Call it festive sentimentality, but it’s time someone had a rant on your
behalf. Yes, you, Campaign Diary (you wot? - Ed). It strikes me that
you’ve been much maligned over the last year. It’s got to stop.
It’s about time people realised just what a service you do for the
advertising community. I mean, if it wasn’t for you and your unfailing
sense of what’s fragrant and what’s smelly, we’d still be mired in a
mangy trough filled with ads from advertisers who bloody care, DJ
Doctors who really should schwing for it, PR companies trying to force
you to write bad English, NABS Misery Night(s) and Vauxhall Vectra
commercials.
It’s not as if you spend every day at lunch in posh restaurants or
anything. It’s not your fault if drunken celibacy-challenged luvvies and
hacks insist on polluting your vision with their canoodlings. Keep
advertising snog-free, that’s what I say. It’s a bloody good job you’ve
led the clampdown on all this Internet diary smut, too. Someone’s got to
before the whole thing goes the way of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Sex is in
the air there, make no mistake. All that bondage and M&S. I blame it on
the free ice-cream.
I think you should be knighted, or have a date with Will Carling, or a
kiss blown at you in the Ivy by Lyndy Payne, or something. I hope your
boss, that nice Mr Heseltine, will recognise your services in promoting
valuable exports like the Saatchis and Persil Power ads. Perhaps he can
find you a job in a newly privatised utility.
As for all those small-minded people having a go at you for moving to
Hammersmith, tell them to shove it up their Groucho. It’s good to be a
little detached (or, in your case, a lot) from all those Soho luvvies,
with their Italias and Valeries, Mezzos and Zillis and clubs called
houses. You’ll really know what the man on the number 27 bus is thinking
- and it’s not ‘advertising is art’. He doesn’t like that poncy Euro
rubbish, save for the ambassador’s party. Campaign of the year.
Excellente. Top page! Keep it up. One day that nice David Abbott might
nominate you for a sainthood.
Want to rant in ’96? Send 400 words to 174 Hammersmith Road, London W6
7JP. Or fax the same old number, 0171-413 4507.
