The glass palette on the studio floor was a mess of deep violet and crushed gold and it was beautiful before anyone had a chance to say a word about it. It was a pile of raw pigment that we had mixed with a bit of oil to see how the light would catch the grain and the camera saw every jagged edge of the powder and it saw the way the oil made the purple look like heavy silk.

This was the original dream for the campaign and it was bold and it was strange and it was exactly what a luxury brand needs to stop someone from scrolling past a digital ad. But the dream was about to go into a file and that file was about to go to twelve different departments and that is where the light goes to die.

I was sitting in my car in the parking garage and it was nearly six on a Friday and the air in the concrete box was heavy and hot and smelled like old exhaust. I opened the file on my phone and the first thing I saw was the count of the comments and there were 61 of them.

My thumb shook a little as I scrolled and then my phone rang and it was the vice president of marketing and I tried to answer but I hit the red button instead of the green one and I hung up on her in the middle of a parking garage under a low ceiling. I sat there in the dark and I knew she would think I was being rude or that I was angry but I was really just tired of looking at 61 ways to turn a violet spark into a beige smudge.

The Inspector’s Paradox

The first comment was from the legal team and they wanted the claim about the glow to be moved three inches to the left so it did not cover the edge of the bottle and the second comment was from the regional lead in the eastern market and she thought the background was too moody for her customers.

Then there were the notes from the product team and they felt the texture looked a bit too messy and they wanted the grains of powder to be smoothed out in the retouching and then there was the note from the founder. The founder had circled the whole image with a digital pen and she had written one word and that word was safer and she put a question mark after it.

We build these systems because we think that more eyes on a project will make the project better and we think that if we let everyone have a say then we will catch all the mistakes before the world sees them. We treat a brand like a building that needs a dozen inspectors to check the wires and the pipes and the foundation and we forget that a brand is not a building but a feeling and you cannot find a feeling by committee.

Each person who looks at the PDF has a job to do and their job is to find something wrong and so they find something and they write it down and they feel like they have added value to the day. But they do not see the other 60 comments and they do not see how their one small request for a lighter shadow or a bigger logo or a smoother skin texture is pulling the soul out of the work.

In a real studio you spend four hours setting up a single light and you use a tiny piece of black card to create a shadow that is only as wide as a finger and you do this because the shadow is what gives the cheekbone its shape. If you take that shadow away because someone in a meeting thought it looked a bit dark then you lose the shape and if you lose the shape you lose the beauty and if you lose the beauty you lose the sale.

This is how a

la product photographer

actually works and it is a game of inches and it is a game of holding on to the truth of the light while a hundred hands try to grab it.

“If you change one gear in a system you have to change them all or the timing will never be right again.”

– Maria P., Clockmaker

I think about Maria P. who spends her days fixing old clocks and she told me once that… a marketing campaign is the same way. You cannot just change the color of the sky or the crop of the model or the shine on the lip without affecting every other part of the frame but the people in the PDF do not know this. They see a flat image and they think they are just moving a piece of furniture in a room but they are actually pulling a thread out of a sweater and soon the whole thing is just a pile of yarn on the floor.

The cost of these comments is low for the person who writes them because it only takes ten seconds to type that the blue should be a bit more green but the cost to the brand is massive. When you follow all 61 notes you end up with an image that is perfectly safe and perfectly boring and it looks like every other beauty ad that has ever been put on a shelf.

It is the average of everyone’s fears and it is the middle of the road and the middle of the road is where you get hit by the truck of the competition.

I stayed in the parking garage for twenty minutes and I did not call the vice president back right away because I needed to look at the violet pigment one more time before it was gone. I thought about how the studio felt when we were shooting it and how the air smelled like expensive perfume and how we all leaned in to the monitor and we knew we had something that was different and special.

We were not thinking about the legal department or the regional leads or the “safer” question from the founder and we were just thinking about the way the light hit the oil. The problem is that we confuse broad sign-off with good judgment and we think that if everyone says yes then the answer must be right but the opposite is often true.

If everyone says yes it is because you have removed everything that might make someone say no and the things that make people say no are often the same things that make people feel something. A bold shadow is a risk and a weird color is a risk and a messy texture is a risk but those are the things that stick in the mind of the person who is buying the product.

Protecting the Point

I finally started the car and I drove out into the light and I realized that my job was not to manage the 61 comments but to protect the one thing that mattered. I had to go back to the office on Monday and I had to tell them that we were not going to smooth out the powder and we were not going to lighten the background and we were not going to be safer.

I had to tell them that the mess was the point and the shadow was the point and the violet was the point.

It is hard to stand in a room and tell a dozen people that their notes are not going to be used and it makes you look like you are not a team player and it makes you look like you are difficult to work with. But being easy to work with is how you end up with a brand that nobody remembers and being a team player is how you end up with a campaign that dies by consensus.

I would rather be the person who hung up on her boss in a parking garage than the person who let a PDF kill the best shot we ever took. We have to trust the people we hire to do the work and we have to trust that the vision we started with was the right one even when it feels scary and even when the founder wants to know if we can make it a bit more like the stuff they saw last year.

The beauty industry is built on the idea of something new and something better and you do not get to the new stuff by following the old map that everyone has already seen. You get there by mixed pigment and raw oil and a light that nobody else thought to use and a shadow that stays exactly where you put it.

I called the vice president back when I got home and I told her the truth and I told her that I hit the button because I was overwhelmed by the file and she laughed and she said she had not even looked at the comments yet because she was too busy with another fire. She told me to do what I thought was best and she told me to keep it bold and I realized that half the time the committee is just waiting for someone to tell them to stop.

They are waiting for someone to be the boss and to say that the 61 notes are just noise and that the violet pigment is the only thing that stays. So we kept the shot and we kept the mess and we kept the shadow and it was the best performing ad the brand had in five years.

It did not look safe and it did not look like the average of a dozen departments and it looked like a mess of purple and gold on a glass plate. It looked like the truth of the product and that was enough.