Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I love television. I know it's old-fashioned. These days people in my business are supposed to be tweeting, linking, blogging, bookmarking, friending and tagging. Not just… watching.

But I watch. And it's rarely the good stuff like The Daily Show or National Geographic. My favorites are the dramas. So, when I heard about the new TNT drama set in an ad agency, Trust Me, I couldn't resist.

My first reaction? The only thing keeping Trust Me from being the most unrealistic show about an ad agency in television history is that nobody’s married to a witch. Just like Bewitched's Darrin Stephens and Larry Tate 40 years ago, the creative partners played by Eric McCormack and Tom Cavanagh approach each client challenge as the search for One Big Idea – we never see any research, positioning, or immersion in the client's bottom-line needs. (They're never far from the nearest cocktail, either.)

The more modern touches are just as farcical. When a major client balks at a pitch, the boss dangles the (false) promise of a Super Bowl placement to get his team cracking on a better one – because the prospect of losing a $75 million account isn't motivation enough. Teams within the same agency spend more time scheming to stab each other in the back than working to solve clients' problems. And the responsibility for the Big Idea rests on the shoulders of one "resident genius."

I scoffed and even posted an update on Facebook about how unrealistic the show was… but I kept watching. I realized it might be a nice change of pace if our work really were that simple. Wouldn't it be kind of nice if each of us only had to worry about coming up with One Big Idea, for one client? Then, despite the exaggerations and simplifications, some of what I was seeing started to feel familiar.

There are some teachable truths in the absurdities. In the real world of marketing and advertising, we know that everyone shares in the entire range of responsibilities that go into making a client happy, from keeping the budget in line to delivering that big idea. One of my colleagues, CCO Todd Coats, is fond of saying that great creative ideas can come from anywhere. We're all "directors." We're all "geniuses." More often than not, the winning approach emerges when we corral client services, media, interactive, PR and creative people into one room and keep them there until the idea is hatched.

Giving TV viewers a real-life glimpse into PR, advertising and marketing wouldn't make much of a TV drama, of course. At Capstrat, we're all human, and we manage emotion and the occasional conflict. But we keep it under control. We even channel it into our success whenever we can. The intensity of a TV show, with its brazen irresponsibility, no-holds-barred arguments, and cut-throat manipulation might feel good if you weren't trying to be a decent person getting a job done – and it definitely makes for good entertainment. Throw in some comic relief and a neatly packaged redemption at the end, and you have something that takes your mind off of the deadlines, mandates, and trials of a real agency.

I get it. It's escape. Which is the point of television, at least for me. So I'll keep watching, chuckling, and occasionally pausing to think about the real dramas I get to share with my colleagues every day.