San Francisco is the best advertising city in America

The difference between NY and SF ad people?

It’s easy.

New York ad people are assholes.

San Francisco ad people are dicks.

How do I know?

I’ve been both of them.

And I prefer being a dick.

Now, advertising as a whole is a world of enormous ego, made worse by the fact that most involved are hopped up on the lethal combination of insecurity and award shows. But when you add New York City to the mix, as I discovered when I moved there for my first real advertising job, it’s the perfect recipe for assholes.

In New York, I worked for a wide range of assholes. From big, blustery, wipe-their-ass-with-your-work types, to conniving, deceitful, throw-you-under-the-bus types, to talentless, manipulative, rely-on-your-accent-to-fool-people-into-thinking-you’re-smart types. And they all shared something in common. Deep in their hearts and minds, they thought they were better than you. And in some ways they were. They had gotten to their position by perfecting the art of the asshole.

So, as I worked in New York for my nine years, I began to learn this ancient pastime, piece by piece. Some people are born with the asshole gene, and you see them shoot to the top fairly quickly. For the rest of us, we have to just be patient, but give it a few years, and surrounded ourselves with just the right blend of anxiety, fear and success, and it just happens. You reach, or maybe just catch a glimpse of, the top, and then you’ll do whatever it takes to stay there or get there again. Screw people’s feelings. Advertising success in New York is like emotional meth. You want another hit of a Lion, a Clio, fuck it, you’ll even take a goddamn Effie, you don’t care who it hurts.

As I reached rock bottom, as I started to become the asshole I so despised not so long ago, I decided I had to get out, so I moved to San Francisco, where the air was clean, the people were nice, and a spirit of koom-bi-yah filled the air.

Alas, when I got here, despite what I thought was a pretty good book, and despite good contacts at the right places, it suddenly become not a matter of where I’d work, but if. For I was dealing with something worse than all those assholes I’d left behind in New York.

Turns out, San Francisco was full of dicks.

Wireframes in hand, and swf files on their flash drives, SF creative directors labeled my work as “too traditional,” my ideas “too shallow,” my previous agencies “not just dinosaurs, but dead uncool dinosaurs.

The vibe was this: my shortage of interactive work demonstrated a shortage of talent, which, for me, meant a shortage of job prospects.

So, freelance job by freelance job, I lived my own version of my favorite film quote.

“People say, You must have been the class clown. And I say, No, I wasn't. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him.”

And after enough time studying these dicks, I discovered they were coming from an entirely different place than the assholes in New York. It wasn’t solely about ego, although there was a healthy dose of that present. It wasn’t that they had the right answer and you didn’t, although I can’t say smugness wasn’t completely absent.

No, it stemmed from an inherent sense that SF ad people had seen the future, and knew that it was going to take more brains than balls to get it done. It was about looking outside classic media to find an audience. It was about rebranding the untraditional as the new traditional.

The New York ad person in me recoils at this last thought. It was the same holier than thou attitude that brought me so much annoyance when I first moved here. After 6 years here, however, I’ve bought in to it. From the old timers like Butler Shine and to Goodby, to relative newcomers Heat and Pereira & O'Dell, the work coming out of SF makes New Yorkers look like, well, like a bunch of assholes.

Spoken like a real dick.

After 9 years in NYC at dead uncool dinosaur agencies, and 4 years freelancing in SF, Ted is currently an ACD at R/GA SF, and creator of the semi-popular blog, Questionable Skills.