Sorry to have been away for so long loyal followers, but over the past few weeks we have had to face many obstacles at DR. The world of Advertising is challenging and unpredictable at best. Just last night, my lawyers and I were up until the early morning trying to fight a police injunction barring us from shooting an advert for Ace Cider at a school for the deaf. We found a loophole that allowed us to have the students sign the benefits of excessive alcohol consumption among children, which is in no way prohibited by the Advertising Standards Authority’s rules and regulations. It was a real masterstroke on our part, and probation and my lawyer’s advice aside, I’ll stand by the decision until the day I die.
It was just another incident of the Advertising Standards Authority loosening our grip on a new consumer base, by prohibiting the lawful exploitation of the disabled. I can think back to several incidents where there ASA has shockingly stifled my team in Creative. For example, some of the greatest Ad campaigns of the last thirty years have relied on casual racism and stereotypes: Whether it’s a young Japanese couple convulsing to fit-inducing trance in honour of shower gel with a hook on the bottle, or a lecherous Frenchman waging a ten year war on his daughter’s sexual innocence while behind the wheel of a Renault, xenophobia is perhaps advertising’s oldest tradition. Yet when we claim that it is in the CID’s best interest to exhume the corpse of nationalist treasure Bernard Manning for a Branston Pickle advert, we get a slap on the wrist from the ASA. Not to mention having the doctor who agreed to reanimate him struck off the Burmese medical counsel.
Just recently, we lost a lucrative account with Cravendale, the milk company. They initially came to us wanting a campaign that was edgy and provocative, to make their product stand out in an over saturated market. After months of painstaking planning, upwards of five hundred re-drafts, several emotional breakdowns, and many careers lost due to crippling addictions to oxycodones, we came up with what we thought would be the most effective and memorable campaign of the 21st Century:
We knew that the professional and emotional price we paid at DR was worth it, and were sure that the consumer would feel similarly. That was until the ASA stepped in, labelling the campaign as ‘grossly offensive,’ ‘overtly sexist,’ and ‘bearing little or no relation to the product in question.’ The account was taken over by Wieden + Kennedy, where Cravendale inevitably suffered. No one wants to see cats stealing our milk and threatening us with make-shift weapons. If the internet has taught us anything, which it has, it’s that people want cats riding turtles, fighting dogs, and sitting in awkward and hilarious positions. Cats don’t even have opposable thumbs, and to suggest that they could grow them goes against the strict creationist views of the milk consumer.
It’s not all bad however. Our finest work of recent memory was with Sensodyne whitening tooth paste. We paid a group of Albanian dentists a pittance to vouch for what was essentially a tube of surplus Warhammer figurine primer. Despite some initial complaints from the ASA following a spate of mouth-cancer related deaths in the Norfolk Manila East Anglia
I’ll never forget the advice Maurice Saatchi gave me with regard to the ASA when I was a bright-eyed intern cutting my teeth in the industry: ‘I’m trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a subbuteo ball, and my wife is about to start proceedings for my third divorce, do you think I have time for advertising standards? Bollocks to them. Bollocks to everything.’ And trust me, he didn’t tell me this in a series of hand gestures. Maurice Saatchi’s grasp on sign language is tenuous at best.
