A friend of mine made an interesting analogy the other day. “Advertising is like porn, he commented, ruefully. “It’s filled with people who sell themselves outright, but always harbor dreams of respectability.
And like porn, they always swear they’ll never do it again.
But they always do.
It’s true, ad people constantly talk about doing something else: copywriters want to be writers, art directors want to be artists and client service people want to be clients. In fact, the copywriter who has a script for a movie in his drawer or the art director who paints on the side, has become something of an advertising cliché.
That’s why I lie and pretend I’ve never written a haunting, coming-of-age, satirical drama, set in Cairo at the turn of the millennium.
Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to improve your station in life, but why does advertising especially inspire such vehement self-loathing among its own people?
The truth lies on many levels.
First up, despite its glamour image, advertising is really a service industry.
It’s no different from waiting tables, except there’s little chance you’ll get a tip for your troubles. Monitoring your every move are bosses who act like parents and clients who act like infants. Ignore your boss and he’ll make your life miserable, while if you ignore your clients, they’ll throw an almighty tantrum. It’s like being an unwed mother with a screaming two-year old, living in your parents’ basement. And your parents scream at you, too.
Another friend, a few months into his first advertising job, started calling himself So’ad, as in: Igri ya bit ya So’ad hateeli kobayit maya! (Run along So ad and fetch me a glass of water!)
Another reason for all this discontent is that the ad world is forever trying to reclaim the glamour of its mythical origins: the brandy-and-broads decadence and iconoclasm of 1960s Madison Avenue (For a compelling glimpse of that ad era, watch the outstanding Mad Men ¾ the best show on TV, in my opinion).
Like everything else, things aren’t what they used to be, and most ad folk hark back to a time when you had an open-ended expense account, when you could smoke in the office and when you could smack your secretary on the bottom without staring at the wrong end of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
Advertising has become a business that creates fun images, but isn’t that much fun itself.
Yet another reason lies in the delusions of grandeur that afflict the entire industry: it thinks it’s better than everyone else. It imbues its people with an inflated sense of superiority, teaching them to scoff at the business world for being uncool, and to look down on the arts for being more penniless than a broken car meter. When the reality is that advertising envies them both for the power (business) and the integrity (arts) they’ve managed to hold on to.
Ad people know they’ve left their dreams at a random doorstep, wrapped in a shawl and accompanied by a hurriedly-scribbled note. Now, they spend their nights clutching their pillows, pretending they’re the dreams they never gave up.
Finally, and this is probably the most critical: ever since the internet showed up, advertising is no longer the cool kid on the block. Now, any 15-year old with a video camera, a Youtube account and an active imagination can make as much of a splash (if not a tidal wave) than the biggest TV spot. It’s become a source of industry-wide embarrassment, how the “Internets (as George W. Bush calls it) has stolen the thunder of advertising and essentially rewritten the rules of the game.
And that’s it, in a nutshell: advertising is having a midlife crisis. It’s no longer young, it’s no longer pretty and consumers aren’t as stupid as they used to be. Advertising is the aging actress who insists on playing a teenager in her movies, or that middle-aged man in a bar, with a buttoned-down floral shirt revealing his swathe of graying chest hair. They’re desperate and it shows. They’re not cool and that’s the second biggest sin you could commit in an industry obsessed with cool.
The first? Trying to be cool.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to shoot my scene in this porn movie. See you next week.
Mohammed Nassar was kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble on his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him.
