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.

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

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.