Admen who make madmen of us all
They interrupt our TV — and we can’t get their blasted jingles out of our heads. Why we love to hate those annoyingly brilliant ads
BOOK OF THE WEEK
SAD MEN
by Dave Roberts (Bantam Press £12.99 £11.49)
THOSE of us born in the last century, before the invention of the TV remote which allowed you to hastily change channels, were unable to escape commercials. hotwired into our brains are the era’s jingles and slogans: Beanz Meanz heinz; Drink A Pinta Milka Day; Guinness Is Good For You; All Because The Lady Loves Milk Tray; Schhh . . . You Know Who; opal Fruits, Made To Make Your Mouth Water . . .
My f avourites were t he Cinzano commercials, starring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, which began in 1978 and ran for six years.
Directed by Alan Parker and hugh hudson, no less, they were brilliant little comic films, clearly inspired by Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau, in which Joan was the glamour puss and Leonard the buffoon who’d end up i nadvertently flinging a drink full in her face.
Parker was correct to say that the ads were ‘infinitely more entertaining than any of the programmes in those days’ — but the Cinzano company wasn’t happy. The public confused the product with the rival Martini brand, sales of which soared.
Middle- class persons, hating the crassness of advertising, often refused to watch ITV on principle — but such cultural or moral prohibitions certainly never beset Dave Roberts, who remains utterly besotted by brand names and slogans.
he doesn’t just drink tea, it’s always PG Tips. In the supermarket he puts the Ariel back on the shelf, because he’d been impressed by Persil’s ‘whiter than white’ campaign. he doesn’t wear any old shirts — they are Ben Sherman shirts.
If you wish to discover what kind of mad man becomes an ad man, the answers are to be found in Sad Men.
on the face of it, it would seem a reprehensible occupation, persuading the gullible public to buy stuff they don’t want or need.
BEING-about power and manipulation, you can see how frightful bullies like Charles Saatchi are drawn to it. Roberts, however, sees his calling as artistic. In his interpretation, advertising (‘a genius for condensing complex thought into a few words’) belongs with the same world of fantasy and illusion as is found in Romantic poetry.
You never once doubt Roberts’ sincerity. he genuinely believes that ‘Do the Shake n’ Vac and put the freshness back’ or ‘Any time, any place, anywhere’ (Martini) are lyrics to rival Keats and Byron. When he says of a colleague: ‘ his changes were good. he added a nicely judged line here and there, and wrapped it up with a cleverer ending than I had managed’, he’s not referring to script emendations by noel Coward or oscar Wilde. This is a story conference for Great northern Bitter (‘Specially imported from Manchester’).
It’s comical really, the disparity between the claims Roberts makes and the reality of what he’s up to.
Yet all he ever wanted was to become an advertising executive. From an early age, ‘I immersed myself i n newspapers and magazines, studying t he ads they carried’.
Roberts cut out the blurbs for harp Lager or Toshiba and pinned them on his wall. Failing to get a job with Saatchi & Saatchi, however, he instead went as a trainee copywriter to an agency in Leeds.
hoping to be taught sophisticated ‘top secret mind-manipulating techniques’, what he found himself doing was devising a leaflet for sparkplugs.
he also promoted lavatory paper (‘it will fill a vital gap’) and a brand of processed breaded meat called ‘Steakaways’ in the pages of the prestigious Sandwich And Snack news.
even this palled eventually, so Roberts
went to New Zealand, where all the old l adies were busy ‘ knitting a jumper for Princess Diana’s baby’. One of his colleagues was the ‘short, scruffy’ Peter Jackson — later a film director of repute.
Roberts prospered in Wellington, hiring British celebrities to fly out and promote anti-freeze or service stations. David Jason, at the height of his Del Boy fame, advertised a supermarket (‘Great food which doesn’t cost the earth,’ he had to say, as he fell over by the till). Spike Milligan sold vitamin pills. Kenny Everett was the voice of Funny Feet ice cream, and Pam Ayres narrated the ad for Campbell’s Smoked Salmon.
I wish we were told what these people were paid — what the budgets and inducements were. The reticence is annoying, as Roberts is not short of background info.
Did you know, for example, that the Milky Bar Kid hated Milky Bars? They made him sick. Or that the girl in the Coca-Cola ad ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ was tone deaf?
Not many people will be aware that t he man behind Aero’s ‘indescribabubble’ slogan was an employee at Ogilvy & Mather named Salman Rushdie or that ‘Go to work on an egg’ was thought up by Fay Weldon. While I can j ust about appreciate the wit of some taglines (‘Labour isn’t working’ on behalf of the Tories won a General Election), it is a mystery how the thrusting advertising executive fills the day.
They seem to drift into the office mid-morning, go out immediately for ‘ long liquid lunches,’ come back, doodle on a pad, get typists to decipher the scrawl and designers to create actual logos, and, err, that’s it.
OFF-they go to the pub to ‘ celebrate’ with their clients. If a radio commercial is to be made, again it is but the work of a moment. Roberts goes into a studio ‘run by someone who used to be in Herman’s Hermits’, hires an actor to read the lines, ‘an engineer splices together the best takes, puts a piece of music in the background, and hands me a cassette’.
How can grown men (it is always men) take this seriously? Roberts found he couldn’t in the end.
Looking at his own commercials, and realising ‘ they all had one thing in common: they were rubbish’, he had a nervous breakdown. He stayed in bed all day, put on weight, refused to go out.
‘I f elt a huge wave of heartthumping panic descend on me.’ This lassitude lasted years. His marriage collapsed. He was broke, out of a job, washed up. But he never lost his love of his profession, even if he personally never excelled in it.
Roberts now freelances for a firm in Macclesfield and devises slogans for riveting periodicals such as Caterer And Hotelkeeper.
The mystique has gone for ever, though. These days, such is the plethora of ‘social media, email blasts, product placement, mobile devices and digital TV’, advertising has become cheap and even easier to do, polluting the world with the equivalent of yet more annoying meaningless wallpaper or thoughtless Muzak.
I personally will pay very good money to anyone who’ll sink those damn Viking River Cruises barges.
My loathing for those smug whitehaired couples drinking wine and spending their children’s inheritance as the sun sets on the Danube is getting pathological.
I am a madman created by the ad men. Are they happy now?