I'm still here.

Not sure whether the advertising industry is, however.

More soon!

Office signs.

It was a warm Tuesday morning. I caught the train into town, got off at Parliament station, walked down a wind-swept Lonsdale Street, climbed a hundred steps up to the entrance of a vast grey office block and entered through sliding glass doors big enough for an aircraft hangar. No wonder. You could have parked a jumbo in the lobby.

I crossed the marble floor to the lifts. One whispered open and took me to what felt like the eightieth floor. I was the only person in it. The digital clock on the electronic floor indicator read 9:15 and I wondered what time the other million people in the building must have started work.

I sat in a glassed-in reception area for about ten minutes reading one of those free newspaper magazines full of ads for diamond-encrusted watches and articles about how to cope during a recession. Then a woman burst through the door, smiled and grabbed my hand, shook it furiously and then led me down a passage-way and around three corners to an office cubicle the size of a cupboard. In it was a desk and a computer. Next to the computer was a stack of A4 pages about two feet high. That was the job.

*

We got the computer going and set up a highly confidential guest account and a password and a user name, all of which I immediately wrote down so I wouldn't forget them. Then I set to work.

It wasn't all that hard. It was just long and convoluted and full of jargon and there were ten acronyms to a page. My job was to make it readable by humans. The problem is that this kind of writing has meaning only to those who wrote it. Once you take the jargon out it doesn't mean anything at all. Alter the words 'strategic implementation' and the rest of the paragraph collapses around it like a house of cards.

That was why, despite almost never worrying about work when not actually doing it, I had had nightmares about it the previous night.

*

Mid-morning I decided coffee might help. The kitchen was two corners and a quite lot of passage-way back towards the reception area.

Printed signs were all along the walls with the kinds of preachy messages you expect to see in a kindergarten or a Uniting Church meeting hall. One read Diversity and had a picture of two disembodied hands shaking; another was Excellence with a magnifying glass as if any excellence around the place was hidden in a file or somewhere; a third was Co-operation with two smiling flowers.

Then I reached the kitchen. There were different signs in there. One over the sink read DO NOT LEAVE YOUR DIRTY DISHES HERE. PUT THEM IN THE DISHWASHER. THIS MEANS YOU all in 72-point serif type with 'dirty dishes' and 'you' underlined to add extra emphasis to the expression of latent, seething hatred between the fellow workers.

I opened the fridge for some milk for the coffee. It was full of nearly-empty packets of caramel Tim-Tams, scraped-out plastic tubs of Kraft French onion dip and mouldy jars of Old El Paso nacho salsa. There was no full cream milk, but plenty of skim. To make up for the Tim-Tams, of course. Coffee tastes like mud with skim milk. What a beautiful place to work.

*

I went out for lunch at a sunny open sandwich bar on a mezzanine overlooking Bourke Street and read the Financial Review. Peter Ruehl on the back page was asking, if we thought bailing out GM-H was such a good idea, why we hadn't we already gone out and bought a Holden? Indeed. Holden's specialty is marketing dinosaur V8 utes to knuckle-dragging oafs, and the government says 'Here's billions of dollars, go make some electric cars.' Sure.

I walked back to the office and bashed away at the computer all afternoon, slashing and burning text and destroying acronyms and dragging capitalised words off their high horses and back to humble lower case along with all the other words.

Then I signed off and walked towards the lift lobby past a sign that read Harmony with an illustration of a musical note. The elevator chimed when it opened. It was a happy sound.

Joker's last three questions.

(The final instalment following parts one, two and three.)


18. Do you blog at work?

Especially at work. What else is there to do?


19. Name the worst agency you ever worked for. And the upside.

Adtown was an appalling excuse for an agency. It was a retail pretender with a couple of crap accounts that fell out the back seat of a second-rate account executive's SAAB convertible. Account service could be better described as mail service. Creative consisted of two bearded check-shirted ex-finished artists from Kilsyth. The MD was lazy and useless. The CD couldn't make a decision to save himself. The upside? Leaving after five minutes.


20. Finally, name the best agency you ever worked for. And the downside.

M & C Saatchi, during its first five years in Australia. It cleaned up at awards nights five years running. It used to hire a truck to fetch them at the end of the night. Downside? No downside in creative, but the account service department was a revolving door in the early years. Something about continually being told to fuck off by creative. It was advertising agency heaven.

Life at the bottom: a new blog for juniors.

Junior is a new blog about starting a career in advertising. Why would you want do that? Junior is designed to answer that question and offer therapy and alcohol to sufferers. Junior is undesigny, fresh and calls networking a stupid fucking buzzword. Its top menu bar reads 'home', 'wtf?' and 'drinks'; nailing in three short words the very essence of a day in advertising.

All of which makes it a very good read. Even if you're not a junior. But you were once.

(Via Stan Lee at Brand DNA.)

Joker's twenty questions, continued.

More answers to Joker's 20-20 interview. (Part One here and Part Two here.) I'm getting there. Three questions to go.


11. What's more frustrating, doing crap work that the client absolutely adores and tells everyone about, or doing great work that ends up in one print ad in the ROP section and gets mentioned in an unknown ad awards show?

The first. Being forced to do crap work is the bane of the industry. If you do great work that remains obscure, you still have the satisfaction of knowing you can do great work.


12. You get a mysterious phone call from a serial killer that says he's going to kill your most hated client and he wants your input on how to make it a special event, what do you reply?

"Hi, Craven. You're up late!"


13. An ideal agency needs______.

Luck, brains, money and talent.


14. What workshops would you give creatives, accounts people and clients to make them better professionals?

If creatives are any good they don't need workshops. You can't teach a writer to write and you can't instil an art director with an innate sense of design. So if they don't cut it they get to go to the New Job Start training workshop at Social Security. Accounts people will benefit from workshops such as finance management to help them maximise revenue and lateral thinking to reduce time-wasting and endless reporting. Clients? Probably the same as accounts people.


15. Worst category/ies to work on and why?

Good question. Varies with time and place. Financial services was great from last century up to about, oh, a month ago? (In fact, finance and banking has been tanking since about last year. You wouldn't believe the off-the-record stuff I heard from my mortgage originator clients from late 2006 to the present. It went along these lines: "There's bad news and good news. The bad news is we're fucked. The good news is so are the banks!") The traditionally great category in advertising was cigarettes. I started soon before cigarette advertising was banned by governments (but not their sale, which tipped billions into their coffers).


16. Ten things your average layman does not know about Australia that you think would be of interest.

(a) It's not Austria. (b) It is a littoral society (no-one lives in the middle, which is why we win more Olympic swimming medals than we should. Also you can't swim in the rivers because crocodiles eat you). (c) Its two major cities - Sydney and Melbourne - warred over which should be capital but, being Australia, no-one could make a decision and instead, they built a new capital in the 1930s in dense bushland halfway between the two cities. (d) In recent times, kangaroos have been reclaiming the capital, invading sensitive Defence Department land and inflaming the debate about whether we should farm and eat the animal, hitherto protected. (e) Kangaroo meat is the most nutritious, low-fat meat you can eat. (f) Global warming has fed into this argument, with proponents of kangaroo farming claiming cows and sheep emit alarming levels of carbon. Kangaroo farming would, therefore, alleviate both global warming and invasion of Canberra. (g) New Zealand is a small nation independent of Australia to its south east in the Pacific Ocean. It is so insignificant that most of its population lives in Australia ("across the ditch"). (h) New Zealand has the highest proportion of sheep to people in the entire world. (i) Ultimately, Australia will invade New Zealand, sell off all the sheep, introduce the kangaroo and export its meat to the rest of the world. This will drag Australia out of the coming world depression and introduce the world to the joys of eating kangaroo meat, naturally lean because of all the jumping. (j) Then there's Tasmania. Maybe another day.


17. The single best put-down you've ever witnessed.

A verbose accounts guy called Gale was debriefing a major new business pitch presentation to the CEO of an agency. He finished, looked enquiringly at the CEO who, after a pregnant pause, replied, "I haven't understood a fucking word you've said, Gale." Dead silence in the room.

Joker's 20-20 Interview: Part Two.

Joker at Why Advertising Sucks recently posed twenty questions to advertising people around the advertising blogosphere.

My answers to Joker's first five questions are in the previous post; here are the answers to questions 6 to 10.

6. Have you ever considered doing something other than advertising? If so what and why?

No. I am qualified to do nothing as well as I can write, which is less of a conceit than a condemnation.

7. What's more evil, focus groups or the nut goblins we call clients?

Focus groups are the suspension of common sense, good judgment and nerve; and are a denial of the essential creative talent some of us offer the business. If you want a focus group you don't need an agency. Clients who spent money on both advertising and focus groups are wasting precisely half of their money. Just like the old saw says.

8. Describe the most hateful of these types of ad people you've met in your life:
a. AE
b. Art Director
c. Copywriter
d. CEO
e. CD

a. Trent or Angelo.
b. Leo or Sophie.
c. Simon.
d. The American one on the tram.
e. Jason, Mikey or James.

9. What's the first thing random foreign people say to you when you say you're an Aussie? Yes, you can include interesting bits and the annoying ass comments people say like some reflex.

I have been mistaken for a South African, a Swede, an Englishman and others. They are possibly surprised becaue I use words of more than one or two syllables and I refuse to use nicknames for people with whom I am not acquainted. Even then I demur. I can't stand the Australian habit of shortening names to one syllable and adding -ie on the end.

10. Local musical bands and products anyone who visits should definitely give a try.

In Melbourne: Chinatown, Brunswick Street, Lygon Street, Acland Street and the CBD will provide enough mainstream and niche food, entertainment and music any visitor will need.

Joker's 20-20 Interview: Part One.

Way down there in my blogroll is a line that reads You Want to get into advertising? No you don't.

Anyone who is considering a career in this industry is well-advised to read the blog it points to, entitled Why Advertising Sucks.

Why Advertising Sucks is a collective of disgruntled advertising people who write in a hilariously fresh, no-holds-barred kind of way about their sad, pathetic lives chained to the particular wheel of commerce we call advertising.

One of these people is Joker. Joker's output is heroic in scale and content. He is a writer's writer and wears his heart on his sleeve. Everyone in this nasty business - which is about to get a whole lot nastier - can identify with Joker's experiences.

One of Joker's projects has been to pose twenty questions to people around the advertising blogosphere and Joker was kind enough to ask me.

Here are the answers to the first five of Joker's twenty questions, because as everyone knows I can't get the whole job done in one sitting.

1. If you had to draft an honest job description for a position in advertising, what would you include in it? Pick any job you like (more than one if you like).

Copywriter wanted. Must be prepared to work long hours writing copy great enough to impress a creative director who thinks he is Hemingway; short enough to impress an art director who hates more than three words in a headline and two paragraphs in body copy; long enough to actually convey some kind of convincing message and creative enough to sell a bad product to a non-existent target audience in a tanking economy via a 10 x 2 ad in a trade magazine published in January. Money used to be great but now an IT geek two years out of school gets twice your salary.

2. What are the pros and cons to working in Australia?

Pros: Australia is a small-to-medium economy with most major world brands thanks to strong economic and cultural alignments with the UK and US; bringing with it all the benefits of exposure to multi-national companies. Meanwhile proximity to Asia draws immense wealth into Australia. The downside is that Shanghai's building boom has consumed eighty trillion tons of steel, leaving a giant hole where the State of Western Australia used to be. Its capital, Perth, should fall into the hold any day now, taking with it its population of drug dealers and grifters, so maybe it's not such a downside. (There is even an advertising agency in Perth called Marketforce, which is a kind of black hole, having swallowed up all the other agencies who were stupid enough to set up in the horrible, wind-blown backwater that is the world's most isolated city.)

Cons: Australians are lazy in a kind of laid-back, fun way which is fine until the drinks run out. The you're on your own.

3. Ten visual clichés you'd like to see doused in holy water and burned at the stake?

Slow motion hair. Dogs. Children. Rosebud lips tasting stuff. The face the male actor pulls to show that he is stupid. The face the female actor pulls to show that she is intelligent, smart, savvy or infinitely more superior. Or vice versa: I don't care. Most stills from most car ads. Most stills from most beer ads.

4. How often do you get foreign people in your agency? How would you describe their attitude depending on where they're from?

The British continue to invade Australia, getting off the plane and going straight to St Kilda Road where they pretend to be strategy planners. This would be immensely annoying except that they are better than Australian strategy planners. Australian strategy planners have neither strategies nor plans which makes them completely useless. Europeans are less common which is a shame. I want a female Swedish art director but they are hard to come by here, for some reason.

5. When was the moment you decided to pen the happenings of an advertising agency on a blog?

Many of the early stories were on disk, having already been written clandestinely during moments of extreme boredom at an earlier agency in between ducking out 'round lunchtime to go sit in empty cinemas - a great idea; it gets you back to work around 2.30 p.m. refreshed and revived - and reading entire books online at Project Gutenberg*. I transferred these stories from old-fashioned disk to blog in early 2004 and it took off from there.

*Project Gutenberg here. It's an indispensable tool for writers with a computer screen in front of them and too much time on their hands.

Beer, Part Two.

JUNE, THE LAST REMAINING TEA-LADY IN THE HISTORY OF ADVERTISING, CRASHES THROUGH THE DOOR WITH A TROLLEY LOAD OF COFFEE CUPS. SHE SAYS NOTHING BUT PLONKS A TRAY WITH CUPS ON IT DOWN ON THE BOARDROOM TABLE AND WADDLES OUT AGAIN, SLAMMING THE DOOR.

EUGENE: I see June's in her usual high spirits today.

JUSTIN: Every time there's a pitch on she gets more stressed than anyone else in the entire agency because it throws her routine out. A presentation with sixty million dollars in the balance and she's grumpy about ten extra cups to wash up. Plus, I figure she's lost us several new accounts just by spilling coffee on the MD or being rude to the head of marketing.

EUGENE: Yes, well as clients we do factor in the quality of service at a potential agency. That's only natural. And have you ever seen an ugly advertising agency receptionist?

JUSTIN: At the end of the day the quality of creative work is all that counts, Eugene.

EUGENE: That's because at the end of the day the receptionist goes home and there's nothing else to look at. All right, get on with it.

JUSTIN PULLS OUT SOME STORYBOARDS. HE STARTS PRESENTING THE IDEAS.

JUSTIN: Eugene, we've had some great new teams on this account and they've worked their butts off to come up with some really cracking ideas. We've come up with a number of angles and I'm sure there's something here that you'll really love. The key driver is to take your beer brand forward and give it a real sense of presence in the marketplace, a compelling purchase incentive and a unique identity that says 'This is the beer of choice for today's drinker!.

EUGENE: I'll be the judge of that, Justin. Could you stop talking shit and just show me the ideas?

JUSTIN: Well Eugene, the first idea trades on the fact that beer drinkers drink beer for one reason only.

EUGENE: And what would that be, Justin.

JUSTIN: To get pissed, Eugene.

EUGENE: What about taste?

JUSTIN: Nope.

EUGENE: What about image?

JUSTIN: Nope.

EUGENE: What about brand differentiation?

JUSTIN: Nope. You can't even say that after a few beers.

EUGENE: What about brand loyalty?

JUSTIN: Nope. Get into the real world, Eugene. Have you ever been to a party where the beer runs out? People will start drinking anything that isn't under lock and key and even then they'll look for the key. People are disgusting. People will raid the host's drinks cabinet and start hauling out old half-empty bottles of tawny port and Corio whisky and ripping tops off their host's collection of Century test cricket cans of VB and drinking them warm. Just to be drinking anything. Brand attributes? The container might have brand attributes but the product inside is just beer.

LONG PAUSE

EUGENE: Then why do we need to advertise at all, Justin?

JUSTIN: It's like hardware store advertising, Eugene. Suddenly it's springtime and someone sees a hedge-trimmer and a can of paint on a TV ad and they rush straight out to their nearest hardware store. The brand doesn't matter one iota. Bunnings? Mitre 10? Home Hardware? Who gives a toss? Incidentally, this has been proven by statistics showing a spike in all hardware brand sales when only one brand is currently running a campaign.

EUGENE: Exactly what is this leading up to, Justin?

JUSTIN: To this, Eugene.

HE HITS A BUTTON AND AN ANIMATIC STARTS PLAYING ON THE SCREEN.

VISION: Four men with scarves tied around their eyes as if about to take a blind taste test. In front of them are four cans each of four brands of beer: Redback, Corona, Miller Draught and Cooper's Dry.

VOICEOVER: The blind taste test is a tired old cliche, so for our beer test, we decided to throw away the blinds. Gentlemen, remove your scarves and come and have a beer.

THE MEN REMOVE THEIR SCARVES AND EACH GRABS A BEER WITH ALACRITY AND A BIG SMILE ON THEIR FACE. RATHER THAN TASTE THEM CAREFULLY, THEY DRINK THEM STRAIGHT DOWN. USING A STOP-MOTION DELAY EFFECT, WE SEE THEM DRAIN, IN UNISON, ONE EACH OF FOUR BRANDS WITHOUT TAKING ANY NOTICE OF THE BRAND.

VOICEOVER: So gentlemen, what's your favourite beer?

ALL IN UNISON:
The last one.
PAUSE
Whatever that was.

CUT TO GRAPHIC WITH IMAGE OF BEER LABEL:
Stanhope Brewing Company. Because all beer is good.

DEAD SILENCE FALLS ACROSS THE ROOM UNTIL JUNE CRASHES IN AGAIN WITH THE TROLLEY

JUNE: Are you finished yet? I've got another meeting to prepare for.

The beer account, part one.

THE CREATIVE PRESENTATION FOR A NEW BRAND OF BEER IS TAKING PLACE IN THE BOARDROOM. THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, JUSTIN, IS AT ONE END AND THE CLIENT, MR EUGENE IONESCO, IS AT THE OTHER OF THE TABLE WHICH IS ABOUT A MILE LONG. WHAT IS IT ABOUT LARGE BOARDROOM TABLES? SOME KIND OF STUPID POWER GAME? NO MEETING IN ANY BOARDROOM SHOULD EVER COMPRISE MORE THAN FIFTEEN PEOPLE SO CUT IT WITH THE FUCKING SUPERSIZED POWER-GAME TABLES, OK?

JUSTIN IS NERVOUS. FOR ONE, HE HAS TO SHOUT BECAUSE THE CLIENT IS SO FAR AWAY; FOR TWO, THE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION IS ONE FRAME OUT, MEANING THERE'S AN EXTRA PAGE IN THE PRINT DOCUMENT BUT DELETED FROM THE COMPUTER; AND FOR THREE, THE CONCEPTS ARE NOT MAKING HIM JUMP THROUGH HOOPS TODAY.

JUSTIN IS WEARING A CHAMBRAY SHIRT OVER FADED JEANS. HE THINKS HE IS BEING IRONIC ABOUT THE EIGHTIES, BUT HE JUST LOOKS LIKE ROD STEWART.

EUGENE IS WEARING A WHITE SHIRT OF FINEST COTTON OVER BLACK DESIGNER PANTS AND SOFT BLACK SUEDE SHOES. A SLINKY ORANGE SCARF IS TOSSED CARELESSLY AROUND HIS NECK AND DRIFTS WITH HIS MOVEMENTS LIKE GOSSAMER. HE LOOKS LIKE A YOUNG FRANK THRING PLAYING A MATADOR.

JUSTIN: Good morning, Eugene. Take a seat.

EUGENE IS ALREADY SEATED. HE SAYS WITH A PAINED LOOK: Christ. The traffic. Does everyone driving a BMW have to be so horrible to other drivers?

JUSTIN: But you drive a Mercedes, Eugene. You're superior. You don't have to worry about BMW drivers.

EUGENE: But Justin, BMW drivers are perfectly horrible to Mercedes drivers! They must think we're all gangsters and we're not. Only people who drive black Mercedes are gangsters.

JUSTIN: How do you figure that, Eugene?

EUGENE: Heavens, Justin. Have you driven down Chapel Street lately?

JUSTIN: No, I live in Templestowe.

EUGENE: How frightful! Why do you live there? I thought it was compulsory for creative directors to never live in places like Templestowe. I mean, where do you have breakfast at weekends? The food court at Doncaster Shoppingtown?

JUSTIN: No, I drive to Burke Road, actually, and have eggs benedict at George's. But after we finish trading insults, do you think we could get down to showing you the work?

EUGENE: You can't beat a good insult to get on better terms with the agency, Justin. I'm sure you believe exactly the same about clients. We don't really dislike the agency, we just want to make life as hard as possible for it. After all, you are taking our money - earned perfectly legitimately by selling consumer goods on the open competitive market - and squandering it on dreadful advertising ideas devised by shady ill-educated illiterate oafs who think they are all Andy Warhols and Damien Hirsts and Ernest fucking Hemingways.

JUSTIN SAYS NOTHING, BUT STARES OPEN-MOUTHED.

EUGENE (SMILING): Present company excepted, of course, Justin. You wouldn't be so presumtive as to put yourself in that league, would you?

JUSTIN: Let's get on with the work, Eugene.

EUGENE: Can I have another coffee?

JUSTIN: I'll call June. She'll probably ignore me.

Footnote.

The two posts below really happened. To witness the comment from the store manager (end of the second post) totally broke me up because I had been a fly on the wall in the first post. To hear an actual store manager admit that 'people fucking hate Coles' after the launch of the house brand was gold.

The can of beans, part two.

A MEETING IN THE BOARDROOM OF A MAJOR NATIONAL SUPERMARKET CHAIN CONTINUES. THE COMPANY HAD BRIEFED ITS ADVERTISING AGENCY TO COME UP WITH A NEW NAME FOR ITS HOUSE BRAND LINE OF GROCERIES AND WAS MIFFED WHEN THE AGENCY FAILED TO PRODUCE AN EXTENSIVE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION, PRESENTING ITS NAMING IDEAS ON TRADITIONAL BOARDS INSTEAD.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON: As I was saying, Tony, it's not about the beans. It's about the prestige of a major national supermarket chain. Mere suppliers need to recognise our importance. I expect nothing less.

TONY: But some suppliers are actually quite good at efficiency and perhaps don't see the need to spend three hours and an endless PowerPoint presentation to introduce a new name for ...

SMILING MARKETING PERSON (NOW NOT SMILING AGAIN): Efficiency? Efficiency? What's efficiency got to do with it?

TONY: Well, it's just that some of the agencies I've worked with (prior to joining this company) no longer believe in complex and colourful but ultimately vapid technology for its own sake; and have gone back to the simplicity of presenting on tactile boards.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON: Not here they don't. And anyway, we're efficient: we've eliminated several hundred suppliers to our supermarkets in our inexorable drive to world house-brand domination. That's efficiency. Imagine not having to deal with all those suppliers.

SHE HITS A BUTTON AND THE SCREEN LIGHTS UP. SHE CONTINUES: And so we thanked the agency very much, saw them to the door, slammed it behind them and decided to come up with a new house brand name ourselves. After all, we know ourselves best, don't we?

SHE LOOKS AROUND ENQUIRINGLY AT THE GATHERED MARKETING DEPARTMENT, SOME OF WHOM ARE LISTENING.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON: So we invested great time and major resources in researching the history of our house brands. First there was Embassy. That was too '60s and nationalistic. Then there was Farmland. That was too childish and unbelievable and anyway, Woolworths owns the Fresh Food people and has farmers in its ads. I can't think why.

And after much deliberation, I am very glad to say (SHUFFLING THROUGH A FEW MORE PPT PAGES OF MEANINGLESS GRAPHS AND SQUIGGLES AND CLICHES) that we have been able to come up with a name so exceedingly memorable that people will not fail to take it to their hearts and never buy a proprietary brand again.

A name that reflects the beloved position our very own company holds in the hearts of every Australian.

A name that might ultimately grace products in every aisle of every one of our stores across this great nation of ours.

SHE CLICKS ONTO THE REVEAL SHOT, WHICH SHOWS THE NEW NAME IN THREE COLOURS:

You'll Love Coles.

THE BOARDROOM ERUPTS INTO DESULTORY APPLAUSE FROM ABOUT THREE PEOPLE. THE REST JUST STARE.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON: You'll Love Coles! Isn't it wonderful! Because people do! They love us! They love our clean, well-stocked stores, they love our friendly service, they love the way our staff treat them, they love everything about us! And they will love that they will now be able to buy their favourite product under our very own name! Heinz, SPC, Kraft - who needs them?

SHE PAUSES FOR BREATH

And we will love the extra margin and not having to deal with brand managers.

THEY EXIT AND GO TO LUNCH IN THE HEAD OFFICE CAFETERIA THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL STADIUM THAT SERVES BAD COFFEE AND CELLOPHANE-WRAPPED SALAD ROLLS THAT ARE ALREADY LIMP AND MOIST.

TWO MONTHS LATER.

A SUPERMARKET IN THE NORTHERN SUBURBS THAT USED TO WEAR THE COLES 'BI-LO' SUB-BRAND BUT HAS NOW BEEN BROUGHT INTO THE MAINSTREAM COLES BRAND, THUS ELIMINATING THE STORE'S LOCAL COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. SHELF STACKERS ARE BUSILY STACKING SHELVES WITH YOU'LL LOVE COLES PRODUCTS UP TO THE RAFTERS. THE STORE MANAGER WALKS PAST.

STORE MANAGER: Great name, isn't it? I wonder which head office genius came up with that.

HE PAUSES. THE SHELF STACKERS LOOK AT HIM, HAPPY TO TAKE A BREAK.

STORE MANAGER: Because people don't love Coles at all. They fucking hate Coles.

SUDDENLY ONE OF THE STACKS COLLAPSES, AND EIGHT HUNDRED CANS OF YOU'LL LOVE COLES REDUCED-SALT BAKED BEANS COME CRASHING DOWN.

STORE MANAGER: Says it all, really.

The can of beans.

In the boardroom of a major national supermarket chain. Fifteen people are sitting around a table the size of a tennis court. They are marketing people. You need a lot of marketing people to run a supermarket chain. It's all about perception. It's nothing to do with soap powder. Who gives a toss about soap powder?

SMILING MARKETING PERSON (FIFTIES, BOBBED FAKE-BLONDE HAIRCUT, BRIGHTON ACCENT, FLATTERING WHITE BLOUSE OVER LONG BLACK SENSIBLE TROUSERS, EXTREMELY POINTY SHOES): Thanks, everyone. I'm glad you could all make it today. It's an important day in the annals of supermarket retailing in this country. And an important day in the history of great brands, because today we are commencing Australia-wide domination for a brand new brand. (SHE LAUGHS) Brand new brand. Get it?

BORED TITTERS FROM THOSE ACTUALLY LISTENING

SMILING MARKETING PERSON CONTINUES: As you know, we asked the advertising agency to present on this momentous challenge to the future of our industry and to come up with names and pack designs for this iconic new house brand.

DOOR BANGS OPEN, ANOTHER THREE MARKETING PEOPLE ENTER WITH COFFEE CUPS IN HAND.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON CONTINUES, SMILE UNDISTURBED: Oh, good morning: I was just explaining some of the history of the development of our new initiative in the packaged goods area ...

THE INTERRUPTERS SIT DOWN NOISILY.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON: ... and how we briefed our very expensive advertising agency on directions for the new brand name and packaging design and how they presented their concept ...

SHE SHAKES HER HEAD AND TRAILS OFF BEFORE CONTINUING

... on boards. Can you believe that? I still can't. I mean, what is PowerPoint for? The launch of a new in-house product for a major national supermarket chain deserves at the very least a two-hour PowerPoint presentation with what, fifty pages of development, strategy and creative execution?

A BORED MARKETING EXECUTIVE SITTING AT THE TABLE: Maybe they figured it was just a 79 cent can of beans.

SMILING MARKETING PERSON (STOPS SMILING MOMENTARILY): It's not about the beans, Tony.

Pope fails to inspire irreverent advertising: is this the last supper for the business?

I once worked on a fine crockery account. Very prestigious. English china, for the upper crust. It cost a bomb, but when you are eating finest French foie gras plates 'manufactured' in Asia just won't do.

I presented the campaign. It was based around The Last Supper. That part wasn't unique: the famous painting had been used on a variety of occasions in ads.

In the ad, we had Judas sneaking off, and Peter saying to Matthew across a bewildered Jesus, 'Where's he off to?'

Matthew replies, once again cutting across the about-to-die Jesus, 'He only eats off Wedgwood' and a tiny logo in the corner.

Why am I recalling this minor ad from the archives of my mind? Because the Pope is in town. Not the poet, not the mower, not the 1960s Fitzroy ruck-rover; but the actual Pope Benedict from Vatican City, Rome, Italy.

WHERE IS ALL THE OPPORTUNISTIC ADVERTISING?

Nowhere. This industry has lost its balls, if it ever had any, and I mean balls in the metaphorical sense only. Some of the ballsiest people I've known in advertising were women.

Yes, it did ever have any. In the seventies, this papal tour would have seen newspapers roadblocked with humourous Pope- or church-based advertising. No better way to get publicity. The Campaign Palace specialised in opportunistic ads. They were great. They made you feel there was a sense of humour within the national psyche. They made you laugh. People like to characterise Victorian times as being proscriptive and censorious. Bullshit. Today, there is more tut-tutting and pursed lips around than ever before in the history of mankind.

Maybe it's the clients. Marketing departments are full of the most frightened people on earth.

What a shame. At the end of the day, it's just another reason to leave the industry. Who wants to run around being frightened of nanny-state bureaucrats or church bigots? Not me. I'll go and shovel horse shit out of stables. I might see something funny and laugh.

Like the arse-end of a horse that reminds me uncannily of an account service person I worked with once. And that walk ...

Reasons to leave advertising. Article One of, oh, six million?

Reason 1. No-one briefs any more. They send emails. You cannot stack emails in an in-tray. So you forget what you're supposed to do by the time six million other emails have arrived. And, no, don't tell me to print the fucking email. I don't have an in-tray six million emails deep.

Reason 2. No-one debriefs any more. They send emails. The other day, I received an email with the following message:

Good morning Writer.
The client has now read through the copy and has supplied feedback as follows:
Headlines to be more ‘eye catching’. Re-visit the copy contents as some of it is not factually correct. The client has supplied a couple of PPT presentations containing lots of info re the product.
Signed
Idiot account director.

Just like that. He just signed his death warrant.

How do you write an eye-catching headline? I wouldn't know. I'm just a writer.

As for the factually incorrect copy contents, the factuality or non-factuality all came out of the idiot account director's brief. How would I know if the spline of an end-bolt in the circulating ball of a universal-jointed rocket axle's cross-member is one-eighth of an inch thick or two-eights? (That's metaphor, by the way, I've never written about rockets in my life. But you get what I mean about arcane facts.)

To add insult to injury, the idiot account director attached NOT ONE but TWO powerpoint presentations for me to waste three days delving into, in order for me to DO HIS DIRTY WORK AND EXTRAPOLATE (is that a word?) SOME FACTS OF GUARANTEED FACTUALLY-CORRECT STATUS AS PROVEN IN LABORATORY TESTS.

Did I do it? Of course I didn't. I emailed him right back and said if your head was as loose as this debrief it would be rolling around on the ground and I would kick it from here to Venus.

He laughed. They always laugh.

He's meant to be getting back to me with the facts, but that was three days ago.

Maybe there are no facts at all associated with this particular product. What happens when there are no facts?

Now I'm getting frightened as well as angry, in a weird metaphysical or philosophic kind of way, like Kant or Descartes or Hegel thinking about something impossible and frowning wisely at the same time and getting paid to do it.

That's it. I'll become a philosopher. Philosophers never get sent emails from account service people.

I'm still here.

I'm just sulking. My finalist entry failed to win gold at MADC.

I might leave advertising and join an industry where you get respect.

Word of the day: 'spurious'.

I put a web counter on this site. You can see it over there on the right. I also put the same web counter on another - defunct - weblog which no longer has any readers and at which I have not posted for three years.

The web counter on each weblog shows exactly the same figure every time I check. I don't know how it works but I have proven it is spurious.

I might remove it. I think it's watching me.

The art director who googled.

I was briefed on a twelve page brochure. By the art director. Yes, sometimes I write long copy. The art director showed me a layout.

The art director, for some reason, had included in the layout 'real' copy - not lorem ipsem - but actual words on the subject of the brochure. Which he had lifted from the internet. Someone else's copy. He had googled the subject and lifted the copy. Write stuff like this, he said to me. Without making it exactly like this, he said to me.

Hmmm.

I wrote the copy, to the layout. Like the internet copy but also unlike it. I sent it. To the art director.

Did you notice that in this blog, over the years, I have made an art form of satirising account people?

Maybe I had the wrong target all along.

The art director said he would bang the copy into the layout and get back to me.

He got back to me. With a new layout. Fine. I can deal with a new layout.

He had banged bits of my copy into parts of the layout. And parts of the internet-lifted copy into other parts of the brochure.

Can you fix it, he asked.

Fix what, I asked. My copy? The lifted copy?

The bastard had picked bits and pieces of my copy to fit his new layout and left in bits of the stolen copy to complete it.

Sense-wise, it was now totally out of any logical flow or order. He didn't get that. It's just words. Write new ones, he said.

I didn't kill him because he is a freelancer to the agency and so am I. It's only protocol to kill people when you are both employees. Freelancers have to be nice.

I completely rewrote the entire fucking thing and sent it to him.

I haven't heard back yet.

Client even stupider in one step.

Museums Victoria (because there is more than one) is planning a new advertising campaign.

The museum clearly has a problem. While intelligent people keep visiting museums, the less intelligent among us are hardly ever seen inspecting the preserved larvae of the Australis Gigantus moth or researching the effects of Governor McJingo's Merino sheep import strategies in the early 1800s.

Which is kind of obvious; like wondering why you never have a conversation with Barry Hall and Wayne Carey about Schoenheimer's early biomoecular isotope-tagging techniques.

However, you do have to wonder about Museum Victoria's proposed concept. Their brilliant headline:

Be less stupid in three steps.

The scintillating copy reads:

Visit the museum, look at everything, go home.

Sometimes irony isn't irony, edginess isn't edginess, being brave or out there isn't being brave or out there.

It's just moronic.

Three days in a studio.

I’m sitting in the studio doing nothing because the editor totally gets what we want - isn't that a relief - and is busy cutting away.

I love it when the editor gets what we want. It makes it so much easier. Easier for him too, because we’re not hanging over his shoulder telling him to replay the last half second 58 times.

It’s just a stupid corporate DVD, which used to be called a video, which used to be called an AV, which used to be called … wait, I’m not that old.

Someone at the client has shot a bunch of footage - don't you hate that - which is complete shit (yet the guy thinks he is Spielberg), so the only thing to do is find a piece of music and cut the crap out of the vision - chop it into tiny bits and stick it against the beat of the music, which happens to be quite a good piece, a tight drum-flecked post-punk tribute to XTC, the Cure, that kind of thing. It's a royalty-free piece, but we're charging the client $1500 for the search. Don't tell him, but the search took three and one half minutes.

This is the third day and I’m sitting there being waited on hand and foot. Caffe latte? Sure. Toast? Sure. Sourdough, please. I don't eat white bread. Mineral water? Sure. Newspapers? Sure.

There must be money in production houses, because the agency gets given far more largesse at the studio than we hand out to our clients, even though clients are the source of all the money. Someone’s winning somewhere, I just can’t figure out who. I hope it's me.

Anyway, the operator is busy cutting away and even the agency production girl is kicking back. She’s early twenties, pert, spectacled, brown hair, long legs crossed, kind of cute in a too-young way. She's wearing a white sleeveless blouse over three-quarter-length denim jeans and white sneakers. She’s reading a book and is giggling. She tells me she doesn’t usually giggle while reading. She shows me the book.

Christ almighty.

Has anyone noticed what girls are reading these days? They call it chick lit, but from what I can see the word break in that expression comes in the wrong place. The book is a semi-biographical account of a New York woman’s serial one-night stands, so it has a lot of very short chapters each of which has a climax. Some have several. That's great value for a $24.95 paperback - normally you only get one climax per book.

So she reads me out the funny bits. Like most chick lit, it’s pretty much pornography with wine, roses, chocolates, $1000 shoes and expensive cars thrown in to soften the hard core. Sometimes the wine and roses and chocolates and $1000 shoes are missing; and sometimes the action is not in the expensive cars, but on them or around them. Authors.

Lunch came out before we knew it. We took the DVD - five copies - back to the agency. The client loved it. He wanted an extra copy. Probably to show his mother. She'll probably want another dozen copies to give to relatives next Christmas.

Old copywriter recalls Industrial Age artefacts.

No, not me; AdBroad.

AdBroad describes herself as the oldest working copywriter in advertising and who am I to argue?

At her excellent weblog, her panel entitled Gone But Not Forgotten contains the following artefacts from the olden days of advertising when account executives' ties were wider than their experience, but not as wide as their egos:

1) Art directors who could draw.
2) Lucy room for art directors who couldn't.
3) Sound of selectrics.
4) Spray mount.
5) When copy was mailed to the client, with stamps.
6) Yellow paper for drafts, white for revision and carbon paper used to make copies.

I've got some more (not that I remember them, someone told me about them):

1) Secretaries. (Oh, go look in your dictionary. I mean go look up dictionary.com.)
2) Typists. (MDs had secretaries; everyone else had typists. Secretaries typed and typists typed and made coffee for the MD after being asked to by the secretary. Yes, I know it's complicated.)
3) Typesetters. (No. Typesetters were not typists; typists typed copy while typesetters set copy in type. Oh, forget it. Go back to your iPod shuffling.)
4) Cleaners. (Where did all the cleaners go? My desk is a mess and there are no typists or secretaries any more.)
5) Copy files: large grey cabinets with perspex tabs in alphabetical order of client and typically containing probably 150 drafts of copy for a 10x2 press ad.
6) A timber cigarette case the size of a small yacht on the boardroom table. Go on, help yourself. Meetings were a blue blur. What else are you going to do to stay awake?

More, anyone? You don't have to be old. You just have to have heard or read about them.