What I’ve learned about … surviving change

By Simon Young, October 8, 2007 @ 8:36 pm

He’s worked in the mail room, written ads for some of the world’s biggest ad agencies and then, 27 years ago, started his own agency. His name is Tim Delaney and his company, Leagas Delaney, works with clients like Bacardi, Reebok and Goodyear. As well as chairing the agency, Delaney continues to work as a copywriter

In those 27 years, Delaney has learned a thing or two about adapting. He’s seen the advertising industry morph from a fairly predictable industry awash with money to one under the constant threat of irrelevancy. Through all the changes, he continues to passionately advocate what his industry is really good at.

Stay curious

“When you’re on a project you can either do it as a job, or do it because you’ve got a conviction about what you’re up to.

 “You develop your business by retaining your intellectual curiosity about why people do this, why the human condition is like this, why we buy things or why we behave a certain way. If you retain that curiosity and you work hard at it, you’ll become a person who is gifted in the area of mass communications.”

Play to your strengths

“The advertising industry faces a crisis of self-confidence. It needs to rediscover its faith in itself—its understanding of what it does. The ad industry has to say, ‘We’re a bunch of talented, gifted people—probably overpaid, and probably with too many rather foppish egos—but in the middle of it all there are some talented people who have an instinct for mass communication and brand building’.

“The world is changing, but the nature of what we do is still creating relationships and communicating in a disciplined, strategic, interesting way.”

Some things don’t change

“Let’s take writing as an example. If you write with conviction and you make a subject interesting to somebody, they’ll read it. If you write without conviction about a subject you’re not interested in, and you don’t write in such a way that people want to read it, you can kiss writing goodbye. That’s never changed. Bad copywriters have always been bad copywriters. No one reads them.”

Keep improving

“What creative people do is a gift, but to turn it into a skill, you have to create a technique to understand what you can do. You need to work pretty damn hard. And you hone it the whole time. You’ve got to keep doing it.

“I’m a copywriter, and I also have a business, and I’m a creative director of other people’s work. Essentially my skill is a copywriter. Everyone needs to stay close to what they do.”

— As told to Simon Young