TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Welcome to Shallow DeepDive, where we take
a deep-ish dive into the shallow world of
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branding, advertising and creative.
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I'm Joe Qualls.
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Today, we're covering why we've started to
think of ourselves more as editors than
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creators.
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There's a version of this job that lives
in most people's heads, and it's a little
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out of date.
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In it, a client arrives with a problem and
an empty page.
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They don't know what they want, only that
they need something, and the agency's job
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is to conjure it — to walk in with the
blank sheet and walk out with the idea.
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The value was in the making.
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You paid us because we could produce the
thing you couldn't.
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For a long time, that was a fair
description of the work.
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It isn't really the work anymore.
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The meeting has changed, and it changed
while nobody announced it.
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Think about what a client brings into a
first meeting now.
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Not a vague brief and a hopeful shrug.
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They've seen what three competitors did
last quarter and can tell you why two of
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them missed.
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They've got a folder of references —
brands they admire, a palette they keep
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back to, a tone of voice they've
half-articulated.
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Someone on their team has spun up a rough
draft, maybe in a design tool, maybe with
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an AI sitting next to them, so there's
already something on the screen.
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They arrive informed and prepared in a way
that would have been unusual ten years
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ago and is now simply normal.
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The blank page turns up to the meeting
already filled.
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And this is a good thing.
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We want to be clear about that, because
it's easy to hear it as a complaint and it
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isn't one.
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A prepared client is a better client.
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The conversation starts further along.
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Nobody's pretending they have no taste and
no opinions when they plainly do.
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But it does something to the shape of our
value, and the something is worth naming,
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because it's the whole point of this
episode.
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When the page arrives full, the scarce
skill is no longer filling it.
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Load full transcript
It's knowing what on the page is worth
keeping.
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That's editing.
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Not making the thing — deciding what of
the thing survives, in what order, at what
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length, with what cut.
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And once you see the work that way, you
can't unsee it.
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Most of what we actually do in a week is
not generation.
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It's judgement applied to material that
already exists: this reference is leading
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you somewhere true and that one is a trap;
this line is the position and those three
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are hedges around it; this is the idea and
the rest is the scaffolding you built to
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reach it, which we can now quietly take
away.
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The client brought the raw material.
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Our job is the cold eye they can't turn on
their own work, because they made it and
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we didn't.
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Here's the part most people skip, and it's
the part that matters.
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Editing sounds like the lesser craft.
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It sounds like tidying — the polish you do
after the real work is finished, the red
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pen, the trim.
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That instinct has it exactly backwards.
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When everyone can generate, generation
stops being the valuable thing, because
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follows scarcity and generation is no
longer scarce.
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What's rare, now that a decent first draft
is available to anyone with an afternoon
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and the right tools, is the ability to
look at a pile of plausible options and
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with reasons, which one is right and why
the others aren't.
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Anyone can produce.
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Very few people can tell what's worth
producing.
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The market is quietly re-pricing those two
skills, and the second one is the
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editor's.
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There's a delicate thing inside this,
though, and it's the reason editing is
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than it looks.
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When you edit your own work, killing a
weak line only costs you your pride.
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When you edit a client's, you're removing
something they brought, and often
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something they're attached to — because
they made it, or half-made it, or fell for
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it on the drive over.
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Somewhere in every prepared client's
folder is a darling: the reference they
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that's pulling the whole project sideways,
the clever line that has to go.
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--> 00:03:47.157
Cutting it isn't a matter of being right.
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It's a matter of being useful without
being wounding — of serving the work
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than overwriting it with our own voice.
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The aim is never to redo their idea as
ours.
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It's to make their idea better by its own
lights, and then get out of the way.
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Good editing and good feedback are close
to the same skill, and both of them are
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mostly restraint.
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I'll admit this reframe comes easily to
me, because I came up in advertising, in
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York, and advertising was never a blank
page either.
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You were always working with someone's
actual product, someone's real business,
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someone's brand that already existed and
already meant something to somebody.
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Nobody was inventing from nothing.
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The craft was knowing what to leave out —
which true thing about the product to say,
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and which nine equally true things to keep
quiet, so the one that mattered had room
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to land.
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That was editing all along.
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We just didn't call it that, because the
empty-page story sounded more like magic
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and magic is easier to sell.
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There is one real risk in the prepared
client, and naming it is part of our job
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Arriving prepared can look, from the
inside, like arriving finished.
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You've done the reading, you've made the
references, you've got a draft — surely
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thinking is mostly done and what's left is
execution.
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But preparation is raw material, not a
plan.
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A folder of forty references isn't a
direction; it's forty directions, and the
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of choosing between them hasn't happened
yet.
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It only feels like it has, because
gathering is satisfying and looks a lot
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deciding.
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So the first thing we're often really
doing, before a single word gets changed,
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telling the difference between a client
who has a position and a client who has a
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lot of tabs open.
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Both walk in prepared.
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Only one of them has actually chosen.
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Helping the second become the first is
most of the value, and it's pure editing —
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the structural pass, done on a brief
instead of a page.
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None of this makes us less involved in the
work.
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If anything it puts us closer to the part
that counts.
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We're not standing at the empty page doing
the trick the client couldn't.
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We're standing next to a full one, doing
the harder thing they can't do for
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themselves — reading their own material
with a stranger's eye and telling them,
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plainly, what's worth keeping.
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The blank page was never the difficult
part of this job.
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Deciding what deserves to stay always was.
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That hasn't changed.
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It's just finally visible, now that
everyone shows up with the page already
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Thank you for indulging us in today's
Shallow DeepDive.
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We hope you'll join us for the next one.
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Until then, take care.