney, he’s a veteran of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a kind of cyberpunk Justice League which successfully blocked the needless surveillance of Americans’ personal information.

It’s an uphill battle, but that’s the kind of challenge I like. Avis: We’re #2, we try harder. (Look it up, kids.)

The job is 100 percent pro bono/volunteer, and it’s taking up more of my time and energy than I anticipated. Between Slack, Zoom, and the actual writing process, I’m more drained at the end of some days than I was working for an in-house agency.

So why am I loving it so much?

Part of it is the way this work fits into my new sensibility. I was always politically aware, but as an observer, like a space alien curious about earthlings’ ways. In recent years, though, I’ve become more involved, and COVID-19, which affects an extraordinary range of life’s facets from healthcare to employment to the way we socialize, has only sharpened that involvement. (Shahid’s platform includes healthcare as a human right.)

Another part of it is that I’m just made to write. To paraphrase Twilight Zone and Star Trek writer Harlan Ellison, it’s what I’m for. Not having any assignments for a month or so should have felt like a fun break, but instead it felt like a piece of me was missing.

Finally, as a little bit of a celebrity stalker, I’ve enjoyed being on Zoom calls with minor political figures. I can’t say who they are, but if you follow progressive politics, you’d recognize their names.

Don’t get me wrong. I like receiving fair compensation for the work I do, and look forward to the day when I can do so again.

And I certainly would never work free for a for-profit company. That’s called slavery.

But with paying work hard to come by this summer, I have to admit nonpaying work is satisfying. It uses all the skills I used in advertising: Research, presentation, strategy and conceptualization, and writing itself.

Best of all, I don’t have to sit on a long train ride and go to an office I might or might not want to be in for 40 hours every week. I can just write, do virtual meetings, and have fun.

Find a cause you like and try it sometime.

It’s time for creatives to take a long, hard look at how we got here

Why did you become a creative professional? A copywriter, designer, art director, creative director, video/film director? An ad person, in other words?

At the deepest psychological level, why would you voluntarily join such an unstable, unpredictable, unappreciated, and often scoffed-at profession?

I know why I did. And I’m not proud of it.

I hasten to add that I am proud of the actual work I’ve done over the years. Of helping to grow my clients’ businesses. Of getting paid to solve tough business problems with insightful solutions. And yes, of adding some thoughtful, well-crafted, and occasionally even funny lines to the business environment we all live in.

But between the pandemic, the insane unemployment numbers, and the continuing transfer of advertising dollars from thousands of venues to Google and Facebook, I believe it’s worth looking at how we got here, so we can see a little more clearly where we’re going.

Like all my compatriots of a certain age—like you, in all probability—I spent a lot of my formative years in front of the TV, and that TV was always trying to sell me something.

Sometimes that thing would even include a picture of the very characters I saw on TV, which seemed vaguely magical, as though the characters had somehow popped out of the TV and broken the Fourth Wall.

For example, a cartoon leprechaun would sell you cereal, and when your parents bought the cereal, there that leprechaun would be, right on the box. To a two- or three-year-old with a still-developing brain, this passed for a religious experience.

And where was those parents, by the way, when all this was happening? Either taking care of even younger kids and doing housework, or working, or attending night school, or simply finding themselves—as the TV also encouraged them to do. So they plopped the kids in front of the magical babysitter, where they then would be sold even more things that had pictures of TV characters on them.

Cut to several years later, the small child grew into a larger child and then a college student, who on some level, albeit dimly, realized the profound power and influence that advertising had held over his life.

In fact, many were the times, between parental divorces and separations and constantly changing schools and moving houses, when advertising characters had seemed more like friends than people did.

But what if that power could be reclaimed?

What if, after 20 years of advertising wielding immense power over a person, that person could turn the tables? What if they could wield that same power over not just other people, but the advertising profession itself?

And so, we learned to use Macs and design software. And brand voice and tone guidelines, and creative briefs. And video editing software. And whatever else was necessary so we could do this ourselves, instead of having it done to us.

And now, here we all are. We’ve mastered this craft which previously mastered us, so congratulations to all of us.

The problem is, it’s now a craft without a venue—just Google and Facebook. We’re like carpenters who can design and build wonderful imaginative chairs, suddenly transported to ancient Japan where everyone is expected to kneel on the floor at mealtimes.

So what do we do now?

In the short term, I imagine some of us will become Instacart shoppers, nurses, grocery store stock clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, and other essential employees. I myself made such a temporary transition just after 9/11, when agency jobs were tough to come by. I catered, tended bar, waited tables. I didn’t mind it, to tell you the truth.

But in the long term, something deeper has to happen. We need to focus on using our incredible creative potential to build something new.

Not to sell cereal, or beer, or the latest SaaS/cloud solution, but to sell ideas that change the very way we live, the way we see each other, the way we see fundamental things like money and time and human relationships and our place in the universe.

Call it anti-propaganda, or advertising in reverse.

Who’s going to pay us to do that? For a while, maybe no one. In that case, we’re going have to do it for free, building the world we want to see.

Meanwhile, to survive and support our families, we’ll do our old creative professional jobs as well as we can—for as long as they exist.

But that won’t be forever.

Video killed the creative star: Why the insane race to go viral is destroying your creative team and budget

A few months ago I interviewed at a super-hot startup. Among the five or six people scheduled to grill me that morning was the company video specialist.

This is a fairly new role popping up everywhere, apparently based on the information that video radically boosts the chances of social posts going viral.

The person lucky enough to fill this role is usually a fanboy who thinks he’s Tarantino because he did a five-minute short in college, or maybe an ex-radio jock or TV news reporter. He–it’s always a he–has access to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of expensive video hardware and software.

Well, I didn’t get the job, and I have a feeling it’s because the video guy gave me a lukewarm review. He asked me about my video experience. What he didn’t ask me about was my thinking experience.

Let me be very clear about this. Video specialists have no business having such a heavy hand deciding who’s going to be on the creative team and who isn’t. They have no idea what a concept is. They throw around words like “story” and “narrative,” but when push comes to shove, instead of taking the truth and making it fascinating, as a good filmmaker should, they make hackneyed PR videos with a few lame jokes thrown in.

The results are predictable. The videos get no traction, amusing though they might be to a few people around the office.

Now why is this? It’s because people are short on time. They want answers to their business problems. Answers that a jokey, goofy PR video won’t give them.

This presents a conundrum because only enormous companies like Adobe and IBM can afford to continuously produce the kind of content-rich videos that really go viral. It takes a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of knowledge, and frankly a lot of real interest in the subject matter that your average film buff can’t fake.

But here’s the thing. You don’t have to produce the videos you post. You just have to find them. And there are relevant thought leadership videos out there that your audience wants to see, I assure you. They’re produced not by your competitors but by nonprofits, universities, think tanks and other organizations.

Save yourself a few hundred thousand dollars and post those videos, okay?

Oh, and that startup I mentioned? They just laid off half their staff. I wish I were lying.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.

Creative agencies and departments, take this hint from Finland

Sanna Marin, the 34-year-old prime minister of Finland, made news this week when she recommended that her government seriously look into the benefits of a four-day workweek. (To be clear, this would be four days for the same pay as five days right now.)

Marin, a member of Finland’s parliament for four years and most recently the Minister of Transport and Communications, is hardly a novice when it comes to getting more and better things done in less time. Despite her youth, she’s deadly serious.

It pays to remember that just over a hundred years ago, really no time at all in a broad sense, people were regularly working 70, 80, 100-hour workweeks, and some of them were children. This was considered normal at the time, as was working on Saturday. If your boss was religious, you might get a break on Sunday.

What does all this have to do with creating for a living? Well, if you’re forced to stare at the same four walls and the same open plan office and yes, sometimes even the same faces for five nine-hour days straight, you might run into writers’ or artists’ block.

This is how we get campaigns that all look the same, even though they were created at different places by different people.

Instead of basing their work on problem-solving, and the inspiration that comes from getting to know your audience and your product, desperately bored creatives are forced to turn to the latest trends, scrolling through Ads of the World, Adweek, Ad Age, or that Super Bowl thing your client said they liked from five years ago.

Inspiration needs time.

Inspiration needs a chance to breathe, rest and refresh.

Inspiration needs a four-day workweek.

PM Sanna Marin proposes a four-day workweek for Finland. Smart creative groups should follow suit.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.

Marketers need to stop ostriching on climate change

Many years ago, when my hair was mostly brown with a few gray strands instead of the opposite, my wife and I took a vacation in Asia. We went to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and, because my wife wanted to see Bali, we stopped in Indonesia as well.

In order to get to Bali via the deal my wife wangled, we had to go through Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta. I have to say that at the time, it struck me as unbelievably banal and boring, one of the dullest capital cities I’d been in.

I wish it were as dull and boring today. Instead, it’s rapidly sinking underwater. The cause? Melting polar ice caused by climate change.

If you’ve never been to Indonesia, I don’t expect this will mean much to you. You’ll probably file it away in a mental folder called “Things to be concerned about when I have time.” But if you have, it’ll be very real to you. A place that used to be land is now sinking under the ocean.

Now: What the hell does all this have to do with marketing?

As marketers, we’re in denial, to one degree or another. Our rationale up until now has been that we have to be, in order to survive. We have to think about billings, clients, briefs, quarterly goals. There’s only so much room in our brains.

But now, faster than we know, the situation is flipping.

Now, in order to survive, we need to not be in denial.

For example, if you’re in the marketing department of an airline that flies to Indonesia, its sinking into the ocean is a pretty big deal that’s going to cut into your business. The same is true if you work for an international company that markets to Indonesian businesses or consumers. Are you a designer, art director or copywriter for a concern that makes things in Indonesian factories, like clothing or sneakers? You might be in for a bumpy ride.

Because now, global climate change isn’t something we can ignore, or donate to once a year, or pay lip service to with products named Rainforest Renew and Coral Reef Sparkle.

It’s something that should factor heavily into every decision we make, every day.

Our survival depends on it, not just as marketers but as human beings.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.

Sunlight is born.

A few short years ago, I came to the conclusion that advertising is really just a bunch of noise unless it also involves helping our rapidly unraveling planet. It could have been the urge to make a better world for my teenage daughter, or just the daily news about penguins and polar bears, but I wanted to do my part.

It was around that time that I came up with the idea for Sunlight: An advertising and marketing organization–”agency” is too strong a word–focused entirely on marketing renewable and green technology to a world that needed a little kick in the rear to adopt it.

The timing wasn’t right then, but maybe it is now. Hence, a new virtual marketing group. A collaboration. A collective. An idea: Sunlight.

For now, I’ll continue to pay the bills via contract work. I’m lucky to have some great clients who encourage me to push boundaries and do what I do.

Meanwhile, more and more roofs are going solar. Teslas are everywhere. People are commuting to work by electric bike, electric kick scooter, electric hoverboard.

Maybe this whole alternative energy thing isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

We still aren’t adopting it fast enough, so there’s a lot of room for a group with a strong voice to do effective work. And while much of the work done is still nonprofit, more and more profitable companies are emerging on the backs of these technologies, making a a marketing agency a viable proposition even when social media companies are sucking up most of what used to be ad media revenue.

Over the years, my own work in this area has included ridesharing, solar panel and electric car doohickeys such as analog-to-digital components, software that automatically turns off huge numbers of computers, and paperless agreement technology. But the (petroleum-free) ride has just started.

Get in touch if we should talk.

Dave Dumanis is a 25-year San Francisco Bay Area copywriter, creative director and advertising veteran.