Marketing.ie’s Stray Thoughts columnist Breandán O Broin on why staying positive is the only show in town right now and is likely to remain so for some time to come
Your agency has shut up shop for the now.
You haven’t shared a creative lock-in for what seems like an age. No more knocking out brilliant ideas in a pub by the canal, during a seamless summer afternoon in this year of woe and worry. Aah, Sweet Golden Days of Youth. Instead, you’re caught in an endlessly-repeating Zoom Triangle, slowly morphing into a mix of Lost in Translation and Groundhog Day.
Government Covid-19 guidance is meat and drink to your agency now; gov.ie being the only client in town with the money to spend and the clout to do so. Only the work is not very creative, is it? It’s more meat and two veg in comparison to a Hang Dai Duck accompanied by a Larkins Pale Ale. So you find yourself trying to come up with less objectionable terms.
Better than ‘cocooning’ while simultaneously answering the call for a whack of alternatives to ‘It’s in Your Hands’. Research is showing a growing number of cynical citizens are saying “No, It’s in Your Hands”, referring to the well-meaning army of experts who have the best of intentions but are beginning to sound a teeny bit patronisingly annoying.
Not like in Dear Old Blighty, where the Scots and English advisors have the good grace to become tabloid fodder and give the peasants something to smile about. Professor Lockdown of London and Medical Holiday Home Advisor of Edinburgh, we salute you.
You’re taking a hit for the team and boosting the nation’s morale.
Sure, didn’t Bouncy Boris even nearly die for the cause and become a seven (six?) times dad only a week later? No greater love et cetera. In the meantime, you have another Zoom-In within the hour. Your nasal hair needs plucking and your virtue-signalling background props demand careful planning. The Bicycle-Hanging-On-The-Red-Brick-Wall motif didn’t really work out at well as you had hoped, last time around. Single Gear Fixies are so last season.
BRIGHT SIDE
Instead of feeling hemmed in by the Ikea bedroom-cum-office design, regard your furlough on reduced pay as preparation for the time when WFH becomes not so much a two-month experiential time frame but more a career inevitability for when you pass over into the dark side of 50, or is it 45 now? Change is constant and not always for the better either.
Fáilte to freelance life – or portfolio life if you are an art director and can manage to draw and paint a bit. Copywriters feel compelled to try their hands at poetry and short stories, but quickly find the publishing market is saturated, with a majority of publishing debuts stemming from the work of young and youngish female writers.
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Also, the pay for poetry is next to nothing and Roddy Doyle has cornered the market in baldy old blokes with meaningful beards. But nil desperandum, as those seasoned enough to have learned Latin at school like to say. Freelance living can be fun and sometimes far more fulfilling than the type of work the average agency client list can offer.
Freelance challenges can be a bit like when you started out in your first agency – happy to focus on trade ads as there was always a better chance of snaffling an ICAD gong in one of the lesser categories. These days, all the categories seem to be lesser. In England, D&AD has even abolished the copywriting craft award as no one bothers with long copy these days.
So where to next?
Are we at the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning or just stuck in the muddle? We can’t in all honesty say everything will come right in the end, because to be frank nobody knows anything, as screenwriter William Goldman observed about movie-making.
But that’s not entirely true as Lenny Abrahamson (above) has proved in co-directing Normal People, a TV series destined to become the Fleabag of the Covid year. LA clearly knows what he’s doing, partly due to cutting his filmic chops making TV ads for Carlsberg and ESB. Now he’s in his Element and the original creative light is still burning fiercely bright.
Talent will win out in the end. That’s what looking on the bright side means.
Interestingly, or perhaps worryingly for media buyers, the viewership numbers of the first four episodes show that while 370,000 people watched live transmissions on RTE 1, over 300,000 tuned in via the RTE Player. In the UK, the figures are even more remarkable – a respectable two million-plus watched on BBC 1 but a record-bursting 16.2 million viewed on BBC Player.
To paraphrase John Fanning, it’s a case of Sally Rooney and the way you might look at her.
DAMON IN DALKEY
When it comes to awards night at ICAD, or any other major ad awards show, just give every prize going to Musgrave for capturing Matt Damon going swimming at Hawk’s Cliff (aka The Ramparts) in his lockdown home of Dalkey carrying his kecks in a SuperValu reusable bag. The resultant Facebook posting went wildly viral with global likes by the bucketful.
Getting Damon to happily work for nothing displays the kind of initiative that once made Dalkey great and will make it great again. What do you mean it was fortuitous? You make your own luck in business. They’re looking on the bright side in SuperValu Dalkey, that’s for sure.
Also, fair play to Spin 1038 in getting the Damon scoop ahead of other Irish media owners.
Slán go fóill.
Breandan O’Broin is founder and director of Company of Words
breandanobroin@companyofwords.com
