Mad men and motor bikes

Melbourne Herald Sun, March 16, 2011

The TV show Mad Men, on SBS, presses all my nostalgia buttons. A recent episode showed a drink-fuelled agency celebration where the client's John Deere ride-on mower was raced around the office corridors.

Which flashed me back to a drink-fuelled agency celebration at Masius in 1970. A client's promotion had as its first prize a Yamaha motorbike, which had been brought in for photos. I was a junior writer but my copy chief finally couldn't resist, threw himself on and roared several circuits of the Queens Road office corridor.

He's since left the business to become the Great Australian Novelist - Peter Carey. And the bike was then taken round the corridors by my fellow cadet, Terry Durack - who these days is one of London's leading food writers.

Oh yes, Mad Men is written out of intensive research, including consultants who lived the action at the time. What you see is real.

Here in Australia we worked very hard to emulate our heroes in Madison Avenue. I well remember the ash tray piled high with cigarette butts next to my typewriter. The after-work drinks in the board room that, after a time, I realised I would have to stop attending or turn into an alcoholic.

Ah, the legendary long lunches. Any excuse would see us visit a fine restaurant with our company-provided credit cards and disappear till late afternoon. The clients were eager accomplices who somehow always set meetings which would necessitate us going to lunch. The agency didn't worry - they saw it as cultivating the client.

The peak of the excess was the Melbourne Art Directors Club Christmas Party in 1983. Somehow they got permission to take over Gunn Island in the middle of Albert Park Lake. On it they built tents for circus acts, side shows, food and grog, very loud bands and fireworks. Guests were rowed over in boats, and at the end of the night most were rowed back. However some very expensive designer dresses and tuxedos ended sloshing to shore through the lake mud.

I'm glad to see that there is still some creativity left in advertising. Not in the ads, alas, but there's hope ahead. It took my South African friend passing me a YouTube video doing the rounds in London, to find out what's happening right here.

A writer-art director team were having no luck in getting work at the big agencies, not even interviews. So they designed a campaign. They registered the names of Melbourne's leading creative directors, as web sites. Like bencoulson.com (Pattersons), grant-rutherford.com (DDB), matgarbutt.com (FCB), and announced they had taken the sites hostage.

The ransom was - to interview the team with the possibility of a job. Should any victim fail to respond in time, their site would suffer a traumatic blow to their reputation: redirection to Justin Bieber Under the Mistletoe.

Unable to withstand the threat, seven CDs agreed. Our lads turned up with suits, lap tops, and ski masks, and pitched their credentials. The result, they report: "We met seven creative directors, freaked out nine receptionists, and found a job!"

The team are Andrew Grinter and Lee Spencer-Michaelsen, now working with Ogilvy Melbourne - ironically not one they targeted, but which heard the buzz. So the pair of RMIT 2010 grads is now on the ladder - and their site has garnered 66,000 views around the world. I think the lads will be going places.

It is with relief then, that I can report there are still some mad men working in our advertising industry. All they need now are a few mad clients.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com