Let’s face it, we’ve become accustomed to quickies. There are examples abound. Whether turning to AI like Grok or Chat GPT. Because ‘Googling it’ has become tedious (not that you were venturing past page 2 of the search results anyway). Or shopping online for everything from food to fashion,(even when the same thing is a 20 minute drive away) – fast is the name of the game. Unfortunately, conditioning the mind for the fast lane leads to unexpected speed bumps when you apply the same ‘need for speed’ in the workspace. In the day and age of ‘exploding offers’ sprinkled from everything from retail to even job offers, may I present to you the exploding deadline. You’ve heard one before most likely. The hallmark “we need in by the next hour”, or it’s elder brother – “we need to submit it by close of business.”

Yet, ask a common person about what they think life in advertising or communication must be like and you might hear them draw inspiration from the popular Advertising Drama Mad Men. As an industry veteran, I can tell you that many a creative soul have ruminated at their open office desks about the apparent mismatch between the silver screen and reality of the industry today. One of the things that truly stand out today, is the amount of time the creatives feel they get to solve a brief. Gone are the days of long lunches, fancy parties, copious amounts of cigarettes and alcohol after work (or under the table at work) and a brief that could be solved within half a month. What has been ushered in instead is the demand to be always at the beck and call of your clientele with instant solutions. Instant Ramen creativity. The ability to solve briefs and generate tasty artwork like a pop-up toaster before the end of day or business hours. And that can be a luxury too. The internet meme that best describes this is where an artist is tasked to draw a picture of Spiderman in 10 minutes, 1 minute or 10 seconds.

So why are exploding deadlines bad? It earns its place in the ladder of bad decisions right next to satisficing stakeholders and not end consumers. Failing to provide enough time for a creative to invest in the creative work, is planning to fail in the long run. You may meet your daily deadline. But it’s winning battles at the cost of losing the war. You can rest assured that you aren’t getting the best out of your creative team. Yet what is ample time to give a creative is a goldilocks problem. Give a creative too much time and they may sit on it, gestate, and hit the doldrums of analysis paralysis, or worse be called off to work on a more pressing deliverable. Perhaps at the root cause of the problem are highly efficient creatives who with experience demonstrate quick creatives is a possibility. The type who can pick up briefs and churn out executions of solutions rapidly. They take pleasure in solving the problem and moving on to the next challenge. As if they were climbing an insurmountable mountain of briefs. But this causes clients to always shrink deadlines. To try their luck.

Today explosive offers is combined with the subservient subliminal demand to to be always-on and always reachable. To hop on a call at a moment’s notice no matter where you are. This was impossible in the time of Mad Men. In fact, this was impossible in the early years of my career. I left my desktop at the office. A cell-phone was a luxury, a smartphone putting you in a different league in the early days. It was ok to take up the work the next day. Today’s creative conundrum lies in the easy access to your company laptop, your phone number being mandatorily registered on your company’s intranet and the social engineering of those invisible walls that make it hard to say no. Because even if you did and thought you won more time to crack that brief, it just might loop back to you and land in your plate with a reduced time to crack. And the cycle continues.

Exploding deadlines at the end of the day, don’t make for explosive work. What it is, is a recipe for run-of-the-mill creativity and worn out creatives.