Ad hoc

Once upon a time I wanted to work in advertising.  I thought it was a way to get paid to think of puns.  This theory was shattered during a work experience stint at a flash London agency which largely entailed reuniting hundreds of video cassettes with their cardboard cases (except for the day I spent touring toy shops trying to find plastic tiger claws for a Frostie’s product launch - the equivalent of a sending an idiot apprentice out to fetch some tartan paint).

That wasn’t what put me off advertising, though.  What did it was someone explaining to me that the majority of people in an agency are battling to reconcile two opposing forces - the client and the creative team.

Take a commercial for ketchup.  The client wants a 30 second shot of the sauce slowly leaving a prominently logoed bottle and landing deliciously on a salad or one of the other healthy foodstuffs people generally put ketchup on.  The creative team don’t give a toss about sales of ketchup but do want to impress their mates and win awards, so suggest something surreal and nonsensical - a gorilla playing the drums, say - and promise that it will set Twitter ablaze.  Everyone else then has to find a way of combining art and commerce in a way that won’t get them fired.

This interplay has been playing on my mind recently because I’ve become completely obsessed with this omni-present tube advert for Cheltenham racecourse:


It has to be assumed that the client took the driving seat for this one.  Imagine the creative meeting.

Agency ponce: "OK, we’ve brought some samples of the tube ad and we think you’re gonna be rilly excited, guys - the creatives have really thought their berets off on this one.  We’re seeing a clean white background, big central image of a beautiful black racehorse - but what’s this?  That’s right - it’s got human hands holding banknotes instead of hooves!  And it’s wearing a fez and smoking a pipe!  I know, eye-catching or what?"

Client: "That’s very nice, Julian, but could you do something a bit more, I don't know, wife-beater-y?  Just off the top of my head, I’m seeing a florid complexion and a screech of self-loathing as the children’s trust fund gets blown on an 11-1 long shot.  Boozy simple-minded aggression.  This ad needs to be like looking in the mirror for every overpaid city worker with anger-management issues.  Are your guys up to the job?"

Agency ponce: "Hmmm.  Marcel is very attached to Tote the Gambling Stallion but I’m sure he’ll come up with something.  Just to clarify - you want an image that will put all right-minded people off ever visiting any racecourse ever again?"

Client: "Exactly."

Cross-species love

Things have been quiet around here recently. I've been working quite hard in the week and drinking too much at the weekends, rendering me even more useless and lazy than usual. But I've been roused from my lethergy by the latest in one of the oddest advert series ever conceived - the bed company ones where a man hippo and a yellow woman duck share a bed and appear to be in a stable relationship.

There are so many problems with the basic concept. Mr Hippo wears pyjamas but Mrs Duck doesn't, the tart. It is never explained why they choose to sleep in a low-quality human bed - perhaps they had the old "I'd be far happier in a nest, darling"/"Shut it you slagbag, I'm sleeping in a big pile of mud and that's that" argument and this was the compromise. The logistics of what goes on after the light goes out (I imagine by the duck pulling the cord with her beak) are too alarming to analyse in detail but would surely be considered to be a bit strong by even the most open minded.

But something has changed in the latest installment. He's always been a lot larger than her, as you'd expect. Now, presumably after extensive market research into how much reality-bending the public can cope with in an onscreen cross-species bunk up, the size difference has been reduced - she seems to have grown in size to about goose proportions. Which is closer to the size of a hippo, but not that close.

So why make the change? One attack of flailing hippo night terrors will still obliterate her. It's still an unacceptably weird set up. But there will have been meetings, conference calls, pie and flip charts, advertising briefings and hundreds of man hours devoted to enlarging the duck. I guarantee that not one extra crappy bed has been sold as a result.