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The Walls Come Crumbling Down

A long long time ago in 2013, companies pitching advert ideas to potential advertising clients in the hope of winning their business had reached their apex of theatrics. Designers, actors, caterers, musicians, celebrities and Christ knows who were brought in to try and “land the idea”. Sometimes this worked and multi-million pound accounts changed hands, raising the individuals responsible up to illustrious status (financially and egotistically). Sometimes it didn’t. This meeting was an example of the latter.

I had been asked to attend a creative pitch for Kingsmill bread, purely in a consultative capacity and as a neutral in a competitive tender process. 3 separate agencies had pitched a variety of advert ideas and this 4th was to be the last. This meeting was make or break. It was not their first attempt. Their first go was a hideous attempt to get the room singing along to famous songs with the lyrics altered to be about bread. “Muffin Compares 2 U” was easily the pick of the bunch. “Bagel over Troubled Water” was a low point and  “Always Look on the Bread Side of Life” didn’t rhyme either. For some reason “Crust for life” and “Bread-ringer for love” didn’t come up. Ever the professional, I kept my opinions behind a poker face and aside from pointing out that we’d need Prince’s approval rather than that of “the bald Irish girl who hadn’t had a hit in a while” and suggesting Toastbusters, kept my head down all meeting. Anyway, the idea couldn’t be done which was lucky because it was shit and the clients were correctly disappointed and a bit angry but for some strange reason offered its authors another crack at it a week later.

That week the MD of the creative agency called me most days to try and get an angle on how to play the next meeting. It was clear he saw this as a risk everything, go big or go home, shoot from the hip, turnaround jump shot, Hail Mary string of cliché that basically meant they’d fucked up the first meeting. His plan was to bring in actual creatives. Now to those of you unfamiliar with the industry, creatives were the people who actually wrote the adverts. Most people who work in creative agencies don’t write adverts they simply sell the advert concepts to clients and are the polished, expensively educated, legitimate face of the organisation whose two reasons for living were to buff client’s egos and above all…..protect the proposed advert from any erosion of the creative’s initial vision or God forbid, from being rejected.  Creatives on the other hand were deified geniuses who worked in pairs and seemed to only have first names. They sat in offices surrounded by space hoppers, signed sporting memorabilia that they’d drunkenly bought at charity auctions and awards from the 80s. They wore Converse All-Stars, skinny jeans, took smart casual as two separate instructions (think Avril Lavigne or Green Day) and had haircuts (sometimes plural) they were too old for. They supported obscure football teams to highlight their individuality and named their children names that people don’t use any more or flowers that aren’t names. They were rarely allowed in front of clients at all let alone new clients but due to a combination of the Hail Mary status and the fact that “Roll with it” would have won if it had been pitched right, meant the rule book was firmly out the window.

Creative agencies always brought too many people to a meeting so the room was full to bursting. There were 5 people from Kingsmill including the Head of Marketing (top dog), Head of Procurement (top dog of another department, no interest in advertising, didn’t like other dogs), Kingsmill brand manager (top dog in a slightly smaller pack), Head of Research (sniffer dog) and a teenage girl on work experience (shy puppy). Then there was me and 45 or so people from the creative agency including the unmistakeable creatives who’d made a huge effort to not dress for the occasion. One of them was carrying a waist high, long trumpet the type of which would seem at home in any film set in a castle, possibly with a crested flag hanging below it and to be used to precede some kind of announcement. The trumpet you have in your head right now is probably correct. One of either Dave or Kev (can’t remember their real names but they only had one each) placed it in the corner and successfully (up to a point) drew attention away from it by making some comment about the picture of his two kids (clad in Bracknell United and Orkney Island Rovers away kits) on his desk top.

After about half an hour of hand-shakes, biscuits, plugging and unplugging of cables and painful small talk about how great bread is we were ready to go. Apparently, toast is the best thing about bread. Someone actually said that to five people who work for a bread company. Anyway – such high level displays of empathy would never be reached again in this meeting. 

So the big idea was centred around an hilarious character, a Spanish Conquistador. Me neither I had to look it up but the image Google offered was familiar.  A 16th century soldier, metal hat, musket, sword, possibly with a waist high trumpet. Anyway, he would come running into a room where there was some food that wasn’t Kingsmill bread in it, blow the trumpet and say  “EEEEZE THEEZE THE KING’S MEALLL?” Fucking funny I think you’ll agree. Because if you get the mild racism right it sounds a bit like Kingsmill. I can’t remember what happened in the ad after he said that. He probably then got out a sandwich. Or maybe toast because that’s the best thing about bread.

Now to say the room fell flat was to exaggerate silence. Momentum was being lost and I was the only person enjoying the meeting. In the spirit of Hail Mary, Kev (or Dave I forget) stood up and without saying a word, clumsily but dramatically manoeuvred through the crowd, picked up the trumpet and left the room.

The suspense was terrible – I hoped it would last.

The door banged open. In strode Kev. “EEEEZE THEEZE THE KING’S MEALLL?” he bellowed before raising the trumpet, puffing out his cheeks and …..making no sound at all.

There was no time to notice that the trumpet should probably be played before the mild racism because the red faced Kev had already left the room probably cursing himself for having not worked on his 16th century trumpet chops prior to the meeting.

The suspense was terrible – it did last

The door banged open. In strode Kev. A new Kev. Hail Mary Kev. “EEEEZE THEEZE THE KING’S MEALLL?” he bellowed before raising the trumpet – now at a proper 90 degree, trumpet angle rather than the previous oboe effort. This had the unfortunate consequence of placing the business end of the sonic shot-gun in work experience’s face. With a momentary glance at Beryl and Rhododendron for inspiration, he unleashed hell.

I can’t describe the noise, mainly because it was drowned out by work experience’s scream suffice to say it was loud and a horrible bass frequency that literally ruffled its victim’s hair. The retaliatory scream on the other hand was eight or nine octaves higher. Screams in meetings are rare at best but this was a proper, fear of death, reflex, blood curdling, Janet Leigh in Psycho, scream.

Lesser men would have left this deafening, sonic tennis rally at 15 all but not Kev. Not Hail Mary Kev. Clearly running on adrenalin rather than reasoned judgment he took aim again. Work experience was having none of it. She grabbed the barrel on the inhale and with a swift wax on wax off, got her self out of harm’s way. This had the unfortunate consequence of placing the business end of the sonic shot-gun in top dog’s face. Top dogs don’t scream. “Don’t fucking blow that again” he barked.

By now I was definitely the only person enjoying the meeting and I was fucking loving it but was in danger of losing my poker face. Fortunately the two fog horns, scream and threats had been sufficient for people outside the room to feel the need to check we were ok so ever the professional, I took the opportunity to calm the masses outside and laugh in secret.

After shorter pleasantries and thanks than was customary, 45 people and a trumpet left the room.

“What…(10 second pause)…the fuck…(10 second pause)…was that?” asked top dog.

An hour later my phone rang, it was the MD.

“How do you think it went?”

What’s In A Name?

The other day someone asked me: “Didn’t someone in your office once throw a Barry Manilow record at Michael Cain?” The answer was “not quite” but the memory jog was enough to nudge me out of retirement.

A long, long time ago (and also, now) advertising companies were struggling to differentiate themselves from each other. They all basically provided the same service, employed the same kinds of people and churned out the same shit so it just came down to a subtle blend of nepotism and yacht hookers as to who got the most lucrative accounts. So in a gargantuan effort to create differentiation companies tried adopting mantras, mottos and monikers to try and stand out. A fantastic example of the latter was a company that called itself “Mother” because of you know, reasons. There was also “Naked” and “Tequila” because those are also both words. Anyway, back to Mother. They fully embraced their maternal status by decorating their office like a 1950s house and having a teapot in meeting rooms so that one of them could do the “shall I be Mother?” joke, which was just brilliant, every single time. This was back in the days of business card and they each had a picture of their own mother on the back of theirs. This had the unfortunate consequence of (predominantly male) visitors in large, long and boring meetings arranging the cards they’d been given into piles of “would” and “wouldn’t”. As the meeting progressed some of the old dears were promoted which can’t have been nice for junior sat opposite to witness.

As the arms race for a plausible company personality continued some agencies experimented with the unwise weapon of the company video. These were usually bland montages of staff high fiving, feigning moments of inspiration around whiteboards and going around corners on the office scooter to “I’ve got a feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. Our company wanted to go further and deliver some powerful messages of our company ethos (something about being mavericks – just like everyone else’s) and hired the services of a properly maverick director. We could tell he was out there because his purple dungarees were only half done up – the right-hand strap trailing behind him like a shoulder tail of nonconformity. He then spent the day convincing various people in the company to set fire to their dignity while he filmed it. There were some Top Gun volleyball scene, over and under high fives in corridors which took hours to film because no one does that but the highlight was my boss aggressively announcing to the camera that we “didn’t accept the status quo” before throwing a Status Quo record out of a fifth floor window. A tad literal but powerful none the less. Being such a slave to his craft the semi dungareed maestro had no time to consider any possible consequences of hoying Rocking All Over the World out of a top floor window and its descent on to the streets of London was left to fate. He certainly didn’t expect it to hit John Hurt who lived next door to us. Probably the most surprising thing that had happened to John since he last peered into an egg on LV426, the Knight of the Realm, Oscar winner and general class act was apparently surprised to find the sky raining three cord masterpieces and he didn’t like it (like it la la la like it).

A competitor’s more obsequious effort saw them reworking a Donna Summer classic to declare to potential clients that they “worked hard for your money” which had the unfortunate consequence of going viral in a whirl-wind of ridicule from the real world. “So you better treat her right” was replaced with “buying lots of GRPs”. For readers outside the industry – just trust me, this is horrible.

Then came the mottos. In the spirit of the “Who Dares Wins, Death or Glory” pithy delivery of adjectival inspiration came some proper horse shit. “The Freshness Company” appointed a Head of Freshness to preside over a team of “Forward Thinking Mother Fuckers” (big pile of business cards in the “would” section). These were the actual words used. A good friend of mine discovered he’d been anointed into the clairvoyant oedipuses but was pleased to discover it only meant you were expected to have a youtube channel and flick through Stuff magazine once in a while. Others were “Fueling Brand Power” which sort of made sense if you knew that Americans spell “Fuelling” differently and prioritise global consistency over the London office avoiding a one-metre-high spelling mistake above their front door. Another chose a different tack of “People first” which was bold and indeed accurate, when it came to redundancies. I imagine they are “Making People Great Again” now.

Over time advertising company brands became less and less about being any good at advertising and increasingly about how diverse their workforce was and saying “data” at every opportunity. Pitches went from ad scripts and mood boards to a live demonstration of how the new Datatron 2.0 tool could empirically prove that white men were rubbish. I’m sure Mother has since rebranded as Gestational Parent and their latest intake of Gen Zs would be horrified to learn of their company’s problematic name back in the day let alone the bleak history of an industry that thought it was ok to fling vinyl at the elephant man to showcase their lack of fucks for convention.

Word to the Mother.

No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

It’s been a while! Another wonderful contribution from a guest contributor. It’s all true. I was there throughout. What started with laughter ended with blood (and after a respectful break, more laughter).

Enjoy!

A long time ago in 2011, a common practice for agency folk in the media industry was (and let’s face it, still is) to invite advertising sales reps from publishers, TV stations and the like to join leaving dos. This takes place under the auspices of building professional relationships with business partners. The fact that the sales reps are also expected to pay for everything on their company credit cards is obviously neither here nor there, and don’t go thinking otherwise, OK?

On one such occasion, the departee was a workmate called Paul, who was moving to pastures new after several years of mostly unblemished agency service. Paul’s leaving drinks started on his last Friday, at lunchtime, in a very fancy and expensive steak restaurant. The TV station he’d invited to build closer relationships with/foot the bill had a strict ‘no alcohol’ policy during the working day, but Paul was good friends with someone at the company, and the policy was disregarded with giddy abandon. Red wine was guzzled, and porterhouses demolished.

One of the lunchers was a recent graduate who had joined the TV station that week. As most people do when in the early throes of their career, she looked to her more seasoned and experienced peers for guidance on how to behave – in hindsight, a massive error – and enthusiastically dived headfirst into the vino. Good for her.

While this was going on, some of us were working. I was finishing a major pitch presentation with a few other people from the agency, including our CEO. It hadn’t gone particularly well. For a bit of ‘pitch theatre’ (see ‘The Walls Come Crumbling Down’), we’d laid real turf in the company board room, to create the impression of a countryside spa resort. This seemed relevant at the time, but had the unintended consequence of multiple spiders and worms crawling out of the turf and over our prospective clients’ feet during the presentation.

Following a curt ‘we’ll be in touch’ from the now far less prospective client, a few of us in the deflated pitch team went to the pub opposite our office to consider our folly. After nursing a pint or two outside the increasingly busy boozer – it was late Friday afternoon, after all – we heard a bit of a commotion, as Paul’s leathered lunching crew made their way up the street towards us, surrounded by a thick cloud of Malbec fumes (probably).

A short interjection from your humble narrator and leathered lunching crew member: The host for the day was keeping a particularly low profile as the most senior member of the no-drinking organisation she was representing by wearing a high-vis jacket that she has swapped for a cigarette with a workman outside a pub.

As he neared his work local for one last hurrah, Paul jogged ahead of the lunchers – clearly he still had a thirst on – and turned to beckon the gang to catch up. The (by now extremely shitfaced) graduate/grape enthusiast in the group didn’t need asking twice, and charged towards Paul, who held his arms out wide to absorb the impact. As she drew nearer, Wine Grad launched herself into the air, possibly imagining the dulcet tones of Bill Medley and Jennifer Warner as she had the time of her (working) life.

Humble narrator: In Paul’s defence, his invitation was clearly nothing even close to the acrobatics that were about to be attempted which should have been obvious from the pint glass in his hand. It is a testament to the man’s can do attitude (and love of WWE) that  he didn’t simply sidestep the proposed Cirque Du Soleil shit and return to his pint as Wine Grad launched herself through a shop window.

Unfortunately, by this stage in proceedings, balance was not a friend to Paul. As Wine Grad crashed into him, he unsuccessfully attempted to catch her, but instead rotated roughly 180 degrees before falling on top of her in the middle of the road. Paul was not a small chap, and was also holding a pint glass at the time. In his efforts to cushion the fall, he accidentally wound up cracking Wine Grad on the back of the head with said glass, shortly before she landed skull-first on the concrete.

After a few seconds of awkward groans and laughter from the collapsed duo, and a collective sharp intake of breath from everyone outside the pub, Wine Grad sat up and touched the back of her head. Upon feeling the blood we could all see trickling down her neck, she started to scream her lungs out, while Paul (also splattered with a mix of his and her blood) tried to down-play the inadvertent glassing, picking shards out of his arm while attempting to make his way to the bar.

This downplaying was scuppered somewhat, as shit went from bad to horrible when Wine Grad stopped screaming, and started having a massive seizure in the street. An ambulance was called, and first aid administered, after which she was driven to a local hospital for observation. Unfortunately for her, the day got even worse; after spectacularly breaking company rules in her first week on the job, getting accidentally glassed, having a seizure and ending up in hospital, her boyfriend broke up with her that evening.

Still, I think she managed to keep her job. It’s not easy to get sacked in media.

Final interjection: We didn’t win the pitch. Turns out as a pharmaceutical brand they weren’t sure about the the worms in the meeting room or the blood soaked teen on the steps of reception. Someone should have put baby in the corner.   

The Company You Keep

A long long time ago since forever everyone was boycotting stuff. Still are. Advertising platforms declared each other evil and clients convinced themselves they saw Lizzie Proctor dancing with the Devil and pulled budgets left and right. Mostly from the Left.

Younger readers might be forgiven for assuming that the current kicking Facebook is getting from the world’s most honourable advertisers is something new but I frequently had to deal with people wanting me to pull advertising from the Daily Mail for years. They called themselves “Don’t Give in to Hate” or some other Obi-Wan Kenobi quote and tried to publicly shame advertisers who used The Mail, Times, Telegraph, Express, Sun, Star, Jewish Chronicle (yes really!)….. If you tried to explain to them that putting all your budget exclusively into The Guardian and Stalinist Bugle didn’t do wonders for your unique cover you were deemed to be part of the problem. I’m all for fine targeting but unless you were flogging Levellers tickets, self-righteousness or conspiracy theories about Jewish people this strategy just wasn’t going to work.

Fortunately when all this was happening Newspaper advertising was in marked decline and you could choose not to pick sides by sticking it all online. Equally fortunately Stop the Debate (I mean Hate) were only interested in papers (much easier to burn) and hadn’t got round to noticing the Mail Online yet.

Politics was one thing. Unfortunate placement was another. In the good old days of newspapers and TV you could very occasionally get your advert placed next to a story that gave you a problem (Slim-Fast ad in a Karen Carpenter movie – True story, not me – did happen) but by then if you kept words like “Crashed”, “Massacre” or “Diana” out of your print ads you’d probably be ok.

Then Youtube fucked everything up. The Times was justifiably irked by the fact that the pesky internet was stealing all its advertising revenue and got a room full of graduates to spend their waking lives on Youtube watching Islamic extremist content (probably radicalising themselves silly) in the hope of finding some UK advertisers in and amongst all the 9/11 porn. By employing the same strategy that Veruca Salt’s Dad did to get a golden ticket the Times worked out that one in a couple of billions adverts on Youtube was a pre-roll for an Al Qaeda recruitment video:

 “Exciting start-up looking for highly motivated team player with nothing in the diary from mid-September onwards – previous experience unlikely”

As I say, this was a fractional percentage of Youtube videos as the Al Qaeda Vlogger market was still in its infancy. I think Bin Laden was still releasing cassettes at the time (Now That’s What I Call Terrorism 25 and the like). The odds of your ad appearing before this sort of thing were tiny. It happened to me twice.

In the first instance my client was a bank. They’d been tipped off by the Times with a screen shot of one of their ads featuring near a fun video of a masked man in a cave, AK propped up against a rock ranting away in the usual fashion. Lots of pointing. Client went ape shit but the irony of his demeanour matching that of the chap in the video clearly escaped him. It was clear that while the Mujahedeen were not a central focus in the bank’s customer segmentation he viewed the issue as more than one of wastage. That said the video had only had about 15 views which basically accounted for its creator, his mum, 3 mates who didn’t deem it good enough to send it on and 10 kids at the Times but we still got an almighty kicking for the negative PR (of which there was none) and boycotted Youtube furiously except for when we wanted to flog bank accounts to young people.

The second instance my client was Mercedes and their ad featured near a Combat 18 video. I’ll see your, bank near a recruitment ad for Al Qaeda and raise you a German car brand desperately trying to distance themselves from their most valuable customers of the 1930s, appearing by Neo Nazi propaganda! All heil broke loose and phones and laptops slowly melted under the demand for explanations and news of how all advertising had been pulled. Fortunately it turned out the ad had not been placed there by my company but by someone at Mercedes directly.  Merc gave in to hate and  the culprit was properly boycotted.

Getting Onboard

A long long time ago in 2014 the advertising industry was nobly and publicly trying to increase its Diversity. Everyone was on board with the challenge, no one had agreed the details of the brief, everyone started work anyway. It was very important to the powers that be that our company was seen as “leading the way on Diversity”. As mentioned previously we were very proud of the way we on average paid women more than men for doing the same job which was awesome and a bit illegal but was enshrined in our creds presentation as evidence of being good at advertising.

An otherwise uneventful board meeting was brought to life with the news that the whole company would be having a “Diversity Week”. We’d had Radio Week when people who worked in radio came in for a week to talk about radio to a company that bought ads on the radio and that went well so we were going to do the same thing with Diversity.  Questions arose.

Q “Does is sound like we don’t care about Diversity 51 weeks of the year?”

A “No”

Q “Have we agreed what we mean by Diversity (eg racial, gender, sexuality, socio-economic, disability)?”

A “No – The Diversity Board will do that”

Q “The what, who are they?”

(List of women produced and put on screen)

Q “Can you have a Diversity Board who are all women?”

(Humble narrator joins Diversity Board making mental note to ask fewer questions in meetings)

I attended my first Diversity Board meeting and was greeted with the warmth you’d expect from an older and more senior male entering a room that was 100% female discussing the patriarchy.

The idea being discussed was to give women time off during Diversity Week to highlight the gender pay gap. I pointed out that we paid women more so to stay true to the idea women would have to give up their lunch hour or come in at the weekend. If they didn’t like me walking in they fucking loved me now!

Skimming the meeting agenda it was clear that gender was the sole focus and we needed to diversify the diversity. A remarkable brainstorm ensued.

After deciding we would focus on racial, gender, sexuality, socio-economic and disability diversity someone suggested we broaden the circle (no pun intended) to include obesity.

“Absolutely not!” said a previously silent female holding her lunch (a single apple) in one hand and her thin privilege in the other. She looked hangry so we moved on. Evidently fat lives did not matter.

Another suggestion was that we make a commitment to hiring some ex-offenders to give them a gateway to re-enter society. A nice idea in principle but might fall down on execution (not literally as we don’t do that any more).

“That’s Brian our new head of HR who’s previous experience was shanking people on D-Wing -we call him Shawshank for bants”

We softened the ambition to people who didn’t have a degree but excluded murderers, which was better.

Over the next few weeks the plans for Diversity Week came together with some genuinely brilliant and transformative initiatives but there were a few bumps on the way which made me laugh so we’ll focus on those.

A Diversity Charter was written and was emblazoned on the wall in reception. The whole company would be told to sign it (literally on the wall), as would any new joiners. I asked what would happen if people didn’t want to sign it and was told that they would be made to go on diversity training and if that failed (actual word used) they had to leave. Not wishing to nit-pick but I was pretty sure you can’t fire people for disagreeing with you and or “failing” at the reconditioning process (even with Shawshank as HR Director). The Charter and Orwellian training stayed but the Luca Brasi signature attainment method was shelved.

The biggest bump was a well-intentioned support of people with disability via an empathetic staging of a Paralympic event for people without disability in the park opposite the office.

Yes really!

We were going to make up for the fact that we had no employees with disability and less than ideal office facilities for visitors with disability by getting people without disability to play a few games of wheelchair dodgeball and get Channel 4 to film it.

I’m usually a sucker for allowing potentially amusing mistakes to play out to reach their natural conclusion but this one needed intervention. I raised my concerns of the optics of all of this but seemed alone in my views. I tried to make a parallel to blacking up but the average age in our company was about 12 at the time so none of them were born when Little Britain was on.

They did accept that dodgeball was not a Paralympic sport and decided to switch to something that was but I was still getting nowhere with my warnings. I tried a compromise of empathetic sumo in fat suits but Hangry was having none of it.

I called in reinforcements (adult females) and deputised some colleagues onto the Diversity Board to rig the vote. They objected considerably more forcefully than I could/did and they were naturally listened to.

Sumo was a no no.

Living On The Edge

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.

  1. Out of touch with audience
  2. Racist
  3. 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.

The Future’s Bright

Coming out of retirement with the grace and style of an Elvis kung fu demo (if you’re confused ignore what follows and search, then return) with another guest contribution. All true – I was there. Enjoy!

A long time ago in the mid-noughties, alcohol was the boozy lifeblood of the advertising and media industry. If LinkedIn had been a thing in 2006, downing pints and draining vodka luges would have been highly sought-after skills.

At the company I was working for at the time, each floor of the office had a large, continuously well-stocked fridge full of premium-strength lager. This was free to all staff, courtesy of one of our clients.

These fridges rapidly became the stuff of dreams, as the lager was soon accompanied by products from other clients, namely chocolate bars and pasties. Party time!

Unfortunately, some of the more refined employees were a bit upset by the lager-centric nature of these fridges. “What if I don’t drink lager? It’s so unfair!” was an actual real complaint from a member of staff during a company Q&A.

If that was the Q, the A from company management was simple, and astonishingly tolerant. In addition to free lager, chocolate and pasties, free white wine was also made available in the now-bulging Fridges of Wonder, to accommodate the beer bigots.

Side note – this didn’t stop the complaints, as a few people protested that they preferred red wine rather than white, and felt they were still being penalised for their palates. In short, some of the more precious employees in the company were confusing perks with entitlements, and their place of work with a Slug & Lettuce.

Anyway, these increasingly stuffed fridges were opened at 5.30pm every day, with a similar impact to releasing the Kraken. Members of staff would often get royally pissed-up in the office, with a predictable trifecta of consequences:

  • Theft
  • Damage
  • Intra-agency shagging

If sofas could talk…

Now I know what you’re thinking.

“If people are off the clock, they should be allowed to drink/steal/break/shag as they please. It’s a free country.”

While I agree with your logic, this assumes company boozing was confined to the post 5.30pm slot. The reality was a bit different.

The TV buyers in the agency – mostly loud angry Essex blokes called Chris – were at the vanguard of the day-drinking movement, and typically bypassed anything as banal as ‘food’ of a lunchtime. Instead, they preferred decamping to a local pub for a liquid diet of many pints of Foster’s (Monday to Wednesday), ramping up to Stella by Thursday/Friday, before returning to the office to shout abuse at ITV.

Unsurprisingly, these liquid lunches sometimes led to poor decisions, like the time when a group of lads (and I do mean LADS) hit the pub especially hard, to build up a bit of lager-based courage for their turn as that year’s Helicockters. Read ‘You’d Better Watch Out’ for context, and keep in mind that, astonishingly, the Helicockters were not a one-time-only gig.

Jason was a workmate of mine, a proud member of the troupe that year, and he had quite the afternoon.

After getting heroically pissed in the space of 45 minutes at a local hostelry, he returned to the office to undertake his solemn duties as a sworn Helicockter. Jason’s beer-powered gyrations clearly impressed one of the secretaries in attendance, and he proceeded to make a new friend.

Those poor sofas.

Riding high on a cocktail of post-coital endorphins and several pints of Belgium’s finest, he decided that it was the perfect time to confront his boss and tender his resignation.

Jason’s boss was a fairly taciturn man called Dave. Dave was one of those rare agency folk who had characteristics like ‘integrity’ and ‘honesty’. He was also quite an intense fellow, with a reputation for taking his job very seriously, and he expected his team to be as focused and hard-working as he was. He was definitely not a man to be trifled with.

Bearing in mind that Jason had left his team a man down, during an exceptionally busy pre-Xmas period, to get shitfaced and swing his cock around in front of a load of secretaries, he might as well have opened a trifle factory next to the office.

Undaunted by his boss’ fearsome reputation, Jason arrived on the floor with a bang, stumbling towards Dave’s desk while shouting that he ‘wanted a word’. He’d clearly made his mind up about his glittering future career path, possibly as a part-time lager taster and full-time ladies’ man. While this was going on, in an office, in the middle of a normal working day, a few of the people on the floor attempted to halt Jason’s progress, to no effect.

The Stella had made him confident and strong. They don’t tell you that in the adverts, do they?

Strong would also be an apt way to describe Jason’s resignation outfit. Technically there was no dress code at the company, but even so, I’m sure he was breaching an unspoken regulation or two based on the fact he was wearing nothing but his underpants, a vest, and for reasons unknown to this day, a pair of aviator sunglasses.

All the while, Dave was understandably seething. He refused to look up at the ensuing spectacle, and merely growled ‘not now’, while getting on with his (and Jason’s) work.

Jason/The King Of The World, by this point looming over Dave’s desk, pulled his aviators down to the bridge of his nose for full dramatic eye contact effect, and uttered four simple words:

‘Dave – I’m not happy.’

It just so happened that made two of them. Dave looked up, and to his eternal credit, resisted the urge to physically attack Jason. He simply and firmly instructed Jason to go home, adding that he would ‘deal with the issue tomorrow’.

Jason wobbled out of the office to enjoy what I can only assume was a sub-optimal night’s sleep. His demeanour was noticeably different the following morning. Sheepish is the word. I think he even put a tie on, which may have contributed to him somehow salvaging his job. That, and the begging.

Jason now lives in Australia, which has two professional benefits:

1 – a vest/pants/aviators ensemble is considered appropriate work attire.

2 – he’s a very long way away from Dave.

Life Moves Pretty Fast

I know the last one was the last one but we’re back due to lukewarm demand (think T’Pau reunion or Police Academy 7). Admittedly, more “Bof” than “Encore” but I’ve been encouraged to share the story of the worst grad ever.

A long long time ago in 2010 I inherited a truly terrible junior team member. She had worked for pretty much every team in the company to universal failure but I arrogantly, stupidly and incorrectly though I could make her better.

It was not so much that she was bad at her job it was more that she was never there to do it. Strangely she was very visible (and indeed, audible) at social events but was thwarted in any and every attempt to pop into the office for a bit of work with increasingly implausible obstacles.

Such obstacles could pop up at the damdest moments and her chair would remain empty. In her first week she got lost while going out to get lunch. Luckily she found her way home and while her boss was of the opinion she should stay there for the medium to long term, just to be on the safe side, HR stepped in to demand she was given another chance.

One day her chair was empty and we had long since moved from counting her sick days to counting her present days to save time. Two things worked against her.

1.She was a terrible liar

2. She was very unlucky.

Imagine if Ferris Beuller had routinely posted photos of himself at the baseball game before crashing the Ferrari though the wall of double physics.

On this occasion she had emailed in to say her father was very sick and she had to visit him in hospital. Now the odds of Daddy Beuller turning up at reception that very same day were tiny. Who’s parents drop in to see if their kids want to have lunch?. Nobody’s did. Not even hers. Any other day.

We congratulated Dad on his miraculous recovery, much to his confusion and then had to have a horrible conversation with her the next day which was very unedifying for all involved. We all got strapped in for the explanation. Are you ready? Here we go.  She explained that there was confusion of who was in hospital and that she had found out it was actually someone else’s Dad when she got there. That cleared that up.

But we still couldn’t fire her.

She once phoned in sick from Glastonbury. She didn’t think to leave the field and while the voicemail she left included some fantastic coughing and groaning the sound of Orbital and tens of thousands of fucked people in the background detracted from the performance.

But we still couldn’t fire her.

She left work early because “she had to get a piercing done”.

But we still couldn’t fire her.

As time progressed and we saw less and less of her, the stories had to get more fantastic. She had clearly done a bit of research and discovered that simply saying cold or period every time would only keep her going for a couple of months so she had to get creative. And get creative she did.

She didn’t show up for work one day and that afternoon emailed us to say that she had disturbed a burglar who had knocked her unconscious (hence why it was afternoon because of the unconsciousness you see)  and stolen her company laptop. She hadn’t been able to get in touch because she was unconscious. And she wasn’t able to email because…oh shit she’d emailed in proof that her story was bollocks. Our emails had a different signature when not sent from the laptops our company provided. This also left us not doing our duty if we didn’t send her to the police to tell them about a non-existent burglar and left her with no option but to destroy or keep the laptop. Realising that her cheeky lie-in had elevated quickly to larceny via perjury she enthusiastically resigned (via email!!)

The story has a happy ending though as the bugler left the laptop on reception – people can change!

No Message Could Have Been Any Clearer

This is the last one. Thanks to everyone who’s read, contributed or been in touch and to anyone who was there at the time. While there’s been quite a bit of ridicule flying about it’s mostly been done with affection. There are some truly ridiculous people in the wonderful world of advertising but they are often hilarious which goes a long way towards their redemption. There are also some wonderful people, many of whom will had experiences similar to those found here. That said, the one person who’s thus far escaped the smug roasting of these pages but has been no stranger to fuckuperry is for it now. I will leave you with some examples:

  • Showed up on my first day as a fresh-faced 22 year old in full suit and (my only) tie that had a dolphin on it.
  • Forgot to book an entire advertising campaign. This was awkward as we had nothing by way of explanation and it was the most basic service our company provided. It was the equivalent of waking up after an operation, asking the surgeon how it went and for them to say “oh shit I knew there was something I was meant to do while you were asleep”. I had the unenviable task of telling the client that we just hadn’t done it but not to worry because next time we would, because that’s what we normally do.
  • Rejected a call from someone I’d not spoken to before because he’d called just outside the 3 hour window I’d agreed with his PA. The nerve, right? I later saw on the news that he had just been made Global CEO of the company that owns the company that owned my company and that I was one of his 130,000 employees. If I’d known that I might have taken the call and not texted him to “give me a bell tomorrow”. He was cool about it. Lovely fella, he’ll do well.
  • Put my team’s entire Christmas party budget on red at roulette. We’d all agreed this was a good plan and had mapped out two evening scenarios based on the two available consequences and hit the casino together. Sadly that consequence was Black 13 so Wetherspoons it was. Still a great night.
  • Got into an irreconcilable argument with my Selfridges client about whether or not Selfridges was a shop. I had dared to use the word “Retail” which infuriated her immeasurably (possibly exacerbated by all the cocaine she did)  because Selfridges was apparently not a shop but an experience. I took a different position because people kept going in and buying stuff which in my view made it a bit shoppy. Being childish (23) and combative I offered to pay for some research where we asked people “what is Selfridges?” Being less childish and high she declined the offer and had me taken off the account.
  • Accidently made an American girl I’d not met before cry in a “dealing with conflict” roll play training session. She was dealing, I was conflicting and was asked to act as Mathew McConaughey’s manager (whom she frequently dealt with and frequently made her cry) and evidently nailed it. As it turns out Matthew and his manager are different people though you wouldn’t have known from my performance as I simply shouted at her in a crap southern accent while resitting the temptation to pat my chest while humming. But it worked and she cried. In fact I’m not sure why this made the list.
  • Accidently broke a recently received award on the award ceremony bar while doing (as it turns out a vey accurate) impression of the kind of twat who impatiently breaks an award on an award ceremony bar.

That’s it!

This Girl Could

A long long time ago from about 2011 onwards  women, girls, feminism, femininity and all things that weren’t male were front and centre. The whole industry was falling over itself to rebalance years of male dominance and show who run the world. Female empowerment was massively en Vogue (both metaphorically and on the front cover) and companies left and right were pledging to hire, promote and pay women, more. Ours was no exception. We’d set our stall out to increase our gender diversity (which in those days was a binary comparison) and our female CEO, female MD, female deputy MD, half female board and predominantly female work force were going to make damn sure it happened. As were the men, probably, but it didn’t really matter.

One headline grabber was the gender pay gap. The advertising industry was doing the analysis and it often showed that men were sometimes more than women at some levels. Women were justifiably outraged and wanted to know how and when it would be rectified. Our own analysis showed that in our company women were paid demonstratively more than men and at most levels but that data was off message so we decided to hire, promote and pay women more, more. We’d already written manifestoes and PR releases by then anyway.

We also decided to provide some tailored training for women only, to make up for the years of tailored training for men only that had never taken place. One element that was covered was the fact that women were less likely to ask for pay-rises and taught them how to do so. Unsurprisingly, newly empowered and inspired women returned from training and asked their female bosses (who were also on the training) for a pay-rise. Equally unsurprisingly their bosses promptly told them to go fuck themselves. The bosses secured their reservation in Madeline Albright’s special place in hell and the temporarily empowered were left wondering if their work sisters were only doing it for themselves. Irony is a bitch!

Central to all of this was WACL. A vast industry wide, group of rich and powerful women who held banquets, balls and networking events to lament the lack of rich and powerful women in the industry. On the rare occasions men were permitted to attend these events they effectively became compulsory for me due to the fact that my bosses and clients were all rich and powerful women. I would doff cap, put on black tie and wander around feeling like Rupaul at a Klan rally.

One afternoon that preceded the annual WACL ball which I was not attending due to my chromosomal challenges my CEO rang me in the office in some distress. She had arranged to meet my clients (rich and powerful women) in a hotel bar but was running late and wanted to put her ball gown on. It was 4pm and the ball started at 7pm so time was short. She wanted me to drop what I was doing and hurry across town to meet my clients that I wasn’t meeting and she was because she couldn’t. So I did. After a 20 minute trot I arrived, bought a round of drinks but before I could sit down my CEO swept into the room in full ball gown and told me to leave because it was “girls only”.

Now I’m not saying that if the genders were reversed it would be fucking outrageous because of the patriarchy or something but it gives context to the point of the story of when she took me clothes shopping.

One morning she put a meeting in my diary and its location was a coffee shop. This was a massive break from her usual meeting arrangement MO which normally comprised of her shouting “come here” across the office. I went along but she stopped at a small, boutique clothes shop, the type of which I would not normally frequent. She explained that she didn’t like my shirts. They were too dark and were often single colours which wasn’t reflective of the effervescent, dynamic image that she had decided for me. At that point I was still unclear what that had to do with our current location and why she hadn’t just shouted “put on a loud shirt” across the office. The clouds parted as I was ushered inside the completely alien, over-staffed shopping environment and immaculate tailors stared at me and my boring shirt.

I was told to try on shirt after shirt and parade them in front of her. Flowers, penguins, stripes, stars, dots, splashes were all tested and in full spectrum. A chromatographic eruption to rival a firework display. How I’d love my shirt of many colours. Actually, even though I fucking hated the one she finally selected I still felt it was a nice gesture for her to buy me a shirt and set me on the path to effervescent dynamism. When I caught sight of the price tag my gratitude increased to the point of feeling a bit guilty. Not for long. She pointed to the cash till and told me she’d meet me outside.

“How the fuck are you going to pay for it from out there?” I internalised.

It’s still the most expensive shirt I have ever bought. In fact I own suits that cost less than it. Nice suits. Suits I’ve worn to weddings.

Again I’m not saying that if a male CEO took a younger female employee dress shopping (under the ruse of it being a work meeting) and then got her to model some before selecting one for her anyone would raise any objection because of the patriarchy or something. But he’d have paid for it.

The Really Real McCoy

A long long time ago in 2013 my client was a bank. Back then banks weren’t the paragons of moral virtue they are today.  In between financing some truly terrifying dictators around the world and evicting the residents of a not for profit old people’s home that missed some mortgage payments, my bank spent a lot of time polishing their brand image. The whole sector was at it. Global financial meltdowns were excused by images of horses on beaches and while not actually being able to talk about the things they did (horses did not trot past tanks on streets or shivering pensioners) they had to make some shit up. This is where we came in. However on one occasion they had decided to get their own house in order and my friend and I were summoned to a diversity seminar at their illustrious palace in the city.

Lacking in any context or pre reading we were surprised to find a room full of 100+ people, none of whom worked at the bank but were like us, suppliers. The stage on the far side had one occupant and although none of us had met him we could tell instantly he didn’t work at the bank. He was black. Now I’m not saying this bank didn’t employ black people but this man was very obviously the focal point in the room so was obviously senior and well paid, so clearly a ringer. He didn’t wear the bank uniform either. His suit was beige, his shirt stripy, his tie yellow and he wore a lot of gold.

After pausing for dramatic effect he confirmed he was American via the medium of volume. An incredibly long personal introduction followed and the theatrics continued as he set out why we were gathered there while stomping around the stage, gesticulating wildly, covering several octaves and occasionally dabbing his brow with a tie-matching brow dabber. The sheer power of the man’s delivery meant that his congregation hung on his every word somewhere between mild amusement and the hope of inheriting the earth. However we were here for one topic and one topic only, Diversity. The bank had employed him for the sole purpose of making it the most diverse bank in all of bank land. We were going to bring Diverse to the City. We were going to be Equality control. The times were a changing and this revolution was going to be broadcast live.

The Reverend had a dream. The day had come for that bank to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. Tricky, because the bank’s creed was to make a fuck-tone of money through financing dictators and evicting pensioners.

He held these truths to be self evident: that all men (not women obvs) were created equal. Again tricky because the bank almost exclusively employed white men to senior positions.

He rightly sensed doubt. He rightly provided light.

The light came with the revelation that the bank wasn’t actually going to change its diversity profile because that was a bit of a kafuffle but instead we had to.

A masterstroke. A triumph of hypocrisy rarely seen this side of the Vatican. An organisation about as diverse as Devon in the 1950s wanted its suppliers to fix its diversity footprint by increasing their far more diverse, diversity. They even had to hire someone in who wasn’t white to tell us the plan!

There was more.

He didn’t just want us to increase our diversity (for the white boys at the bank) he wanted us to increase the diversity of the companies we bought from on their behalf. Ie their 3rd party suppliers. Tricky for us because we bought all their advertising so the 3rd party suppliers we represented included ITV, Channel 4, Google, Facebook, every radio station, every newspaper, and the whole fucking internet.

There was more.

Diversity included LGBT.

I was effectively tasked with finding out how gay or  L, or B, or T  (Q didn’t get an invite) the employees of ITV, Channel 4, Google, Facebook, every radio station, every newspaper, and the whole fucking internet was.

It wasn’t clear if we needed to work out how gay each employee was individually (from mild fascination with gladiator movies all the way through to still liking Madonna?) or if the whole scale qualified and we simply had to add it up and quantify against a base of straight because obviously this shit is binary. I assumed the latter but it wasn’t as thought they were going to give us a spread sheet and expect us to…wait, hang on.

We were shown a spreadsheet with a column for supplier and then % columns for Men/Women, White/Non White and L,G,B,T broken fucking out!!

“Does anyone have any questions?”

A couple, yeah!

“I’m not sure that the organisations we represent have records of their employees’ LGBT status because of all the laws and morals so how..”

“Estimate – Any other questions?”

A couple, yeah!

“So you want us to estimate the LGBT status of hundreds of thousands of people purely based on the companies they work for?”

“Yes”

To be honest the Rev got me there. The positive response to the rhetorical fucked me right in the logic and I retreated to the universally puzzled congregation.

Having outlined this herculean task the Rev rightly noticed we were in need of some context and some inspiration. He delivered both.

The context was all about the spreadsheet. He didn’t care about the diversity of suppliers he simply wanted the figure in the total column so the bank could communicate the combined % diversity (hence adding LGBT to increase the %) of its cash flow to the City which would presumably result in more investment and therefore more money for tanks and pensioner bailiffs.

Then came the inspiration. A remarkable performance followed. An emotional story of his Great-Great-Grandfather, a slave named McCoy who invented a piece of kit that revolutionised the development of the rail road he was working on and who rose up from the shackles of oppression to inspire the still common vernacular of “The Real McCoy”. The room was filled with emotion as the narrator unsuccessfully fought back tears. Steadying himself with the weight of the story of his ancestor’s gift to the world he saw that his story had touched the room and others joined him in dabbing their eyes. A powerful reminder of the noble and necessary continuous drive towards equality and love of all, irrespective of creed, culture, gender, sex, sexuality, class, age, disability, or political position. As misguided, hypocritical, mildly offensive and stupid as this effort was at least the man in the centre was a true believer, a crusader who’s tears confirmed his commitment. Shame on my cynicism. Shame on my doubt. Shame I googled “origin of the phrase Real McCoy.”

Shame.