The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Actually, I’ve always found journalists that work in particular categories interesting.

The reason for that is that I always wonder whether they like writing about this mad/sad/bad industry or whether it’s simply a job that allows them to get paid for the thing they are passionate about.

Of course doing a job that is only 50% of what you really want to do is not that uncommon.

I’m sure the engineers who invented SONY’s Aibo probably had bigger hopes and expectations in their career than producing a fake dog for sad fuckers to buy and bore their mates with … but let’s face it, there’s an awful lot of adfolk who would rather be writing books and films than churning out another script for Hugglies nappies which, on closer investigation, is exactly the same as the other 9,000 they’ve put out over the past 20 years, even if they keep coming up with new terms for the super absorbent nature of the fabric.

Maybe it’s because of this – or the fact that companies like Ogilvy approach self-PR with all the co-ordination of a military campaign – but I wonder why so many articles I read feature some guy talk about the ‘key rules’ to producing successful campaigns when they’ve not even produced a successful turd in the last 10 years.

That’s not to say these ‘experts’ can’t contribute an interesting point-of-view, but I’d of thought it would be much more valuable if the comments came from the people/parties who actually pulled the thing together in the first place … but then with so few people willing/allowed to tell the blunt truth of it all, is it any surprise journos turn to ‘experts’, even if in many cases what that person has done to justify their title is talk a lot rather than do a lot?

[and yes, I know this is pot. kettle black. time]

I know I’ve told this story umpteen times, but when Baz first came to us, he produced references from the following:

Steve Jobs
Bill Clinton
Kofi Annan
Nelson Mandella

… and when we asked how the hell he got them from these people, he said he just asked to meet them.

Literally that’s all he did.

And he met all of them.

And got references from all of them.

And now works directly for one of them.

By simply saying “can I meet you?”

OK … OK … so he put a great guilt-trip premise to them, namely that because they were all featuring heavily in the World news, he would like to find out if their intentions were honorable and if his older years were in safe hands or not – but it’s still a request which ultimately got answered in the affirmative.