Op-Ed: Why BDA’s Need To Shut Their Pie Holes! By George Parker

By SuperSpy 

Why BDA’s Need To Shut Their Pie Holes!
By George Parker

As you all know, George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon.

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Did you ever think it strange that so many communications companies and the people responsible for running them are the world’s worst communicators? I mean people in advertising have always talked shit, that’s why we’re known as snake oil merchants who deal in smoke and mirrors. Or, as it’s called these days, “Branding.” Which is not to be confused with “Selling.” I was at an AdAge “Ideas” conference last year, where a bunch of people with $1200 to waste and fuck all better to do spent a day listening to big time industry douchenozzles give boiler plate presentations about shit everyone already knew. Which was fine, ‘cos all the wankers in the audience were so busy blogging and Tweeting, they couldn’t have heard much of what the douchenozzles on stage were rabbiting on about anyway.

So, up comes BBDO and GE, who proceed to give a multi-slide Power Point presentation about their recently launched “Imagination” campaign. They show a few magnificent TV spots, which thanks to the miracle of CGI and many millions of production dollars, re-create man’s first flight at Kitty Hawk with giant fucking GE jet engines magically appearing on the fragile wings. And so on, and so on. Total cost of this extravaganza? $350 million… But they assured us, it was worth it because “GE’s brand image was enhanced!”

Next up was the guy from Blend-Tec, the people who do the YouTube “Will it blend?” viral shit…


On stage he blends bricks, ball bearings, an eight foot garden rake and a fucking Blackberry that some schmuck in the audience gave him. He then explains with one simple slide that each video is shot in the factory, costs $50 and every time one runs sales go up between ten and fifteen percent. The crowd goes nuts. Backstage GE cuts the throats of the BBDO suits (OK, I made that bit up, but they should have.)

And it never stops… A few weeks ago a senior Interpublic wanker at another $1200 a pop conference said… “Hard times call for hard sell ads… We have to start doing advertising that demonstrates provable results!” To which I have to say, so, in the good times we should do stuff that doesn’t necessarily work. Did he realize he sounded like a fucktard? No, of course not. Just a couple of months ago Ogilvy started a new division aimed at helping clients with reduced budgets make their dollars work harder. Yeah, ‘cos once again, I assume they didn’t think that was necessary now that the shit has hit the fan. But based on Ogilvy’s new biz track record of the last few years, it doesn’t make any difference, as I can’t see many of these reduced budget clients dropping by for a chat.
Finally, Enfatico… Yeah, I know, I can’t leave that one alone, ‘cos when they were formed all of sixteen months ago, they immediately took over the Draft/FCB mantle of “The Agency with foot constantly in mouth.” Both loved to claim they were the “Agency of the Future” while making grandiose claims about how they were changing the Madison Avenue, when all they were doing was creating yet another BDA… As I said in an AdAge interview… Don’t toot your horn until you’ve achieved something… Until then… Shut the fuck up!
Cheers/George

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