antipopper

Sometimes I actually miss working in the world of marketing. When you work in advertising, you sometimes get paid to just talk shit — not often enough, but just enough for it mix some amusement into the horror. I mean, we actually had conference call meetings to compile lists of “what’s cool at the moment”. “Trucker caps? Not cool,” we told our Melbourne office. The next week, office drinks on Friday night was webcast live between the two offices. Lo and behold, the Melbourne crew were still wearing fucking trucker caps. Fools. (One thing I steadfastly refused to do, though, was encourage any incursion of our marketing efforts into the blogosphere, or any other aspects of the New Web — you know, the part of the web that’s interesting. I mean, we already planted people in forums and chat-rooms to plug products. And IRL, our entire department was once paid in cash to go out to various bars and conspicuously consume a new brand of energy beer we were launching.)

Most of all, I miss my own stupid ideas — idiotic plans that nobody should have any reason for making, which of course would never see the light of day. It was just fun trying to see how far they’d get. Last year we were developing a mobile ringtone promotion for Fanta, and I suggested calling the campaign FANTA FREQUENCY, just so we could have stickers with the slogan “YOU ARE ON THE FANTA FREQUENCY”. Just visualising Warren Ellis’ reaction to this piece of shamelessness was reward enough.

Then there was the launch of Tim Tam Ice-Cream (Tim Tams are the standard chocolate biscuit in Australia). My idea involved getting giant CONCRETE-MIXER trucks and reskinning them appropriately. You’d get all these OOMPA-LOOMPAS in RADIATION SUITS on top of the truck, throwing packets of Tim Tams and buckets of ice-cream into the mixer, which would turn lazily. Buckets of Tim Tam Ice-Cream would miraculously emerge at the rear of the concrete mixer. The element that locked everything into place was that these TIM TAM MIXER TRUCKS would turn up to various events playing a wonky version of GREENSLEEVES really loudly, and actually serve Tim Tam Ice Cream, with no other fuss. No other media. No other campaign. I somehow convinced most of the agency of the genius of this plan until the next day, when it was crushed by management.

Sigh.

[ tags: advertising, cool, fanta, ice-cream, marketing, tim-tams, trucker-caps, warren-ellis ]