150 years of shit!

Earlier this week I was hanging over the Thames in one of the London Eye's pods. The blasted thing was stuck for 20 minutes and Baby Chimp #3 was getting restless.
Being only six, with the expectedly short attention span, she was orbiting the interior of the capsule discretely, convinced she had become invisible. This illusion was immediately shattered when she exclaimed "Yeeuuuw!!! Look Daddy - the river's full of poo!!!"
Of course, being halfway to the top of the Eye's revolution, the object of her derision wasn't poo at all, but the swirly dirty brown current of disturbed mud that flowed along the length of the river at high tide.
150 years ago the Thames really was a river of shit. Open cesspits and drains leaked human effluent into the waterway and in the summer of 1858 London was treated to The Great Stink. Parliament was particularly worried about cholera. In those days, people thought that bad smells could transmit diseases. The result was the commissioning of the greatest sewer network the world had ever seen.
The engineer behind it was Joseph Bazalgette.
This week, Big Brother inflicts itself on British TV once more. The UK chairman of the company behind Big Brother is Joseph Bazalgette's great-great-grandson.
As Stephen Fry has drily remarked, Peter Bazalgette was undoing his great ancestor's works by pumping shit back into our homes.

Marrvellous

Andrew Marr’s short history series currently airing on BBC TV is moving along at a cracking pace. His light touch is just about right for what could otherwise be a turgid trudge through British history since the end of World War Two.
I was particularly taken by yesterday's short anecdote about the Austin Mini. In a few short minutes he demonstrated how a brand can so neatly encapsulate its time.
This is the ad he used as illustration.

What I didn’t realise was that the launch of the tiny, economical car in 1959 – desperately needed because of fuel rationing in the wake of the Suez crisis – was at first a flop. It took a simple piece of publicity – giving a Mini to the newly married Princess Margaret – that started the snowball rolling. Soon, the celebs of the day were seeing driving it, and the car took off.
Marr revealed that the brand wiped the floor with the opposition by selling at £350 for the basic model in 1960. Having just flicked my abacus, I find that this amounts to around £5,500 in today’s money. To put this into context, a brand new bottom of the range Mini today costs £11,600.
Why the ridiculously low price?
Austin didn’t do their sums – the car was sold at a loss and the decline of the British motor industry was assured.
No wonder Britain needed cheering up.

You're making me wet, grandma

It’s a tough job flicking through the men’s mags, but someone’s got to do it. How else to determine the fast-testosterone zeitgeist of the under 30s? Mind you, they’re not as good as they used to be. When I was actually in the target demographic, Loaded was funny, FHM not so dirty, and GQ was so snooty you needed to chew a plum to read it.
Some of the ads a still quite good though, although the nearer you get to the back of these mags, their quality diminishes.
I was pleasantly surprised by this masterpiece from the nether pages of Maxim. It’s a cheapo that doesn't even turn up on Nielsen, has a touch of crapness about it but is still very, very funny. It took less than a moment to force a laugh out of me which, considering how crowded these mags are (especially with other ads for muscle-building supplements, mostly featuring extras from “300” surrounded by blondes with pneumatic tits) is a triumph.
Somehow, I don’t think an art director or copywriter worth their salt would have considered this Carry On execution, but just like the Classic Ford Cortina, is made of cheap elements that create something that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Robbery

It was an odd thing to see my sleepy town in the national news over the weekend. On Friday, armed robbers mugged two security guards who were resupplying the cashpoint machine at my train station. A passerby was shot.
I missed the event itself by about five minutes.
Come the evening, with news and police helicopters buzzing overhead, I returned to the railway station.
A scene familiar to all Brits took place before my eyes:
Outside the station: a news cameraman and a slightly glum looking reporter were preparing to go live.
Behind the reporter: four youths goofing around, waving at the camera. Rabbit ears. Usual thing.

Reporter: "For God's sake stop it! You should be ashamed of yourselves! A man was nearly killed here. Show some respect!"
Youth: "Yeah mate, but we're not the ones making a living out of it."

Touché.

Yeah! Wooh! Hey Buddy! And other Tom Cruisisms

I'm using the feeble excuse that the name of this blog includes the words "media monitoring" to justify playing this clip. I could drum up a planning-esque argument about shifting paradigms and perceptions, but, dammit, that's not my style. Actually, I was tempted to use the word "weltanschauung" but that sort of intellectualising would move me too close to the Russell Davies plannersphere for comfort. My brain isn't accustomed to working at that level without chemical assistance.
Yes, you can probably tell the evil pills are still in my system, which is why my brain did a slight brainflip watching this - the best Tom Cruise impression ever. What's frightening (for TC) is that the impressionist is the BBC's Lucy Montgomery.

Please employ brain

There’s no middle ground with recruitment agencies. As an employer who has used them several times I have found that they generally fall into two camps: the ones who bombard you with CVs, most of which bear little relevance to the job description; and those who you seldom hear from - but will send you one, or maximum two, absolutely spot-on CVs.
I strongly advocate the Chimp Messiah method of dealing with a mountain of CVs. This only works for stage #1 of the selection process.
Separate the CVs randomly into two roughly equal piles.
Shove pile #1 into the bin.
You wouldn’t want to hire anyone who’s unlucky, would you?
I have a strong suspicion that JPL Group is of the “CV-bombarding” variety of recruitment agency.
Why?
Thoroughly lazy copywriting that stinks of in-house work. What the shuddering fuck do summer fruit tarts have to do with their business? And no, they don’t recruit for the catering trade.

Eye'm nearly ok

Another spanner was thrown into the blogging works, this time with a thoroughly evil infected eye ulcer that had the docs in the eye clinic cooing.
"I've seldom seen such a huge ulcer", said one.
"It's spectacular," said another, possibly unaware of the pun.
"Take these drops and come back next week. We need to keep an eye on you."
Ha bloody ha.

Driven by dicks

Here's another spoof ad - a new one from Channel Four's Adam Buxton, fresh on YouTube. I do like the Nissan Transformer ads (much better than the Citroen efforts). They're slightly ickier but thankfully are not immune to Buxton's touch. How nice it would be if these cars could really do these tricks. The school run would certainly be more fun.

Look what’s in the bakery

Fresh on the heels of their first ads for Asda, Fallon keep the bakery theme going with this cheeky Skoda spot.
I am having difficulty articulating my unease because of the industrial-strength painkillers I’m taking to prevent me ripping my ulcer-ridden eye out.
Here’s the thing. I’ve never seen anyone make a car out of cake before, so kudos for the idea.
But.
1. Hello little girlie. Come into my car and have a sweetie. Hansel and Gretel. Missing child in Portugal. Obtuse, I know but my brain’s slightly fucked at the moment.
2. Drive, don’t walk. Eat cake. You fat bastards.
3. Custard pies. Jelly down the trousers. Skoda is the car of choice for clowns.
It’s a fantastic idea that had my kids wondering who ate it after they finished making it, but I can’t figure how it would persuade me to buy a car.
However, I do have an urge to go to the Asda bakery and buy some doughnuts.
They might even take my mind off the pain.

Trigger’s Broom

I wouldn’t consider a Mars bar to be a Mars bar if Masterfoods had gone ahead with its plan to introduce rennet (an enzyme derived from cows’ stomachs) into the recipe.
I’m not a veggie, but my enjoyment of the product would be greatly diminished if I thought there was dead animal in it. Mars bars are a rich sensory overload; pure, sweet pleasure. If carniverous guilt had become part of the package, then I wouldn’t want to eat them.
But how much of its ingredients need to be intact in order to maintain a brand’s authenticity?
We are told that the fire which nearly destroyed the Cutty Sark did leave much of its infrastructure whole. It looks like the metal skeleton and some assorted geegaws that had been removed for renovation survived. Virtually all of the wood was consumed.
I’ve downed many a pint in the shadow of this magnificent sailing ship, but, despite my affection for the old vessel, it’ll take a lot of effort to convince me that when the ship is eventually rebuilt, that it’ll be the same one.
It’ll be like Trigger’s Broom.
(Trigger, a character in a British TV comedy, famously celebrated using the same broom to sweep the streets for 20 years, even though he’d replaced the head 17 times and the handle 14 times).

I wuz slimed

Posts will be erratic and slow over next few days. My home PC died a couple of days ago. Because I spend daylight hours plotting the overthrow of mankind, I will have little time to post new stuff.
Already, highly-skilled techno monkeys are clambering over the hard drive. They are creating something stronger, faster and much more dangerous.

MadScam

There’s a competition running on BBC Radio 5 Live where listeners are invited to submit a recording of themselves reviewing a film. Having heard some of them, the effort has reinforced my view that reviews of anything (books, films) created by the general public are cock.
Just read some of the rubbish on Amazon. The book reviews by readers are supposedly one of the retailer’s strengths. But there are so many semi-literate (judging by the shocking spelling and grammar) people contributing, that one wonders how they managed to read the books at all.
All which makes me wary of writing my own review. I’m going to try and avoid the pseudo intellectualising that’s a characteristic of many reviews by simply pointing out what this book does for me.
There are two things George Parker does that make me laugh out loud. One is his well-targeted polemics in his AdScam blog, and the other is the shameless plugging of his book, MadScam, at any opportunity. Well, this is the ad business after all.
If there’s one regret I had when reading the book (I finished it last week) is that it’s short on swearing, but I guess that fruity Anglo-Saxon wouldn’t have gone down too well in the US.
I still think of myself as an outsider in advertising (about 40% of my working life being spent in the sector), and I am still baffled at how and why certain people in the industry still try to envelop themselves in a cloak of mystery.
MadScam, initially aimed at businesses with nascent marketing strategies, had me chuckling because – at last – I was being told that some of my observations (mostly about witch-doctoring with the sole purpose of extracting money for nothing) were right all along. There is just the right amount of coverage of the various media - what works and what doesn't - which also explains some of the jargon I've long hated. One tiny caveat (mainly for George, rather than the reader) is that with the fast-evolving new media, he'll have to update the book quickly and frequently.
Who should read it: anyone studying business and wanting an honest view of what is occasionally seen as an afterthought of business operations; newcomers to the ad industry; people working in big agencies.
Who shouldn’t read it: people working in big agencies who think they’ll be doing the same job in five years’ time.

See also: Good taste