I am a chocolate fiend and none of this milk chocolate stuff. I like my chocolate dark. (85-90% cacao, please.) My lady and I have a little hobby of trying as many different brands of chocolate as possible, with little regard to cost per ounce or where it comes from. Keep in mind, it might be the only real vice for either of us, and even the most expensive chocolate isn’t much of an investment lest you think of us as aristocrats or something more horrible. Some people like wine, some beer, and some foie gras. We like chocolate. You could say we travel as much as possible, but if we can’t literally go somewhere we visit by trying the chocolates of the world.

This past Sunday I ran across an article in the New York Times about chocolate and was contractually obligated to devour it, too. Turns out it really wasn’t about chocolate at all. The article, Unwrapping the Mythos of Mast Brothers Chocolate in Brooklyn, focuses on the questionable origins of the popular Brooklyn-based chocolatier, Mast Brothers. It mentions a four-part food blog takedown of the brand, which itself follows up an article in Slate last year, Chocolate Experts Hate Mast Brothers. Now, I personally can’t vouch for the accuracy of all the claims made in the articles but there is a lot of vitriol being directed at the brand.

THE MAST BROTHERS – LOOKING THE PART:

For the uninitiated, Mast Brothers’ products are expensive and their brand is the perfect example of homespun artisanal craft. Started by two brothers, out of their Brooklyn apartment – it has all the trappings of true hipsterdom and is branded accordingly. Wallpaper pattern packaging. The requisite san serif simplicity (Metro).  The brutally spartan retail space. The charming heritage story. Right down to the beards of the brothers, this product screams authenticity and to their credit was one of the first bean to bar manufacturers in this country. The recent backlash basically states that the chocolate is terrible, and the branding is selling a what amounts to a culinary fraud. Dallasfood.org – the site which forms the foundation of the New York Times article, questions Mast Brothers’ honesty about how they learned to grind beans, the origin of the company, the ingredients they use, and get this – even their beards. Ouch.

The Masts did not become pariahs in the fine chocolate world because of their beards, publicity or product mediocrity,” the blogger, Scott Craig, wrote in the series, “What Lies Behind the Beards.” “It was because of their lies.

The most vicious attack on the chocolatier focuses on the fact that most experts do not believe the brothers were grinding their beans and making chocolate from scratch in their apartment, despite the brand story presented to the public. These experts accuse Mast Brothers of being remelters early on in their history. Remelters use industrial chocolate, called couverture, and do exactly that – melt it down and use it as their own creation. The brothers dismiss the claim by saying it was a time of experimentation while others point out that since their brand is based totally on a fabricated story and not the quality of the chocolate, the lie is reason to publically denounce them.

Honestly, I’m not a big fan of their chocolate and don’t care too much about which side of the fence you’ll fall on after reading this either. I’m not even particularly concerned that branding might have been used in this case to push authenticity, inauthentically. (Though that would make an interesting article on its own.) I’m not even concerned about this maybe heralding the much-needed end to hipster-styled design. What struck me most about this story was that one word. Remelters.

ALL THE BEAUTIFUL TRAPPINGS:

In the chocolate world, if you are a remelter – you are simply using someone else’s product and taking credit for the work of others. In other circles, you’d be labeled a poser. A charlatan. An imposter. Basically, you are pretending to be good at something. There is something painfully damning and harshly revealing about this word, Remelter. But this idea isn’t unique to chocolate or the culinary realm. Authenticity has been on my mind for some time because sadly, the marketing world is FULL of remelters. Agencies and shops branding themselves as something that they are not, with some clients not being quite sophisticated enough to know the difference once the work hits their palate. I certainly am not going to point fingers at these creative remelters (and that’s not my point anyway – we have enough problems of our own, thank you very much).

Agencies are easily the best remelters in the world, they drink their own kool-aid and eat their own PR better than any chocolatier ever could.

My concern is how does someone who leads a small but hungry shop market ourselves as the authentically creative problem-solvers that we are and yet distance ourselves from the shops that simply wrap an inferior or copied product in all the trappings, packaging and contrived backstory of the day? Agencies are easily the best remelters in the world, they drink their own kool-aid and eat their own PR better than any chocolatier ever could. I guarantee that. They claim they do work that they don’t. They claim they have experience they lack. They claim to be creative when they clearly put their money elsewhere. They hide behind mostly meaningless awards, templated creative, derivative strategy, and copy & pasted descriptors. They claim to be creative but invest in everything but. All chocolate crafted elsewhere by more talented others.

This is what keeps me awake at night. In a world where pretenders can copy, duplicate, and dress themselves in words like integration, creative, rebellion, digital, etc., easier than ever before—how does a shop express our originality and authenticity to potential clients? How can we get as far removed from the word remelter as possible? After all, for every 100 Mast Brothers, there’s a Patric Chocolate that deserves to be tried instead. (Or maybe the more approachable Theo.) To be transparent, I would be horrified if someone called our shop anything nearly as bad as ‘remelter’. As I write and share this thought however, I think that’s the difference in our industry. It’s not the shops that actually worry about this happening that are at risk. We are too angst-ridden, too-reflective, too honest and too scared to ever let that happen. Fear makes us better. Questioning makes us better. It’s the agencies that are so overly confident, so overly into themselves, and so shrouded in bullshit that they don’t realize or care they are simply remelting the work of others. I’ve seen it first hand.

My goal for Magnetry is for us to be a truly creative shop and not one merely in love with the word creative. Let us be always willing to put in the work. Let us not talk the walk, let’s walk it. At the end of the day, I’m still a firm believer that it’s the chocolate that matters and not the accoutrements, even for we in the accoutrement-making business. Focusing on the work and the results will no doubt cost us a lot of sleep because it’s the hard way. The right way. The authentic way. The labor intensive way. But when I do get to sleep, at least I’ll sleep more soundly knowing we will always strive to make our own, and to make it the best we possibly can. Our clients don’t get an over-hyped, glitzy firm of smoke and mirrors. They get a group of talented, hard-working craftsmen who love what they do too much to fake it.

About 15 years ago, a struggling young VCU Brandcenter (then Adcenter) cadet had what he thought was a pretty good idea. He and his partner had a good laugh about it, sketched it up, made it better, and presented it with no less than 75 or 100 other ideas in their campaigns class. The professor liked it, we produced it and we entered it into the Richmond Ad Club show. I was too poor (and introverted) to actually attend the show, but was told that our little idea won Student Best of Show. We received what I still think is one of the five best creative trophies out there. A Richmond Show cannonball. (A very appropriate award for a town that saw more than its share of Civil War cannons.)

That very same award has sat on every desk for every job that I have ever had. That heavy paperweight reminds me of how hard I worked to get through graduate school, how important a good partner and good Creative Director is, and how much fun advertising, creativity and business can be. It’s also special because the Richmond Ad Club wasn’t any ordinary student show—this was where the best creative students in the world were competing. What I didn’t know until later, was that a professor paid for our copy of the cannonball trophies behind the scenes. That professor was none other than Mark Fenske. You can find Mark here, where he just posted a great article about humility that you should read immediately after this. Not sure I ever properly thanked him.

Why do I tell you this story? Well, to provide a little balance I suppose. 

I am locally famous (sic) for pitching an idea to my former employer called, The Bonfire of the Vanities. That event was a would-be block party, concert, bonfire event to be held in downtown Phoenix, during which we intended to burn all of the awards the agency had ever won,  and invite other agencies to do some of the same. Yep. In a big blaze of glory. We even had the fire department permits. The plans. The date. Everything. I wanted to replace a wall of dusty advertising awards of varying degrees of reputation, with a renewed dedication to a higher power – true creative excellence. Since I was the new Creative Director, my job was to right that ship. The bonfire never happened in 2013, as the owner backed out a month before the event. I think partly because of fear and partly because of indecision over what to do with the empty space on the wall. Or he simply thought it was stupid as was his right. The idea did scare everyone (which I think is funny in an industry full of people that call themselves rebels, there is an awful lot of zigging). But the bonfire—as bombastic and crazy as it sounds—was actually me treading lightly.

What I really wanted to do was burn down the whole industrial-award complex.

Too bad, this would have been a fun event:

Since my VCU days, I’ve watched as advertising has become ever more addicted to an ever-growing number of award shows with each passing year. All designed to tell everyone how awesome they are. Every agency is an award-winning agency, because it’s that easy to win. Something. Somewhere. For something. When you become an agency owner, you are forced to put your money where your mouth is and decide what matters. I’m not convinced most of these award shows matter and don’t get me started on Ads of the World and similar sites. Is it wrong that I just don’t really care?

I’m not the only one.

For the biggest agencies there is growing angst about awards too. Amir Kassaei, Chief Creative Officer at DDB Worldwide, recently wrote an article called, The End of False Recognitions. In it, he discusses the focus on awards as one of the biggest problems in ad-land. (And I include digital-land and design-land for my purposes.)

Kassaei’s article got a LOT of attention and a lot of feedback, most of it negative. I’d like to take an optimist’s view however and assume Kassaei’s intentions are honest. Perhaps because I can relate.

At the small agency level, things get really messy. 

We’re a small agency at least at the moment. Ten people on a good day. I think we’re producing work that is far above our weight-class. In our first almost-year, we have more than our share of work we could submit to shows. All of it would do well on the local level. Some would do well on the national level. But are awards really what we are about? Do we care more about external gratification than we do about internal satisfaction of solving problems, with craft and creativity? Do I really want to spend $10,000 dollars entering work in a local show; a week of everyone’s time preparing the work for submission, worth another $15,000 – is that a good use of our resources? Do those awards actually bring us new business? Increase our creative cred? Do they matter to us? Are they more important than taking that money and investing it back into our people, and taking that time and instead focusing on one of our client projects?

I started a status meeting a few months ago and asked the staff if Magnetry could sit out of the award rat race, and instead truly focus on what is best for our clients and more to the point – focus on doing work that WE love. I asked if they were okay, with other local agencies (and their peers) possibly thinking we just didn’t have the chops. Or were cowards. Or were somehow disingenuous—maybe arrogant. I asked if they supported the move to be more discerning in what recognition we pursue. But before that, I had to ask myself and my team an even more fundamental question. Do we even have a choice? We want to show up in our first year, right?

The truth of the matter is, we already have shown up. I’m proud that this agency stands for something and for the reputation we’ve been building. We decided as a group to only do the things that matter to us, everything else be damned. Magnetry will not be defined by the awards we win. We will not be defined by the award shows we don’t enter either. We will be defined by work that sits in that wonderful space between client results and our own personal satisfaction. If you are familiar with the general creative discontent that fuels every single person here—you know that will be a high standard. It’s a cliche, but the work will speak for itself.

Here’s the deal about the Addys. 

Well, now they want us to call them the American Advertising Awards… but the Addys are run by a non-profit called the American Advertising Federation, which made almost $7 million last year from the local and regional award shows. The shows themselves – I’ve probably judged ten of them over the years – are graded on a curve. You are strongly encouraged to award a certain percentage of gold, silver and bronze awards no matter the quality of the work. They are a terrible measure for creativity.

That doesn’t mean we are giving up entering award shows altogether. (There are agencies that don’t enter shows—Ehgad!— like my good friends at High, Wide & Handsome.) It does mean however, that when we enter something, it will be something we LOVE and at a show that we RESPECT. We are not going to act like desperate B-list celebrities vying for a dimming spotlight. Magnetry is a national agency, with national aspirations, and big-time, world-class creative goals. So when we enter something – it has to support those goals. The award shows that consistently award the best of the best are few and far between. I can count them on one hand. 

• The One Show
• D&AD
• The Radio Mercury Awards
• Maybe Cannes (We can talk about this one further.)
• The Effies.
• And… uh… I did say one hand, right? Let’s put the Art Director’s Club here.

So why write this article? 

Well, it’s not to make people feel badly about entering award shows. That’s your call. Or at least the call of your agency leader. Good luck and have fun, I say. Yes, I would be embarrassed if we pretended these lucite trophies matter the way some local shops do but that’s not really the point. I simply feel like it was time to take a stand against a system that I think is flawed and increasingly irrelevant. I must do what is right for Magnetry and the people here, not follow convention. So while every other agency in the city will be spinning out PR articles about how they rocked the Addy’s next week, you won’t read one about us. (Go ahead and thank us now.)  The truth of it is, instead of prepping our work for a show, we’d rather spend our time focused on our clients and making the work better. That’s always been my idea of a party.

(By the way, if you want to know how I think we could fix local creative awards — I have some ideas.)

We’re coming up on our eight year anniversary and I still get asked what type of agency we want to be (A LOT). But I instinctually opt to frame my answer through the type of work we want to do. So I guess, I want us to be an agency that tackles worthwhile problems, and one that spends our time on things that matter. What matters to us? Well, I put that down on an old notecard more than 8 years ago. Not much has changed since then.