You're not the boss of me. Not you or anyone.

So I thought I'd add my tribute to Scamp's ambient week. But then when I looked at his post today I realised that this probably wasn't what he, or anyone else, had in mind.

It's not for a brand, it's to stop drunk men pissing in the alleyway by my house. The first frame is redundant, I realise - but in between playing Spore I'm also learning how to do Photoshop to a fairly shit level.

Tanks a lot

Dave Mance of Real Men Write Long Copy has very kindly nominated me as the biggest Nazi in advertising this month*. Obviously it's a major award, and I'm up against Dave Trott and Russell Davis, so it's going to be a long shot. I'd really appreciate your help in getting my hands on all that vintage SS leatherwear that Neil "goatee" Perkins is kindly offering as a prize (from his own collection I believe). With the kind of wear I give them, these Chinese lederhosen just don't last.

At the time of writing voting stands at 5 votes to 15. So get on there and vote. Obviously I don't believe in voting in principle, but that didn't stop me.

Really the idea of a load of planners and metricians coming on here to read about redundancy, death, mental illness, video games and porn tickles me fucking senseless.

Thanks Dave.

* I hope no-one's told them I'm not technically in advertising any more. I'm mainly just in my kitchen.

UPDATE: We're now trailing the leader (an eye-wateringly dull post about Noam Chomsky and planning) by 6 votes "Sieg! Sieg! Sieg!"

UPDATE: No zey are getting avay!

Crunchy fun

Regular readers will know what a big fan I am of the Innocent Tone of Voice©. I don't even find it insane or anything. So it's with some sadness that I came to hear that Innocent are having to down-size by 25% as a result of the recession. Obviously there's nothing funny about being made redundant, I should know, but it does provide an opportunity to marvel at the versatility of the ITOV©. Is there anything you can't do with it?

Dear XXXXX,

We know you've been working for us for a while, and we just wanted to say that we like you, you're a lovely person, and it goes without saying that any member of the Innocent family is a real treasure.

As you may have heard on the news (boring), there's been a nasty bit of recession going on. We're afraid to say that even Innocent Towers is not immune (although we are immune to woodland magic).

Sometimes no matter how nice you are, you end up having to do some rather nasty things, that's just the way life is. We didn't design life, if we had done we would have made it nicer, take our word for it. But that's another story.

Anyway, because of this belt-tightening and cloth-trimming, we're going to have to terminate your employment with immediate effect.

We hope that we can still be friends, and if you see us driving by in the Innocent van, you might stop and lean at the window for a chat for old time's sake. But apart from that, we will need you to return any equipment you may have in your possession. Also, we'd just like to remind you, in a nice way, of your confidentiality agreement with us. So don't go nattering our business over your garden fence - jabber-chops.

Ok, so we will need you to go really soon. Like by the end of the day. Otherwise we'll have to send security round to haul you out onto the Uxbridge Road.*

We do really like you though. And don't forget for a minute how nice we are.

So yeah, unlucky, bye!

Innocent Drinks Plc.

*(Only joking. Sort of.)

In the ointment

So a lot of a people are like, hey, Gordon, what's it like being unemployed? This is what it's like being unemployed:

Seen the new Mother campaign for Granta Magazine?

Apparently it's only running in one bookshop in Bloomsbury - that's what makes it so clever.

Yeah, yeah.

So already I'm finding advertising much less interesting than I did four days ago. Usually when I take the tube I go round looking at ads muttering "shit, shit, toss, doesn't make any sense, art director fucked it, shit, grammatical aberration, insane, been-done, fucking Mick Hucknall of all people, shit, what kind of cunt do they take me for, toss" like I've got an obscure form of environmental Tourette's.

My girlfriend pointed out I don't actually have to take an interest in any of it any more, unless I want to. You're never really a civilian again though are you?

Obviously I haven't got any advertising news, apart from that which I can manufacture in my flat. But someone reading this will certainly be made redundant soon, and it will probably be you (bad things always happen to you), so prick up your ears you might learn something.

I can report back from the land of the unemployed and say it's fine so far. It reminds me of that time in childhood when I was fully sentient and cunning but didn't yet have to go to school. I find I'm thinking less about advertising, more about bookshops and engaging in a futile staring match with a tin of luncheon meat. I've started selling stuff on eBay - I might try and add a widget to my blog so you too can buy my personal possessions.

Since publishing that post on being made redundant several students have got in touch, asking my advice on how to get into the industry - the leading minds of the future no doubt. From now on I will either send out a standard advisory email, or a creepy invitation to come round to my house and watch a scary film with me on my sofa in my greasy dressing gown, on a kind of Russian Roulette basis.

I get to have lunch with people I like, like Brother Stevie. As a resident of The Borough of Haringey he has also been thoroughly burglarised. We discussed the psychological reaction which is always "Hello, why has my wife moved the TV and smashed the window - this stranger in the hallway - is he from the gas board?" It's something like having Alzheimers. The brain's ability to make connections is totally stymied, and you go flailing around for rational explanations like a dyspraxic on Supermarket Sweep.

(I don't have a television, so all my day time TV references, which I use for dismal colour, are dated, hence extra dismal).

I owe Barack Obama an extra debt of gratitude because on the night of the burglary I had been playing some of the "Audacity of Hope" on my iPod in the bedroom, which meant it wasn't nicked with the laptop. Its hard-disk is also the repository for my own avant-garde filmaking endeavours, and so I was especially relieved that they won't be surfacing on any popular video sites with names like, but not exactly, YouTube. It almost makes up for Gordon Brown nicking my job.

Listening to Barack Obama reading the "Audacity of Hope" is an immensely reassuring experience. He describes his attempt to identify and stave off the forces which make ordinary people into politicians - namely, only hanging around with other politicians and rich people, flying in private jets, turning complex ideas into simple ideas for the sake of soundbites. His perceived non-politician status is what makes him original - I think in any industry that prizes originality it's worth working out what it is that makes the rest of them the same and then doing the opposite.

That's what gives me the edge over all you losers with jobs you see.

Anyway, thanks for all your comments on the last post, all your feedback on that idea really made me realise just how worthwhile writing this blog is.

I am already going insane.

So for my next article in Outdoor Gerontophile Magazine I ended up watching loads of mobile phone advertising. Looked at impassively, every single one of the mobile networks has opted for an advertising strategy that is so obscure that it's only because we're indoctrinated in the, hem, discourse that we can even identify them as adverts for mobile phone networks at all, and not some legal synthesis of the drugs heroin and ecstasy.

They are as bizarre as you like.



This campaign seems to have gently slipped into the background lately. But let's just dwell for a moment on the frank surreality of an ad that begins "I am my Mum". Now it is a totally original use of the first person pronoun, the reason it's taken till now to get here is because it is mad. It has two possible sources: a planner fresh off the plane from a two-week enema break on Koh Samui* or the post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. If you are who you are because of everyone then you're really just a matrix of other people's perceptions, with no innate qualities whatever. Is the suggestion that you should be using the phone the whole time then, to prevent yourself from realising that you're just a horrifying ontological vacuum and imploding? I must admit I find the idea chilling, but not persuasive.

Ok, it is extremely hard to talk about what mobile phone networks sell, without sounding like a French philosopher or a tit. Obviously they didn't try very hard in that case, but fair enough, the sector is a victim of the advertising dictum that says one should sell the hole, not the drill. The standard schtick is that they sell communication, but that's not true is it? They sell a means of communication, not language, but something behind language. The networks long ago abandoned trying to talk about what they actually sell - that is wires, satellite dishes, chirrupy beeping noises and men sitting in front of computers making sure that bandwidth is working. After all, why would you talk about all that boring stuff (the drill), when you've got the other stuff (the hole) and in this case the hole is people communicating with their parents, girlfriends, lovers and grannies. It is emotive. Or it was, until it got boring.

The only problem is that the hole is just that, a hole: it's not there. You can only show it embodied by people, not on its own.



The T-Mobile ad is deeply annoying, but it does contain a sophisticated assault on this philosophical pillbox. How do you show the idea of communication, that is, something invisible, embodied? People talking on phones has been done, is not slightly dynamic, not spectacular, no longer good ad material. The solution they've come up with is a dance. Now, Saatchis aren't the only people to have used this metaphor. The other person is Yeats, and he say: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The weird thing is that Yeats is handling exactly the same thorny metaphysical problem of the embodied idea, the same brief if you like.



Lambie Nairn had a blank canvas, a new network and came up with the empty bubble the initial letter O. The O has a special significance in terms of this idea/reality problem. Lacan uses the O as an ideogram to represent man's inability to realise his desire - the impossiblity of the idea matching the actuality. The interrupted O. Here we are, back on the edge of the void.




But so far so pretentious. These parallels are irrelevent, you say, you're just using these references because you think they make you look clever, and dressing it up with swearing doesn't fool anyone - you're still being a dick.

Well yes I am, and I admit drawing these parellels is a niche activity, and there's a reason for that - there is more or less no continuum between this stuff and advertising. If it exists it goes in one direction, philosophy might look at advertising, but advertising never looks at anything other than its own balls. It is anti-intellectual. Having worked in a few creative departments, I'd hazard a guess that Nan and Spaf at Saatchis didn't go off and read Yeats in order to come up with the Liverpool St. idea (well come on, that's not just arrogant, the reason I write this blog anonymously is because if you mention Yeats in an ad agency people creep into your office in the night and write the word "PRICK" in the corner of every page of every layout pad in your office). Nor am I suggesting they should have. But what it proves is advertising's ability to innovate around intellectual problems in an non-intellectual way. A lateral, creative way. Every time it makes one of these ideas it is making it from scratch, like the man in Borges's story who writes Don Quixote all over again.

And to half-inch an idea from Dave Trott, creativity fuelled by capitalism is water-like, flowing out of necessity into every possible solution. If you set it an impossible problem - how do you represent something intangible, something behind language- it will go off like a mad computer and come up with a series of answers. The weird thing is that it seems to be coming up with the same answers as philosophers and poets have done in the past. The fact that these ideas already existed doesn't matter a damn, they'd already existed long before there was literature or philosophy as well.

It almost seems a shame that all we do is sell stuff.

I mean all you do. I don't even sell stuff any more.

*Complete this gag - What do you get if you give a planner an enema?