War

I have decided to up my war of passive aggressiveness with Box-Ticking Account Guy.

The last victory was a blank refusal to fly Alitalia at something like 4.20am (going, instead, for the LUXURY of BA at 7am) – but it was hard-won. It involved repeated pretences of “Plans Not Finalised” and “Not Sure About the Agenda” scams, and necessitated the enlistment of Temporary Replacement for World’s Greatest P.A. but I triumphed – and I flew to Italy some two and a half hours later than I was due to. Naturally, I was exhausted from all the chicanery and double-dealing I had had to engage in, but I am sure that in a few weeks, it will proved itself to have been worth it. On the other hand, it does strike me that if I spent half the energy I spend on simply not doing what I’m told on things like “Brand Planning” or “Advertising”, I’d be the best and most efficient Planner in the world.

However, that experiment cannot be planned yet, as there is another operation to be managed: it is Operation NotGoingToMoscow. Now: I don’t mind Russia. I liked the 1980s the first time, and so it’s good to see them again, unironically and with Russian accents whenever I can be bothered with a five-hour flight. As it happens, my enthusiasm for this must be higher than I imagined, because I find myself going there with eye-rolling regularity – and that’s OK, because I also like vodka and (whisper it) I like Russians. But NOT this time!

Moscow isn’t the problem: the problem is the “W word” – workshop. The Client has fixed a three-day workshop in Moscow and I have decided I am not going to go, for a number of reasons:-

1. I might still accept this new job, and if I do, then I really should be absenting myself from meetings and letting some of my minions fill my loafers.
2. It is a workshop: the opposite of work.
3. But most importantly: Box-Ticking Account Guy wants me to go – and thus it follows, it follows as Night follows Day that I shall not go.

My only sadness is that I shall not be able to try out my new workshop technique. I have, until now, fallen back on the classic armoury of eye-rolling, tutting and sotto voce murmurings of “Fucking HELL” to signal my involvement in the proceedings, but I think I might have hit on something better.

Waiting until audience participation is requested for the first time in the session (this is important, as there is a fair amount of reticence at these things, and so if you appear to be willing to make a contribution, you are received as enthusiastically as a tray of croissants at a hypoglycemic conference), I would make a very clear show – possibly even going as far as raising my hand – of having something to “contribute”.

“Yes? YES?” the enthusiastic and nervous-of-silence moderator would encourage me.

“No, it’s nothing, it’s probably wrong or stupid…”

“NONSENSE – no such thing! Remember – this is a workshop: there is no place for quality here! What did you want to say?”

At this point, apparently emboldened by the fact that my contribution was genuinely being sought, I would sit erect in my chair, eyes shining and, pausing only to glance round the room with a show of shyness mixed with awareness that Something Good Was Coming, I would say:-

“I just wonder if we could do something about vaginas.”

Any “Sorry, I don’t think I understand” work, would be countered with my nodding my head enthusiastically and saying “Just something with vaginas.” fading to a different angle, disappointed but still convinced of my rectitude with “I really think that there’s something we could do with vaginas. They just FEEL right for us.”, which I would say while looking around, searching out the eyes of my fellow workshop attendees whom I just KNOW will get it and be right behind me. When the moderator went past me (even if he was foolish, but expedient enough to scribble a poorly hand-written “Vaginas” (?) on the flip chart, I would make it clear for the rest of the session that I had put my neck on the line, and it had not (in my opinion) ended well, and that I was now pretty wounded.

I might not have the guts to see this through – but I bet Best Friend has: and it might be better coming from her – so I’m going to try to train a small, elite team to get this kind of thinking at the heart of workshop management as soon as possible.

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“…And Then We Could Eat Our Own Shit.”

Well, I’ve banged on long enough and often enough on this site about my loathing for the horrifying cliché of lazy thinking that is “the workshop” – but I’m afraid that I just can’t help myself. I’ve just returned from Jakarta (oh – and by the way, it’s a shit-hole. Just to be clear, the hotel that we went to was promoted as “the only hotel of its class in Jakarta that has only been bombed once”) where the dread workshop was the centre piece of the visit.

I had actually only gone because Enthusiastic Account Guy had planned to go from there onto his holiday in South Africa, and when the original moderator backed out, it looked like he was going to have to cancel (and lose all his money…) so I stepped in. Anyway, once there, I had to just go with the flow – well: with some of the flow, anyway. I still can’t bring myself to say “No such thing as a bad idea” – when that’s so obviously not true; and I still can’t do any of that “Imagine if this bathroom cleaner was a contestant in the Big Brother house – what would they be like?” type rubbish – I much prefer to stick to the difficult stuff, such as “You want 20% market share in one year and you have fuck all money – how the holy HELL are you going to do that?” and then review ideas. So, I suppose it’s fair enough that the over-riding emotion in the room was “fun” – but do you know what? We were there to work – nevertheless there was a palpable sense of alarm in the room when I started the afternoon session.

I had started to brief the groups on what I wanted them to do, how to approach the task, and how long they had to do it – and when I looked up at them, it was as if I’d suggested that we could murder our children and then sit down for a good session of shit-munching. Needless to say, this was just what I felt like, having flown for about twenty hours, to be confronted by a bunch of people who chose to update their Facebook profiles as other people presented information to them on how to grow THEIR business. And, so, while I didn’t say “Or we could eat our own shit.” I did say “Or we could all just give up, go up to our rooms, have a sleep and watch the brand fail.” – and after that, they were good as gold (well, they compared me to Simon Cowell – but other than that, they were good as gold). Maybe I have found the magic solution to running workshops: arsiness.

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Jakarta

I don’t want to go to Jakarta.

It follows then, as night follows day, that Jakarta is exactly where I AM going on Tuesday night. This arse of a trip is designed for one stupid reason only: the holding of that behemoth of contemporary corporate life: the workshop.

I won’t witter on about the ghastliness of the workshop: the cretinous, credulous, erroneous, offensive beliefs that “There’s no such thing as a bad idea” ( a thought that history would disprove fairly comprehensively, I would suggest) and “Eight people are better than one” (actually what happens is you get a surfeit of people so delighted to be out of the office, but so unaware of their limitations that you end up copying things onto a flip-chart that you will stare at in horrified disbelief only an hour later), but I WILL comment on the fact that for a seven hour “workshop”, I leave home at 5pm on Tuesday night, returning on 6am on Saturday morning.

Oh – and my companion is Enthusiastic Account Guy: whose enthusiasm is exciting for about a day, after which it becomes a principle reason that I start contemplating Niagara Falls tightrope-walking as an alternative career. Oh MAN, I don’t want to go – but I absolutely AM going to go.

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The Freakshow Workshop

Fuck me: we have got some FREAKS working at our agency.

I was reminded of this when having dinner with Women Employed to Work in London But Moved To Singapore By Travesty Of All Things Gay. She reminded me of the day that we held an Asia-specific workshop with attendees from all our agencies in the region – and it was like the circus was in town, complete with World’s Least Convincing Transvestite (hands like a goalkeeper, voice like Barry White) and a pair of matching midgets, both of whom truly are shorter when they are standing up than when they are sitting down – not to mention the shrieking, highlighted, belt buckle the size of a Rugby ball, tightly costumed horror that is Travesty of All Things Gay.

But it appears that we also have more than enough freaks to go round: because the Sentosa workshop introduced me to a whole new bunch of Godawfuls that I had never clapped eyes on before. These included (but were not limited to) Female Creative Director with Henry V’s Haircut, Indian Planner with Lazy Eye, Indian Account Guy with Comic Book T-Shirts, Indian Planner with Nylon Trousers and Pubey Moustache, and Chinese Lesbian Elvis Planner. What a bunch.

We were there to talk about ways of representing horror and tragedy, but as I looked around the room, I realised that, actually, all I needed to do was say: “Look in a fucking mirror, and we can all go home early”. As it happens, we stuck it out – and to very good effect: Woody Allen in Robert de Niro’s Body Creative Director did us all proud, and we came out of it with some really interesting twists on the current idea. I could have done without the shimmering intellect of Australian Account Woman with Dense Apricot Hair on Forearms, but otherwise, for all their retina-scorching hideousness, they turned out to be a sweet, and talented bunch.

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Indifference As An Art Form

The day I had on Tuesday beggars belief.

There is a brand (that I don’t work on) that needed a little extra help, and so I had been conscripted (entirely against my very busy will) to get involved in trying to sort that out by the redoubtable Fearless Leader. So I ended up agreeing to lead an all-day workshop (one of my most dreaded words, with a reality even more terrifying than the word can suggest) in Paris, with our French agency – who proved themselves to be an absolutely staggering display of indifference as an art form.

I won’t itemise the specifics of what made that workshop such a fucking awful day: certainly it wasn’t helped by the glassy-eyed spectatorship of the people who should have been participating, rather than observing – but suffice to say that I have made a vow before God and Fearless Leader, that I shall never lead a workshop on a brand that I don’t work on, ever again.

The only two good things about are that it is over, and that it confirmed the absolute correctness of my hatred of the French.

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Double Wank With Shit Chips

There are, in advertising circles, too many people making a living by holding up a tube of toothpaste and forcing people to consider what it might be were it not, in fact, a tube of toothpaste. What kind of animal would it be? What kind of party would it host? Where would it do its shopping? How would it shapes its pubic hair and so on.

Today, I was trapped in just such a session where we all considered what a well-known cleaning brand would be if it decided to throw in the cleaning towel and re-imagine itself as one of the characters from Classical Greek, Egyptian (or, in a late and surprising bid for what the fuckery) a character in The Iliad or The Odyssey.

We ended up after nine hours (and I felt EVERY ONE) agreeing that it would be EXACTLY WHAT I HAD SAID THREE MONTHS AGO, amid a number of people doing their stroky beard faces. But the point is surely that this is dodging the issue. These things AREN’T Greek gods: if they were, it would be easy – those stories are exciting, deal in extreme emotions and absolutes. It’s only when we face up to, and embrace, the fact that these brands are what they are, and do what they do that we’ll get the right ideas for them, and stop distracting ourselves with pseudo-intellectual masturbatory exercises, such as today’s. It was double wank with shit chips.

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There’s Always One

Sunday, 30th September 2007

Oh, the dread awfulness of the workshop!

Oh the erroneous, provably incorrect idea that a bunch of people in a room with a load of Post-it notes and someone shouting “What if it was an aftershave, a car, a wingnut, an anal douche?” at regular intervals is a better way of getting somewhere viable that a few bright, focused people in a SMALLER room not shouting, but arguing constructively! Oh the sheer shit of having to sit there as someone says “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.” – a statement that even the briefest acquaintance with the history of culture, science, warfare and religion would overthrow in one shiny second.

I fucking hate them: and most of all I hate them because at one point there is always someone who, with the fresh-faced look of someone seeing the light in a 50s Biblical epic says: “Why don’t we become a real PARTNER for people in Area X? Tell them how to do it. No one tells you HOW TO DO IT.”

“Area X”, need I say, could be “Driving a car”, “Eating a yoghurt”, “Putting on a condom”, “Using kitchen towel”, “Shopping for groceries”, “Wiping your arse” or “Cleaning your house”. Only two of these, incidentally, are not ACTUAL examples. But what REALLY grates is that after this pranny has made this childish and disgusting suggestion, the general response isn’t to drag them out of the room, slit their throat and leave them to die, or to bury them under a shower of Post-it notes and indelible markers. Instead, they are greeted with the gentle, smiling nod and slightly opened eyes of the Marketing Professional doing their “Fuck me! Breakthrough thinking that might park my overfed face in a profile in Marketing Week” faces.

I am fresh from such a workshop and next week hosts another one, in Dublin – and on THIS occasion, I shall be in the company of SO MANY people who bug the foreskin off me that next week’s blog should make the Spanish Inquisition look easy-going and laid back.

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