Proximity "In Which Our Hero Falls Another Rung On The Creative Ladder."

Once I'd been asked to leave the DM agency I went stalking around London with this fucking razor sharp axe to grind. Here I was being rejected by the very industry that I thought I was doing a major favour by joining in the first place. I had, however, discovered recruitment consultants, headhunters. I love advertising recruitment consultants, you can have as many of them as you like, you don't have to pay them a brass penny and they will hunt down work for you like a pack of slavering bloodhounds because they are desperate, just desperate for their cut. This is purely cultural - if you compare this system with the one actors have, where they have one agent with whom they maintain an exclusive contract, you can quickly see the advantage of a market that works in your favour. Actors, being predominantly left-wing, have never worked this out. But nice union chaps, well done on that.

I'd done a tiny, tiny amount of web work at the DM shop, but I found that this didn't stop headhunters pimping me out as Mr. Web 2.0. I did site builds, I did virals, I did banners galore. Although I got work at pure web agencies I also worked at DM agencies that had sprouted web agencies. These have to be the only kind of agency where the general level of morale is lower than in DM, with people openly self-harming at their desks, the corridors littered with derelict monitors and shattered dreams. Ok, if you work at a DM place quite often you're adapting the above-the-line concept into roll-fold or whatever, but at the DM/web shop you're adapting the roll-fold into a banner ad. The best argument I ever heard for working in ATL is that you want to be near where The Idea starts - these places are where The Idea comes to die. If I ever start taking drugs again, and need money for scag, this is where I will work, because I'm quite certain you could be spazzed off your baps and no-one one would be any the wiser. The process at these places tended to be hopelessly convolved and Kafkaesqe, so that, even if your creative director liked your scamps, they'd still get shot down because the DM Creative Director had no idea what was going on, or the ATL Creative Director above her was still having to have the concept of a web banner explained to him every two days.

Or you might spend five days waiting for photography to arrive so you could make your dismal banner, going gradually insane in the meantime, and then on finding out that it was all fucked up and the thing was never going to arrive and that they'd just wasted five precious, precious days of your life, completely flip out in a meeting with a load of people you'd never met before, giving vent to all your pent up anguish and frustration, and end up being asked to leave the building. For instance.

I also worked at an agency where they used the word viral as a noun, an adverb and an adjective, sometimes within the same sentence. The creative director had discovered that in order to be "viral" something either had to be really good or funny or interesting, or have tits in it. He used to brief us saying, you know, don't feel limited, don't feel like it has to have tits in it, I'm just saying, if it has tits in it, that's fine. It took me about ten minutes of wrestling with my conscience before I started producing exactly the kind of advertising I'd always promised myself I would never make. There's nothing a like a 4pm deadline and the prospect of four crisp, red fifties to make you set aside your ethical qualms and get on with the matter in hand. This was the agency where my then art director, Brother Alex, came up with the "Adverse-weather-conditions" viral, as well as the, "Are-you-a-paedophile?" viral - guaranteed cult classics, neither of which, sadly, ever saw the light of day.

There, no moral or anything. No conclusion - no neat little blogger's conclusion - didn't even end with a rhetorical question, throwing the whole thing open to the floor like Scamp does, no wonder I can't get the stats. What kind of post is that then - a fucking failed thalidomide limb of a post - see, it's not even ending, looks like it's just sort of trailing off...

Feckless Chutzpah

As a kind of subset of the general question, “why do I write this blog?” is the secondary question, “why do I write these long posts about humiliating episodes from early in my career?”

Well, like all terminal procrastinators I have a paralysing fear, not so much of failure itself, as the contemplation of failure from some point in the future when it is all too late.

These posts then, serve to remind me that I needn’t have worried.

Not that I wasn’t destined to fail, merely that, the contemplation of my failure from some future point (i.e. now) is only bleakly amusing, not adding all that much to my already apocalyptic sense of self-pity.

Sometimes I picture my younger self, cruising the streets of London, skinny, amoral and full of cunning. I was working for a night club, I slept all day, gradually I lost touch with my friends, and my complexion turned a fetching blue/green. My sister said I looked like Zammo – it was a proud moment. With my near-fluent English I quickly rose to the level of assistant manager. That meant I had to make sure we had enough ashtrays and that there was toilet roll in the ladies toilets. I was assiduous in all my duties, as I’m sure you’ll believe.

I also wrote press for the club and I quickly worked out that all DJs needed a “biog”, a CV in long copy, and that, with very few exceptions, they weren’t capable of writing such a thing themselves. In fact, there seemed to be some kind of inverse proportion at work, between probability of becoming a professional DJ and one’s ability to recount one’s own career using words. I also discovered that if you wrote one of these puff pieces and then offered it to a DJ, he would pay virtually any amount of money to get his preening little hands on it.

I started getting a few clients (two clients), and took to hustling for business in the record shops of Soho. No one else was doing it – which I interpreted as a sign that I had “cornered the market”. I got a mate to do me some cards – I’d wanted to have a business card from the age of 8.

(This is the one surviving card that I have – in mitigation please remember that Paul Smith’s first company was called “Vêtements pour hommes”. The words on the pen/stylus hybrid are dentate, plangent, plexor, allipsis and synodinal – for years afterwards they served as bookmarks, from the absurdly obscurantist vocabulary I reckon up until at least 2004 when David Foster Wallace released Oblivion. Five years on I score 2/5 on those words)

On one of these trips I met an aging house DJ called Tiny. He told me about the National DJs Union. The NDJU was a start-up, begun by this bloke Tiny and his friend Dane. Tiny drove a tiny black VW Polo, but was huge. Dane had been a successful child actor, and as an unsuccessful adult carried about him a whiny air of aggrieved entitlement. They were borrowing a minute office space off a mate who ran a web design company in the Truman Brewery (web design company? That feels like period vocabulary). There were usually several people borrowing the same space, including a man who supplied weapons for films. This basically meant there was an insane man in the office, with a large cache of weapons. It was something of a world centre of weirdness of all kinds.

They had this idea that people would sign up to join the DJ Union via its website, and that every DJ would be given his own page, which he could then use to promote himself and his music in whatever way he felt best suited him. I thought this was stupid idea. That the resulting cornucopia of styles and layouts would make the whole thing so ugly and confusing that no one would ever go there.

They had this other idea, which I thought was just as stupid, of a kind of streaming video channel, where people could just post whatever they wanted – a kind of online talent show they said. Who would watch a load of amateurs doing a lot of unscheduled beatboxing and low-production-value party-tricks? I thought.

I did several hundred pounds worth of work for Dane and Tiny, I hung around for days, writing their business plan, buying the coffee, before I realised that Dane was a pathological liar, a fantasist and serial bankrupt and that Tiny had some really spectacular anger management issues. Predictably the two of them fell out, threatened to have one another killed, squabbled over the single share in the company, the domain name of which had been deliberately and unhelpfully bought by the web designer, also unhelpfully called Dane. I was just one victim of the company's ineluctable collapse.

Dane (see) was able to offer me expert advice on the procedure for filing a small claims case against him as well as its evident futility.

I kept travelling back and forth between W12 and Brick Lane, until eventually the girl who answered the phones took me aside and explained that she was only employed on a Prince of Wales Trust subsidy, and that her job was to stall creditors.

Obviously I couldn’t get a penny out of Dane or Tiny, but it gives me some satisfaction to think that they had actually invented both MySpace and YouTube in 2002 but were too busy bickering about selling insurance to DJs to recognise the two multimillion pound ideas floating around amongst all the shit ideas they had.

Maybe one way of viewing these posts would be as the opposite of Scamp’s helpful Tuesday tips. Not as a series of tips, but a single tip, the meaning of which becomes more and more luminously evident, the more of them you read. Less helpful hints, more disheartening warnings.

DM - The Medium's medium

It's become kitsch to refer to advertising to a "black art". Occasionally people still say "web optimisation is a dark art", but I assume they do this because it feels good saying it, like saying the phrase "black ops" almost makes you feel like you yourself are capable of abseiling through someone's window and silently garroting them in the night.

So it's reassuring to know that Professor Alhaje Nasr here, despite being highly skilled in the actual black arts, still prefers a regular old maildrop of the W12 postcode to guarantee credulous footfall.

I myself have some experience with the medium (DM not the Professor) having spent an unhappy year, early in my illustrious career, working for one of the country's largest distributors of direct marketing. I didn't mind the work so much, it mainly involved assuming the voice of an over-friendly middle-aged man and writing to customers of a large telecommunications company, begging them not to leave to leaner, cheaper telecommunications companies - which I can tell you did wonders for my self-esteem. The main problem was that the people working there, with exactly two exceptions, were all some combination of old, alcoholic, embittered and clinically depressed. Let's face it, if you have the necessary verbal and analytical skills to construct a reasonable piece of direct mail, you won't be able to conceal from your secret heart the demeaning nature of the task at hand or gainsay the, no doubt compensatory, scorn of the rest of the industry; an industry regarded by most of society of something of a pariah anyway.

Objectively there is no difference between posting someone a letter in the hope it will cause them to buy something, and pasting the same message in a shorter form on billboard on their way to work. But, when it comes to the creative hierarchy, there's something really basic going on with the size of the message you get to write. The fact that in DM you actually have to write too, which implies you learnt to write and hence some degree of application, belies the money-for-old-rope feeling that makes ATL so thrilling for people with shit A-levels.

During my time there I developed several alarming habits of mind. Sometimes I would be writing a letter on the new range of low, low call rates and look down and see that a sentence that began with the words "what's more" ended with the words "life is a sublime torture, and you will die in the easing of the pain." I discovered that an obsession with suicide is called "autophonomania". The agency had toilets with stalls arranged in endless rows and sometimes, in contemplative moments at certain regular times of the day, I would wonder if this was not the real reason for our being there, that the agency had some special purpose designed for the corporate copreffluvia, and whether the whole letter-writing business was just a ruse to keep us there for the course of a day's digestion. I was once asked to write a "movers pack", consisting of a thick brochure of "helpful hints" and several interleaved coupons, for customers who'd just moved house. The insight we'd been given was that people who've just moved are really busy, that it was the most stressful thing next to death and divorce. I suggested to the creative director that if we really wanted to help, we could perhaps do them a favour by not sending them a bulky "movers pack". Not long after that I was asked to leave the building.

Freelancing in DM is fine, but every time you take a brief, even if they don't say it immediately, you know they're going to ask you for the Innocent tone of voice. "It's so natural," they say, "it's just like someone is talking to you." Yes, just like a paedophile is talking to you. And you are eight.

I have had at least one good experience with DM. I met my girlfriend whilst stranded in South East Asia having exhausted all my funds on opiates, gambling and ladyboys. She was a tender nineteen and on her way to university. Over the next three years I conducted a determined campaign, gradually wearing down her resistance with demoralising propaganda, in the form of letters and mixtapes. I believe the American military call this "psyops".

Oral fixation

It probably doesn't take a forensic typographer to tell that I never went to art school. Having been sent down from my university for sodomy and atheism I just slouched around at parties telling people that I was a writer. This grew so gratingly pretentious that eventually a friend of mine asked me if I’d at least take some work writing 'copy' for this advertising agency he was working for. In fact, it wasn’t so much an advertising agency, more just two men in a flat. They’d had a problem with the writer that they were using because, despite charging hundreds of pounds a day, he couldn’t spell, or indeed punctuate. He was, I gathered, technically a moron.

I gamely agreed to write this 'copy' as they kept calling it, thinking I might after all need some pin money to tide me over whilst I completed my first novel. And honestly, how hard could it be?

I arrived for work, dressed up in my best jodpurs and was promptly locked in a room with a wild-eyed fellow who, they told me, had recently been made redundant for spitting. He was in his fifties and quite mad, he didn’t appear to notice, or mind, that I was barely 15. I sat down on the floor next to him, gathered up some of his felt tips and we set about 'writing ads'.

My career got off to a auspicious start, because more or less the first ad I ever wrote got made. And not just made, but turned in to a kind of architectural feature. It was for a dental clinic near a certain tube station in London. I reproduce it here for your edification.

As you can see it shows the streets of the local area, in an isometric view, being flossed by a pair of monstrous hands. As though London itself actually existed inside the mouth of some kind of terrifying and yet oral hygiene-conscious Leviathan. A nightmarish vision, that, once seen, can never leave the mind of the viewer. I also wrote a headline, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is a forgotten classic. (The occluded words are 'you' and 'work').

In the light of my every single intervening experience of getting work sold to clients, I find it perversely intriguing that the client chose this ad, and, moreover, chose to run it virtually unchanged from the scamp, in his front window. The one place where a map giving directions to his establishment is totally, totally redundant.

There is a tragic coda to this story.

Shortly after writing this fine piece of advertising I had a terrible row with the man who ran the company and was asked to leave the building. That night I went drinking with the wild-eyed art director, who ended the evening sobbing, swearing at me and telling me he was going to kill himself. I have no idea if he did.

And so began my career as a copywriter.

It’s been basically down hill since then.

It was an experience I'll never forget, largely because the dentist is opposite my gym, so I only have to look at it, oh, three times a week.

El culo del mundo

Guns and Roses have a new album out, and by all accounts it's a real turkey. There is one place where it's more or less guaranteed to go down an absolute storm.

Argentina has to be the unluckiest country in the world. It's so unlucky, I can only assume it's been cursed, not unreasonably perhaps, by the spirits of the many thousands of Indians who were massacred at its foundation. You know the way in The Shining, the hotel is built on an old Indian burial ground? That's Argentina. Since then, despite an abundance of natural resources and good-looking women, the corruption of its leaders (more pronounced amongst the political class of any nation, frankly absurd in a country governed by the people Spain didn't want) has kept it more or less in the third world.

I spent 8 months there in 2003 shortly after the financial collapse, taking advantage of the favourable exchange rate to live out various unpleasant, narcissistic fantasies at a fraction of the normal price. My elation at being able to live like a 19th Century Russian aristocrat for about £30 a week soon gave way to bitterness and depression as I lapsed into chronic alcoholism, without licensing laws, or even the normal laws of economics to hinder my fall. My bad.

Anyway, one of the strange things about Argentina was that in 2003 they were still listening to Guns 'n' Roses. Not just like they had November Rain on a mixtape, between Public Enemy and Crass, and had a good old laugh realising that it's sort of hysterically sentimental and therefore fun in a deeply mad way, I mean they were playing it in high street shops and restaurants. All the time. Which means that in 2002 they had been listening to the same three and half albums over and over again for the last 11 years, much like some kind of traumatised young adult, locked in a cellar at the age of 14 with just the tapes in the pockets of their sleeveless denim jacket to entertain them for the next decade.

I did ask my friends "hey, what's with the Axl Rose fixation?" and they'd tell me that oh, Guns 'n' Roses were the first band to play Argentina after the collapse of the brutal military dictatorship that had spent the eighties hoofing intellectuals out of aeroplanes, hence the band has a special meaning for Argentines, associations of freedom and euphoria, rather than just 1/4 mile long stages and spotty metal kids bellowing at a racist in a kilt.

Men in Argentina had mullets, not Shoreditch mullets, but fully-operational mullets. I went to a barbers in Argentina and was given a mullet. Take a moment to imagine my response.

So when people talk about the brave naivety, the unironic viscerality of ads produced by Argentine creatives I always think, well, if you'd spent the first twenty five years or so of your life living in a cave, culturally speaking, you might think that Genesis were pretty hip too.

Watch as advertising eats its own head.

During a dark period in my life, about three years of it, I worked in a methadone unit, typing up the invariably traumatic case notes of the patients from the psychiatrists’ dictaphone tapes. My touch-typing, which had been somewhat erratic, soon became sub-cortical, so that I could type the same tape twice without noticing. I did, however, begin to dream of close friends injecting heroin into my feet.

This already unpleasant job was rendered even more unpleasant by my colleagues, who insisted on listening to XFM all day long. To my surprise and displeasure the smug, dickless MOR rock (it was an era of Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Keane) was not the worst thing about XFM. Because of its audience – 18-30 year old young men and women – it was the media of choice for practically every COI brief going. So that a typical commercial break might consist of the sound of a speeding driver flying through his front windscreen, followed by a larynxless man warning listeners of the perils of smoking, which would segue into a spot that discouraged benefit cheats by telling them that THE GOVERNMENT WAS WATCHING THEM EVERY FUCKING SECOND OF THEIR LIVES. The life stories of chronic heroin addicts were easy-listening by comparison.

Which brings me round to this ad from Simon “Scamp” Veksner and his scowling Art Director at BBH, designed make us reconsider our attitude to teenagers.

We are all paedophobes these days, those of us that aren’t peadophiles. What we need to do is empathise.

Clearly (and I’ll just get this out the way) I think this is a really good advert and to some extent I wish I had made it. I should say, it’s intentionally unpleasant, almost traumatic, to watch:



They're going mad for it on YouTube:

crohnoes (16 hours ago)

hahahahaha this was fucking hilarious

I

nykiepaul (17 hours ago) Show Hide

on 0:22, the slap is fuckin quality lmao

Ok, with the crying FX over the super there is a hint, just a hint, of “unless you give us money the girl gets some more.”

And you might say, well yes, it is nasty, but then the world is a nasty place and frankly you can choose to put your fingers in your ears and loudly sing “What a Difference a Day Makes” all you like but that is precisely the kind of attitude that has caused this sad predicament in the first place.

At least where most advertising seems to offer us a version of reality that is much better than our personal reality, this does the opposite, by offering us something much worse. Worse than mine anyway, even on a bad day. If most advertising causes misery and disatisfaction, by the same logic this should be a cause for happiness. Using less perverse logic, if you want to do something about it, you are empowered to by the charity.

It’s because it’s good that it gets complicated. It points up the fact that the thing that we’re always advertising is advertising.

In Infinite Jest (written in 1994) David Foster Wallace prophesied the teleputer – this being a television that delivered viewer-selected, rather than programmed content. We might call this the internet. In the book a corollary effect of the teleputer is that it causes advertising to kill itself. Viewers become harder and harder to reach so that advertisers have to strain harder and harder to reach them, and advertising becomes so shocking and unpleasant that anyone who possibly can avoids it totally.

According to DFW the next step was advertisers desperately searching for other media, resorting to branding anything they could, even time(The Year of the Dove Soapbar, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment etc.) Something like this is happening now, with the branding of sporting events, awards, festivals, celebrities and basically anything with a flat surface you can put a logo on.

Also, the US is governed by an Obssessive Compulsive whose hygeiolatry extends to catapulting all of America’s waste into Canada. This hasn't happened. Although Obama does look very clean and fresh.

I'm just saying.

Recently my Art Director produced a visual for charity ad that was so unpleasant anyone seeing it involuntarily recoiled in shock. We were all ready to do it, but at the final moment discovered that, like most unpleasant things you’d really like to do, it had already been done in France.