A long long time ago in 2007 a war had broken out in the world of advertising between the established order of powerful and traditional creative agencies (usually known by initials) and new and funky digital agencies (usually called something stupid).
In one corner “AMV, BBH, JWT, ETC” all claimed superiority because they could make expensive TV ads and their CEOs were often knights. In the other corner “Spunky Badger” and “The Unicorn Jockeys” put the fear of Christ in clients with a presentation about lots of people using the internet. This proved to be the biggest threat to creative agencies since cynicism. Small offices adorned with exposed brick and motivational quotes, mostly staffed by children, popped up all over Shoreditch and took a massive bite out of the establishment’s action. These young upstarts rocked up to meetings in hats and told clients that no one watched TV anymore and if you didn’t put your entire advertising budget into Myspace the world would have forgotten you existed by Tuesday.
As an outsider this was hilarious to watch as the truth was somewhere in the middle. The creative agencies could only think in TV scripts and the digital agencies didn’t realise that some people lived past 25 and the fact that their blog had 100 readers (ludicrous!) didn’t make them an authority on how to sell Domestos.
The thing was – there was a lot of money to be made flogging internet soothsaying and lots of people were giving it a try. Some were good. Some were shite. I worked with both. You’ll be surprised to know I’m going to tell you about the latter.
Spunky Badger had been losing their grip on one particular food client and had decided to hold an “inspiration day” to try and both win back some favour and flog some ideas.
The client (a wonderful man) fucking hated them and confided in me that he had been fantasising about firing them for ages. He particularly hated their patronising tone and the way they wasted his time. I’d seen the day’s agenda and it was mostly going to patronise him and waste his time so fun was a comin!
The client was a proper meat and potatoes kind of marking chap with a vast experience. His formula was to cut the price, buy as many ads as he could on TV and then go home. It had worked for decades and last week so he was pretty comfy. I could put a TV plan together in 20 minutes leaving us the rest of the day to laugh at the latest shit the badgers were peddling so we got on famously.
Putting together an all day meeting for 30 people that isn’t a complete waste of time takes a lot of careful planning and empathy for the attendees. Lacking in both Spunky Badger kicked off with the usual horseshit:
By 2010 Lycos will own Norway.
By 2012 babies not born live on the internet will not be accepted as real by their grandparents.
Human’s next evolutionary step will be to have their mouths replaced by a twitter feed.
You get the idea – wild unscientific supposition used to set up the importance of the day and channel more advertising budget in their direction.
Oh I forgot to tell you. It happened to be Red-Nose day but by then no one gave a shit much less did anything about it except the person chairing the meeting who was dressed as David Hasselhoff in Baywatch. Wig, flip-flops, red shorts and holding a red inflatable don’t drown thing. If there was anyone left in any danger of taking him seriously they soon joined the rest of us as he gesticulated with the don’t drown thing and foretold that the internet enabled toaster would be everywhere by the end of the year.
We were about an hour in and the client was justifiably irked because we’d achieved fuck-all except play an overly elaborate introduction game. He was more interested in his next big launch which was for a Thai Green Curry cooking sauce. He was thus far unconvinced with Spunky Badger’s expensive micro-influencer route and wanted to cut the price and buy a fuck tone of TV ads and go home.
The Hoff had another route that he was extremely excited about. This was a huge idea called “Paint the Town Green” and involved taking things that weren’t green and painting them green to promote thai green curry which was also green. Not the worst idea they’d come up with but it fell well short of deserving the excitement they were displaying. They were acting as if they had the preliminary sketches of the Mona Lisa or an early demo of Hotel California in their back pocket which is why they felt justified in wasting everyone’s time to “flesh out the idea”.
We spent the next hour listing things that weren’t green.
This displeased our client further but gave me and others some puerile pleasure in the listing process as we embarked on a game of “get the Hoff to write stupid shit on a flip chart”.
“Mars”, “Ken Livingston” and “Joni Mitchell’s big taxi” were all accepted as good suggestions while someone I’d never met but instantly liked took the game in a wonderful new direction by suggesting “Kermit the Frog” and looking hurt and confused when it failed to make the flip chart.
Then someone came in a with a massive bag of balloons.
Importantly the client had made neither good or obtuse suggestions and had presumably gone to his internal happy place which probably involved firing Spunky Badger.
After lunch the Hoff explained the balloons. As it turns out they were in 3 colours. Red, Yellow and Green. He wanted everyone to talk about the various ideas that 30 people had spent a morning crafting but with a fun twist. If you wanted to say something positive you had to hold a green balloon, something neutral a yellow balloon and something negative, red. Fuck knows why.
After a chronically awkward silence with no one wanting to say anything with or without a balloon a young badger cub reached for a green and effused painfully. It did serve to brake the ice however and a few more views followed, mostly green and the occasional yellow.
With impeccable timing the client reached for a red – his first meaningful contribution to the meeting. He thanked everyone for coming and said the meeting was over. It wasn’t but it kinda was.
Everyone who wasn’t a badger filed out of the room happy with an additional hour that we’d been gifted. I nodded at the Hoff for what I think we both knew would be the last time.
It’s not easy being green.
Diaries Of Media 