RIP: the lost art of copywriting

Were you the guy or gal who gave a shit? Who fussed about the spelling, the punctuation and the syntax generally, when the art director wanted to ‘get the fucken thing gone’? Personally I hold Prince responsible. He was in2 it well b4 there even were mobiles.

Thus I raise a sad toast to you, dear erstwhile caring copywriter, for your ultimately pointless effort, and in a Flurry of Unnecessary Capitals I say thank you. It was noticed. Just not by MiniCooperGirl.

Fuck it. We tried.

Fuck it. We tired.

Thank you and goodnight. Your services are no longer needed.

M is for Media

It is 1988. Marty McFly is the epitome of white cool. It is Ireland. White is pretty much the only colour there is, unless you work in Montrose, in which case there is a panoply of greys to choose from.

Downstairs in the agency there is a room with four people in it. This is The Media Department. Off this room there is another, smaller room with one person in it. This is the Media Director. He is without any shadow of a doubt a man. You can tell this by the well seasoned combination of stale Rothmans stubs and stale men’s cologne that pervades the room. He drives a car from the upper end of the range that the agency makes ads for. Probably coincidence. The other four can be male or female, and can pretty much choose their jobs titles themselves, as long as they pick either Media Planner or Media Buyer. If they find themselves dealing with unhappy people in Montrose quite a lot then they are probably Media Buyers. Otherwise they are Media Planners. Or just plain, generic Media. Nobody else particularly cares. This is not 2008.

Spreadsheets exist. They are sheets that can be spread. That accounts for their demonstrative titles. There are cork noticeboards. These will have polaroids and also proper photos from last Christmas’s party in Leopardstown and the agency do in Tullamore when Nuala shifted Gary from Traffic. There are Remington typewriters, rotary phone number files and always, always there are large, hardbacked RTE diaries. (If you were born in the eighties read Blackberries.)

There is also a very small room in the corner with a young man in it. It is stuffed to the low ceiling with newspapers. This is Vouchers. The young man will be from Inchicore or possibly Finglas and will be responsible for the upkeep of Vouchers. This essentially means that he will cut ads from newspapers and sometimes from magazines. But mostly newspapers. This young man, going by either the formal Bernard or Stephen while at work, will work in a fire hazard zone without complaint, sticking the ads he’s tirelessly cut out into big log books for the perusal of client. Client will never peruse them. When the couriers are looking for Benjy or Steo the rest of the staff just stare blankly. Media do not especially claim him, but there is really nowhere else for him to go, so Media get to keep him. Ten years from 1988 they will similarly get to keep the IT guy. Twenty years from 1988 Media and the IT guy will unite, hatch the most unlikely of plans and stride forth to capture the world.

But this is 1988. There is no Facebook. Nobody has a mobile phone. A blue tooth is a cause for concern. You won’t find panini in the sandwich shop. Hi-tech is the plastic that O’Brien’s puts on its ham and cheese toasties that doesn’t melt off under the grill! O’Brien’s is a pub. There are no O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars. There are no O’Brien Wines. There is no Dennis O’Brien (although he’s certainly coming). For now there is just a pub. On Leeson Street. And that’s where the four Media Planners/Buyers and the Media Director will be on Friday evening after work. There is a continuum with the future however, although people cannot know this. Pat Kenny. Things haven’t changed much since RTE was founded in 1955, the date that Patacakes was yeasted in the underground lab, and they probably never will.

Cream rises (but poo floats)

Where’s the point of attempting to defend the indefensible? There are two kinds of funny: the ha ha type and the Ray Foley type. This piece of dreck gets the Ray Foley Award for all of 2008.

Pay particular attention to the first girl in fetching Exxon Valdez oil-slick lips as she mouths ‘snile-snile-snile.’ The competition has no chance. And, in deference to them, they have consistency in their outdoor work too. It’s also from the top tier of the lowest common denominator. I’m hazarding a guess here, but d’ya think that the same brief was used for the Prague and Dublin versions of 98?

And who doesn’t like to see air blowjobs in the middle of their MOR print ads? Absolute winner, 98. Good luck with the listenin’ crowd.

C is for various c words

It is not my intention to be louche. Some words just propel me that way. Copywriter is one, naturally. But in the interests of all that is just and fair (that’s what’s known as a tautology, copywriters) (that’s what’s known as patronising, copywriters) I thought I’d place them in their proper position, which is as a footnote to Art Directors.

Consultant is another one, and you can approach my comments on it elsewhere around the blog provided you’re wearing an asbestos suit.

The main seaward is, of course, client. Begins with c, ends with nt and invariably there’s a lie in there somewhere. Or do you think I make this stuff up?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some good clients. And possibly you have had too. But I’ve also had some tremendously epiphanic bowel movements, seismic shifts that would bring tears to a glass eye, where choirs of angels could clearly be heard above the rustle of Friday’s Irish Times Ticket supplement (and what a jazzy title that Ticket is. So youth.) But let us not talk of unresearchably small sample numbers.

Clients exist to make the lives of the account executive, account manager (euphemism for a lost person) and account director a series of circles of hell. Usually the lowliest (that’s you, account exec) catches the hottest ring of fire. Their other function is to plot world domination (aka score a house with a D6 address) via the medium of FMCG marketing. FMCG, for any newbies who might not know, simply stands for Flimsily Made Corporate Guano. Shit that people buy, okay?

The Client (big C for emphasis) cannot bear the fact that they themselves are somewhere between the bottom rung and the second-from-bottom rung of the corporate ladder (marketing section), driving some shitbox French car and spending most of the time when they’re not driving it just sitting in it, wishing it was German and steadily going insane with the thought of the spam count building up back in the office.

Hence they make themselves feel better by flinging the crap at the junior in the agency, cos the agency has nice offices near proper shops rather than just Centra. (Still, what an amazing retail success, right? Oh yah. Ohmigod completely.)

But back to making life shit for the AE. Naturally the colour A5 leaflet for the door drop for the car sale for the third quarter has to be revised seventeen times because that’s how to keep them on their toes. And just because that little snot Tara got a job as a suit with Universal Suffrage straight from Aungier Street she better not think that having skinny ankles alone will get her to the top. Etc.

And while Client is flinging general agency shit at the hapless, so too is the Account Director and, if the agency is moribund enough to have one grazing somewhere in an office up a short flight of dead-end steps where no-one else goes, so is the Account Manager.

A quick aside (with expensive graphing) on Account Managers. I really don’t know what they do, I might as well confess right now. Years ago it seemed to be a good way to not promote capable female AEs. Seeing as most client service is now run by women, the ruse has apparently failed. The result is quite simply a graveyard of pulse-free suits who haven’t realised that their Big Jobs In Advertising corpsed along with their Frawleys loyalty cards some years back.

Never mind. The Client will find a way to fuck everybody over eventually. He won’t care that the South African location stand-in for a beach in North Dublin is shot on toilet paper instead of supersaturated 35mm just like Francis Ford Coppola used in Apocalypse Now. He won’t care that he’s raved about the poster, said it’s the best he’s ever been involved with, then rewritten your headline and finally tweaked (ie utterly changed) the picture. He still loves it guys! Terrific job!!

Ever wonder why the bins are so big in Creative? Still, as a nameless studio engineer* put it twenty years ago, it’s better than working. But for how long, my beautiful ones, for how long?

* Fr Noel Storey

I swear to Christ, if one more person commits suicide round here I’ll kill myself.

This is it. The last lifebuoy. Mid 2008. And I’ve got a grip like a pterodactyl, so step away, fucker. Who gives a four-cornered fuck if the wake behind me is strewn with the wreckage of the golden age of Ireland’s ‘traditional’ advertising industry, lovingly referred to hereafter, with self-reverential caps, as The Industry? Hah?

The impossible glamour. We had it all, just like Henry Hill. We even had coke in little bags. Back when it held wide-eyed status and the nobodies sipped it from a can, we had the real deal, chopped up right beside our filofax and – wait till you see this baby – our Ericsson flip-open mobile phone. The boss doing his hilarious J Kirk: ‘Scottie, you’ve got to get us out of here. Taxi. To Renards. Now!’

And how we fell apart laughing. Our mothers would never comprehend, even if they did get to hear about it. And they never would. We raved with the fifth letter of the alphabet and we strode on, relentless cool in Storm shades and Diesel jeans. We had no time for childish things. Oh there were such delights to be enjoyed if you could just squeeze your way into The Industry. Lap dancing clubs and the AMEX left behind the bar and shoots in South Africa and DJs who were more famous than the records they were playing. We were one big, fat ocean liner full of big, fat pleasure seekers on a decade-long cruise.

It all had to end.

They usually kill the engines and hit the brakes on those betties a few miles before they need to stop. The passengers hardly notice the slowdown as they quaff the Taitinger, strains of ‘Midnight, the stars, and you’ as performed by the Ray Noble Orchestra drifting up onto the deck. But unlike them, our trip didn’t end with an imperceptible bump. We didn’t waddle off to fresh, shore-bound pleasures. We hit a big fucking cliff on a perfectly calm day and only when the big fucking ocean liner tore itself apart did we notice. And suddenly all of the learning curves on all of the brand personality profiles in the world didn’t matter. The fact that we knew Powerpoint and had taught ourselves how to use a minidisc player now was irrelevant.

Flash forward even further. The final death rattle of U-Matics and Betamax and the surge of the JPEG and MPEG and the PDF and the WAV and the MP3 were of little fucking consequence all of a sudden. Jesus, how much did they fucking want? We got the laptop and the dialup thing, didn’t we? And forget CDs, we could even burn DVDs now. AND we bought music that Amazon delivered to our door, imagine that. We even grappled with your Uhuru bluetooth and your wifi. SO HOW MUCH COULD ANY ONE PERSON BE EXPECTED TO TAKE ON BOARD IN TEN FUCKING YEARS? HOW. FUCKING. MUCH?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

Never get off the goddamn boat. But what goes down when the boat gets out from under you? We were treading very cold water and we were overwhelmed. We’d had the lock on analogue and we kinda did alright there with the move to digital. But when that fucking internet thing went to the next level, our grasp on the lifebuoy was fucking tired, man. We were so fucking tired.

Realisation came way too slowly that we were dealing with a new creature. The old laws that we had essentially made up for ourselves didn’t pertain. We’d tried so fucking hard, man. We’d watched as the cosy little agency structure gradually got broken up and the media independents and conglomerates went their way. We never thought to be concerned when creative outsourcing became de rigeur. We spat and hissed when they took away cigarette advertising, those bastards are they trying to kill us here? Little guys split away and big guys bought more of everything and we just thought that it was normal flux. No patterns to see here, chaps. Occasional hiccups but really just business as usual.

Hell, there were even moments in there that felt like mini-victories. When it became ok in the early nineties to shoot ads outside Ireland, with no Irish crews for Jayz sake? Not to incur the all-powerful wrath of the unions, that was a ripping victory right there. When Direct Marketing companies shot up like weeds we were all jealous of the new wunderkind on the block (secretly jealous mind you, because those junketeers were still beneath us, ok?) And whole companies were booming, companies devoted to gadgets that you could, like, send in the mail? I can name four shops who sent out alarm clocks in little cardboard boxes that said ‘This is your wake-up call’ on the lid. Timeless. One of them said ‘This is not a wind-up’ on the inside. So giving creatively.

That was a brave new world that we could at least understand.

But things were changing beneath the waterline. Progression was all fine and well, but the rate of acceleration of change was the thing. That the office budget could not afford to keep up with the operating systems as they came and went was surely a clue. If we couldn’t cope with the changing hardware, there would be little hope of keeping up with the software, where the real revolution was fermenting. And how many days would there be, between the start of the revolution and some SEO geek pulling the trigger of mercy on our sorry fucking ‘careers’? I was never one to heed wake up calls, even when they were lovingly delivered in cute little cardboard boxes with personalised messages on them, so I thought I’d stick around to find out. Hey, if Snow Patrol can survive then anything is possible.

So why dontcha come with me, grab a lifebuoy. See if we escape from adland and make it to Tom Hanks Island. Apart from your job, car, house and career in these crazy digital times just what have you got to lose?

A is for Account Executive.

Account executives. God bless ‘em. In the hierarchy of the advertising world they are the classic case of Give the Least Important the Biggest Title. Account execs tend to be graduates in an MSC programme. MSC stands of course for Major Shit Catchers.

Account Exec is entry level for those deluded souls who ‘want’ to be in Client Service. Client Service is like an Escort Service, only seedier. Bright-faced junior account execs come into the business with hopes of moving swiftly up the ladder until they are managing the Honda account for Europe. What they tend not to realise is that for every Honda account there are 2,300 little shitbox clients with head offices in the rust triangle between the Long Mile Road, Clondalkin and Ballyfermot. These clients are frustrated because they don’t get to shop in the Stephen’s Green Centre every lunchtime like the people who run their accounts from the lush D2/D4 offices of Smirk Ignoble & Cystlike. They spend more time in traffic and less time in the shower than they want. The only thing they have to look forward to is staring at a different number plate on the way home as they slowly contemplate pulling out their own teeth, right now goddamit before they have to listen to ANOTHER FUCKING MINUTE OF MATT FUCKING COOPER’S SQUEAKY FUCKING VOICE!!
So if you happen to be that bunny-eyed Account Executive with the tidy in-tray and the snazzy mouse mat from Phantom FM and the hilarious pics of the social on Facebook then you can be sure that Mr Client from west of hopeless is going to Make. Your. Life. A. Living. Hell. There will be changes to that radio script until your bleeding finger stumps can no longer feel the keyboard as you write the hundreth contact report. The meeting will shift until it’s already happened and nobody was there. The package with the posters for the hotel for the Client’s annual presentation to the American investors will never arrive/arrive too soon/arrive too late/arrive covered in camel’s piss. And if you think Creative will offer a consoling ‘Never mind, we’ll work through this together’ then you really are so wrong that you might actually be right. Except you’re not. They will scream. They will run to the Creative Director. The Creative Director will roll his eyes to heaven and make you feel like a fly on a wedding cake. Your helpful Account Manager will bitch about you to your Account Director, who in turn will eye you coldly, an invisible neon sign over her head saying ‘Maybe I made a mistake with this one.’

You will work late every single evening. Nobody will actually see the fruits of these labours, because this is the shit you were supposed to be doing between nine and five thirty anyway. And you could possibly have got it done too, if you hadn’t been chasing couriers, trying to engage in mutually understandable discourse with the art director about why VAG Rounded wasn’t such a terrible idea was it, trying to calm down the screaming copywriter whose headline you had to ‘adapt’ at short notice, waiting on the taxi to get you out of SlurryVest Ltd, Dublin 10. And why doesn’t Nyna ever have to work late and she’s always hanging around Creative and they’re all laughing like idiots and who cares if she was a model in Prittsticki or wherever she’s from.
But hey! You’re on the ladder, right? You can’t resist telling your friend who’s graduating from Aungier Street next year that the 98FM barbecue was, like, amaazing last night and the Star party is on tonight and it’s gonna be amaazing and life is just amaazing like you knew it would be. You’re giving this place two years max, right? And then you’re moving for the money, because they’re paying you shit and they have NO idea how to run a real agency and your friend Eymyr right got this job in a PR company right, Fizz Communications or Bryte Communications or Snaz Communications or something right and they like gave her a Mini Cooper? And the Account Director just hates you cos the MD talked to you at the Christmas Party (yes she did check out the pics on Facebook) and probably cos you didn’t, like, buy your boobs and secretly right you think she’s a dyke cos she’s like got the hots for Nyna ohmygod can you imagine the two of them snogging? All teeth and jaw bones and knobbly kneecaps banging off each other? It’d be like Sinew City eww!

Two more years. Just two years and you are out of there.