A long long time ago in 2008 things were getting edgy. Comedy was edgy. Music was edgy. Anyone worth their salt was edgy and naturally adverts desperately wanted in on it. Creative agencies were falling over themselves to make ads for Cancer Research or PETA simply to allow them to add some disturbing photos of pulsing tumours and recently flayed minks to a portfolio that once contained Marlborough and Versace.
About the same time an hilarious game of theological tennis was playing out on buses in London. A Christian group had run ads inside buses claiming that non-believers would go to hell. Not sure why, or why they chose that particular medium to spread the word of God (presumably a low Pentecost per thousand) but the Humanist Society then bought some ads on buses claiming that there probably wasn’t a God and we should just enjoy our lives. The fundamentalist Christians forgot that wrath was a deadly sin, decided not to turn the other cheek and paid for rebuttal ads claiming there definitely was a God. This gave the advertising standards arm of TFL a bit of a tough decision to make around fact based substantiation. Fortunately Stonewall dramatically and wonderfully joined the party with some ads saying that God loved Gay people which upset the fundamentalists immeasurably. They complained to advertising standard on the grounds that Stonewall’s statement couldn’t be proven. That’s how I like my irony served up!
Anyway, buses were obviously the pre-Twitter medium of choice for contentious headlines and the people who sold the ads on buses made a killing out of charities who obviously had nothing better to spend the money on.
Around this time I was working on the relaunch and rebrand of a radio station. They wanted to be edgy. They were rebranding to a more edgy name and had employed an edgy creative agency to make some edgy ads. Fuck knows why I was involved but I’d been told in advance that we had to do some bus advertising. Now Edgy radio (we’ll call them that to avoid an absolute disaster) were not really that Edgy. Perfectly nice middle age rock. U2 in a polo-shirt. However, given the edgy bar of radio had recently been set when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank called a pensioner live on air about the former having had sex with his granddaughter, the creative agency had a job on their hands.
I know that those of you who also work in the media side of advertising will agree that one of the biggest perks of the job (aside from the all the free stuff that never affects the way we spend other people’s money) is watching enthusiastic selling of shit advert ideas. Now, usually these shit advert ideas fell at 3 hurdles.
- Out of touch with audience
- Racist
- Out of touch with audience and racist
This creative agency added a 4th.
They had devised some bus-side edgy headlines that would emphasise Edgy Radio’s music taste by treating the music they didn’t approve of like Manuel’s granddaughter.
The first example:
“Middle aged men who like Take That. There’s a register for people like you”
Bit harsh I thought. Especially as someone who can hum along to Never Forget without feeling that qualifies me for sex offender categorisation.
For some bizarre reason the client liked it even though it massively fell at hurdle 1 as Edgy radio played a fuck tone of Take That. Not to mention Back Street Boys, Boyzone, Boyz to men, Boys R Us (how did that never happen? – anyway, back on topic)
Then we went over the edge with introduction of hurdle 4
“Celine Dion is very popular at funerals. Sadly not her own”
4. Death threat
The dark and expensive sentences continued. The next (I forget the exact wording) referenced a recent internet hoax of the death of Michael Bolton and described it as “teasing”.
For some reason the room was congratulating itself on the strength of the message while overlooking that so far the message was that Take That fans were rapists and that it was a shame that Michael Bolton and Celine Dion weren’t dead yet.
By the time the wall was covered in slogans calling for the scalping of Nickleback and the nail-bombing of Eurovision I felt the need to interject to point out we might not be able to run these.
After laughing at my lack of edginess and consulting some lawyers it turned out we would need the consent of the ridiculed and threatened artists that we wished were dead but whom we played on our radio station, to be able to run the ads.
With a wonderful display of self awareness someone from the creative agency raised the prospect of trying to get said consent. That would have been a wonderful phone call.
“Bon Jour Celine. Loved you in Titanic. Can we do an ad that ridicules your work and calls for your death?”
(Puts phone on mute)
“If she’s not game I’m calling Barlow and pitching an ad to him about his fans being nonces”
Turned out no one wanted to make these calls and so we put the new station logo on the bus instead. Which was also edgy.
Diaries Of Media 