I sat down with Laurence Shanet, one of the founders of Tent Content, a production company based in New York City. Laurence has been behind many of the ads you’ve loved, but never known who did them. He has been a writer, producer and a director, and he is able to craft emotional stories, make us laugh, and turn seemingly impossible creative feats into on-screen realities. That’s why he won CFP’s Young Director Award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, was liste

I sat down for a little Q and A with our creative director, Wayne Best, to get his take on what’s happening with the agency business and how Cog NYC is doing things a little differently. Enjoy. 1. Why did you start Cog NYC? I love advertising. It’s the perfect mix of business skills and creative skills. But, with each promotion from ACD to CD to ECD… you get further and further away from the actual creative work, and spend increasingly more time dealing with things like budg

My husband is a lawyer and hated Law and Order. My mom, a nurse, disliked “ER.” I hated Mad Men, and worked in, you guessed it, advertising. My mom and my husband dislike dramas depicting their fields for the usual reasons: oversimplified, unduly glamorized, and outright misrepresentations of how things work. This is not why I hated Mad Men. I hated how accurately it depicted my life working in an ad agency. The only real differences: no more drinking or smoking in the offic

The most creative brief is actually the tightest. The more narrow the brief, the better the creative that comes out of it. I know the obvious logic is that if a creative has more freedom, they’ll come up with something more creative, but it’s the exact opposite. Nothing is more creatively freeing than knowing exactly what needs to be said. Then you can have a ton of fun finding the best way to express that single-minded thought. Too often today, we don’t have enough discipli

I don't begrudge Sir Martin Sorrell for being wealthy or successful. He works really hard, he's smart and he's certainly built a bigger company than the rest of us have built. That said, his compensation is a sign of the bigger problems in advertising. The issue is that the bulk of money clients pay is going to executives who never touch your business or help you increase your sales. There are layers of people making lots of money at the top, which means less money for the