Gift of the Gabberer: Jim Ritchie
Jim Ritchie is the founder of Brand, Creative and Design Company, US+US. He talks about his relationship with guilt before and after starting his own business.
Oh, and he’s also my boss.
Interview by Rhiannon Crane
First things first, why advertising? What drew you in and what kept you curious?
I think like a lot of English copywriters, the job was something I fell into by accident. After a couple of false starts on two degrees, a one-day gig as a bin man, a brief stint working in a Sheffield night club, a six-month folly as a landscape architect, and a sliding-doors moment where I almost joined the fire service, I ended up starting an illustration course in my home town of Newcastle. In the first week a tutor from another course strongly suggested I should do advertising. And, that’s how I got into advertising. This is a long-winded way to answer a short question — as you can tell I’ve always been open to things, I’m naturally inquisitive and I like to know what I don’t know.
When you first started, how did you imagine your career progressing after so many diversions?
From the beginning, the importance of awards was indoctrinated into me. D&AD was the pinnacle followed by Cannes. When I started at Saatchi & Saatchi, London in 2001 they were at the peak of their creative powers — Agency of the Year here, Agency of the Year there. Any creative there would tell you that ideas were the key to travelling the world, to living life to excess, and getting paid very well for it, too! I always imagined hitting 35 and having a Porsche, a pool, and a shit-load of awards and cash. But reality bites, we were not kept on and I realised just how hard advertising could be and how high the creative bar was set. At that point it was a case of how do I keep up rather than where am I going.
How long into your career were you until you won an award?
My partner and I had got our first internship, before Saatchi & Saatchi by winning the UK Direct Marketing Association’s award for Best Emerging Team.
In hindsight, I reckon that might have inflated our egos.
Our egos were further inflated by getting four TVCs shortlisted at Cannes in our second year in the industry, followed a year later by another couple of shortlists for an outdoor campaign. So we thought we were doing alright — back then there were significantly less categories so even getting a shortlist was something to get excited about. And then I hit a five-year period of total mediocrity before I landed another award, despite to my mind, producing work that was more worthy. Advertising can be a cruel mistress sometimes.
Has your attitude towards awards stayed the same or changed?
I think it's great to be recognised for pushing the creative envelope, but the industry is giving out far too many shiny trinkets to too many people for totally unnecessary work — I’m looking at you climate change press ad for unknown climate change organisation.
It often feels like who isn't winning awards. And that in itself promotes general anxiety - or guilt - amongst the creative community. There are the people that win awards and feel fantastic. There are the people that don't win awards that year and feel terrible. Personally, I feel anguish about not winning an award even if haven’t got any work entered. That’s conditioning right there. Fuck you advertising!
A year or two ago my young son, came home from school with a sticker on his jumper. In super-hero-esque type it read, “TOP WORK!”. He then stuck it on one of my D&AD pencils. A child cut through the crap and saw that pencil for what it was - my Good Boy award, given out as frequently and numerously as primary school achievement badges.
When I stepped out of a typical advertising agency and into a place where there was zero focus on awards I gained a more circumspect view. I asked myself what’s more important, winning accolades that matter more to senior management and their bonus targets — or learning, growing, and understanding the business of brand and communication, and fostering collaborative relationships with clients that matter in the long term; things that will keep you relevant as you grow into your forties, fifties, and sixties? It’s an easy answer.
Who or what inspired you to start your own company?
As earnest as this sounds, it was a genuine desire to try and create a more positive experience for client-folk and creative-folk alike. We started US+US because we looked around and saw ‘agency’ people who were miserable or unfulfilled, and clients who were frustrated or mistrustful. The more we talked about this dissonance, the more we decided that there had to be a better way —- a way that was more about the creative+client working methodology, and less about ‘the work, the work, screw-you-work-life-balance, the work, the work’. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re client-side or agency-side, there’s often this ‘us and them’ attitude that pervades. We’ve all seen or experienced it, whether it’s creatives saying ‘the client doesn’t get our ideas’ or the client saying ‘the agency doesn’t understand my business needs’.
Not sure we can fix it, but we can try.
What’s your proudest career moment?
I remember trying to get our first job; we were working our arses off for free in the hope of eventually getting hired. In my head I had this rose-tinted, slo-motion idea that when the moment came the creative director would call the department together and say "everyone, I have hired this talented and passionate young creative team!” and then the champagne would flow. In reality a traffic manager stuck his head in the door and said ‘heard you boys are sticking around’. Looking back, I’m proud of that achievement, despite feeling totally underwhelmed at the time. In the here and the now I would say my proudest moment is starting US+US with no money or backing 18 months ago, and for it to not just have survived through COVID, but prospered. We’ve got 13 fantastically individual and talented employees, a new office and a small but growing list of really good clients who subscribe to our values and approach.
What’s your worst career moment?
Not sure about ‘worst’ moments. definitely got a couple of guilty moments. There was this very lovely, charming and talented creative director (Neil) that I used to work with in London, One night when I was drunk I decided to go back to the office at midnight. Neil had taken our pitch work to New York and had sent an email to the pitch team in London saying how well the pitch has gone and congrats to all involved. For some unknown reason I thought it would be hilarious to email everyone - CEO and creative alike, with the response, “And yes, but who are you?”. (Don’t drink and email.) Suffice to say he was pretty pissed off. Years later I was at a bar in Cannes and I heard this booming voice shouting across the crowd - “Jim Ritchie! …and who the fuck are you?!”.
Guilty.
What is the potency of guilt in your life?
I’m not sure guilt is necessarily a potent force in my life, but it’s definitely very present. I feel guilt for not being there all the time for my kids. I feel guilt when I work late and my partner is at home cooking dinner (I cook too!). I feel guilt when I give someone a critical review. I feel guilt when I take too long to respond to an email. I feel guilt when I forget to do something - which happens all the time. I feel tremendous guilt when I wake up with a hangover. And as a forty-ish, white man, I feel guilt; the sins of the patriarchy weigh heavy, and I’ve become acutely aware of my privilege, despite growing up not thinking I was. I’m very conscious that as a man in 2021 I’m viewed differently, perhaps more negatively than how my father would have been viewed at a similar age; society is setting a new standard for masculinity and gender equality. I’m ok with that, and I accept the guilt-by-proxy and the change-pains that go with it. In many ways, I feel guilt more often as I get older, and I wonder whether that’s simply increased conscientiousness and empathy that comes with age, or something more ingrained.
What about guilt in the industry?
The industry asks a lot from everyone who is in it. It asks you to work harder. To work for less. To work weekends. It asks you to work on brands that challenge your values. It asks you to work with people you don’t respect. It asks you to do lots of things that might not necessarily make you feel guilt at the time, but that definitely compromises you. The guilt, invariably, comes later.
Do you think advertising is a guilty industry?
To a certain extent we all did a deal with the devil when we decided on advertising as a career. I think every business has the right to self-promote, but not all clients that choose to advertise stand up to ethical or moral scrutiny. I’ve worked with not-for-profits like Quit, Kidsafe and CALM (a suicide prevention charity in the UK), but like anyone whose worked for a network, I’ve also worked on alcohol brands, gambling brands, and mainstream brands that have totally unethical production methods or business practice. The good thing about running your own business is that you can choose your level of guilt by choosing which brands you want to work with. We actively choose partner businesses that don’t compromise our ethical and moral standpoint.
I find that guilt can make me both productive and unproductive. Do you think guilt is a friend or foe of creativity?
If guilt’s a motivator then it’s the wrong kind of motivation.
It’s like if you go home to your partner because you feel guilty about not being with your partner, that’s the wrong motivation. You should go home to your partner because you love them and you want to be with them. I’m not sure where guilt fits into creativity. I’m sitting here trying to think of a time when guilt created something fantastic and I can’t. Shame definitely drives people to try harder, to prove a point to themselves or others — like when a creative director actively or inadvertently shames one of their creatives for not being good enough, but guilt? Nope, not for me.
So how do we do that, how do you manage your guilt and how should we manage guilt as an industry?
So to be clear, guilt is something that you should only feel when you’ve done something wrong, or when we act against our values. Healthy guilt allows us to seek forgiveness and correct a wrong — like not delivering work to an agreed timeline or brief. Being late with work causes problems, it lets people down, it costs businesses money, it creates friction. So, if we are some way responsible, we need to acknowledge our mistake, we need to apologise to affected parties, we need to learn from the experience and we need to try to be better next time. That’s healthy guilt and that leads to positive change.
Being allowed the freedom to fail in our industry is critical, as is the freedom to be allowed to learn from our mistakes. I’ve always liked DDB's four freedoms: freedom from fear, freedom to fail, freedom from chaos and freedom to be. That said, I feel like as an industry we’re pretty bad when it comes to setting unrealistically high standards and expectations and this can provoke a different kind of guilt; unhealthy guilt. In the wrong kind of high pressure, high status environment, sometimes simply forgetting someone’s name can cause us to feel terrible, disproportionate guilt. We can feel like we’ve let ourselves down, our peers down, let the agency down, compromised a relationship. This kind of unhealthy guilt leads us to self-punish or self-loathe rather than change our behaviour for the better.
We don’t always get it right at US+US, no-one does, but we’re consciously and constantly aware of the things and issues that have the potential to lead to our people feeling unhealthy guilt. We try to make sure as a business we offer a psychologically safe environment where we don’t try to create unreasonable expectations that can’t be met.
What advice would you give to a young creative who is struggling with feeling guilty?
First question would be are you ok? Are you actually feeling guilty about making a mistake or doing something wrong, or are you experiencing feelings of shame? Shame is a deeply held belief about your unworthiness as a person and that’s a sign of something that needs more than my two cents' opinion.
If you are a young creative I’ll say this. Working in a high pressure, fast-paced, opinion-filled, creative environment, where your knowledge and experience is limited, undoubtedly you will fuck up or let people down. It will happen. 100% guaranteed. BUT it’s not the mistakes themselves that matter, it is your response that matters — how you learn and grow as a result. Be self-compassionate, forgive yourself, but make sure the next mistake you make is a different one.
As a final note, if you’re working for an agency and you’re feeling guilty about your output, that’s either because you shouldn’t be in a creative department in the first place, or you’re being set up to fail because the expectations are too high. Everything else in-between should be manageable. If your work is objectively good (get trusted feedback) and you’re still feeling guilty, you need to look at things more holistically and perhaps consider your options.
After a long day/week what’s your go to guilty pleasure?
A nice bottle of Italian red accompanied by mind numbing, expensively produced, Netflix sci-fi nonsense.
I’ll leave it there. I’m starting to feel guilty about taking up too much of your time.
