Side Project number 12845627345
Alex and Adam write:
Hi Ben,
We write to you with what might be the least worthy side project in the history of your blog.
We will understand completely if you pull a funny face and then drag this towards the little trash icon.
Or you can open the attached word doc to see what it’s all about.
(Here are the contents of the Word doc:)
“The client is pushing us heavily towards full-bleed.”
If you work in advertising, we don’t need to tell you the quote above is less sinister than it might first appear. It is, nonetheless a fine example of the surreal sound bites pinging down the halls of ad agencies the world over.
Whether you’re a suit, creative, a planner, or even one of those accounts payable gnomes – chances are, you’ve had a conversation shudder to a halt as you all frown and wonder how you arrived at: “I don’t want to execute any ducks.”
Long, insufferable meetings produce gems like “We have to maintain the biscuit equity” or “That’s a lot of buckets of learning you’ve had along the way.” And if you retreat to a different part of the building – fearing an imminent bleed on the brain – you’re only going to run into a TV producer insisting “We need someone with a face like a sock puppet” or a creative director ranting “I should have drunk that tea, instead of sticking my cock in it.”
These absurd little quotes – stranger still, when taken out of context – seem to be unavoidable byproducts of the marketing process. And we love them. They remind us that we didn’t settle for the nine to five, and the rows of neatly ordered cubicles. No, instead we get to spend every day with a strange, wonderful bunch of people, who say things like “Trick everyone, eat a granny and have a great time.”
As a sort of group-therapy catharsis, we’d like to invite your readers to share their own ad-quotes with us via twitter.com/advertisinghurt
Share away…
There already is a very popular one of these, which most people have heard of called @agencyquotes. If you search the hashtag #Thingsyouhearinagencies.
Dudes, in the nicest possible way, I think #Thingsyouhearinagencies and the accompanying account (@agencyquotes) has this covered.
He chews bread for my Nan’s ducks.
#Thingsyouhearinagencies always seems a bit toxic.
And this sentence makes me queasy:
‘They remind us that we didn’t settle for the nine to five, and the rows of neatly ordered cubicles’
We should be shaming this nonsense and avoiding it, not celebrating it publicly in a ‘Aw shucks isn’t my life so kooky and unpredictable’ way.
We sell things. We’re professionals. Let’s keep some mystery about it, yeah?