A creative director in Portland told me to kill my darlings on a radio spot and I still think about that lesson

About two years ago I was working on a 60 second radio ad for a local car dealership and I had this sound effect of a revving engine that I just loved. I thought it made the spot feel energetic and punchy. But the creative director, this older guy named Tom who had been in the game since the 90s, told me to cut it completely. He said the engine noise was just noise and it was distracting from the actual offer. I fought him on it for a whole afternoon but eventually caved and trimmed it out. The spot ran and the client actually reported a 22% lift in calls compared to their previous campaign. Turns out Tom was right. That engine sound was just taking up space. Anyone else ever have a mentor kill something you thought was gold and it turned out better?

3 comments

3 Comments

juliashah11d ago

Have you ever gone back and listened to rough cuts of old work and cringed at your own taste? Sometimes the thing we're most attached to is the exact thing holding the piece back.

viola_ward11d ago

Oh man, about three years ago I found a rough mix of a song I did with my band and I literally had to stop listening after thirty seconds. Honestly, the thing that made me cringe the most was how much I kept a weird synth pad in the chorus that just cluttered everything up. Tbh, I thought that sound was the whole vibe of the song back then, but now I hear it and I'm like why did I think that was a good idea? Ngl, you're right about being attached to something being the exact problem. It's like you fall in love with some detail and don't realize it's actually dragging the whole thing down.

jesse_williams6211d ago

haha oh man, that synth pad thing hit way too close to home. I've got a whole graveyard of mixes where I was convinced some random noise was the glue holding everything together. It's brutal because you spend hours tweaking this one element thinking it's genius, then you come back a year later and it's just... noise. But honestly that's how you get better, right? You gotta make those bad calls to learn what actually works. I still flinch thinking about my old demos lol.