RIP: the lost art of copywriting
July 4, 2008
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.
Cream rises (but poo floats)
July 1, 2008
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.
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?
