No, I’m not going all religious on you; it’s just that as we are approaching 2017, which is the five hundredth anniversary of when Martin Luther nailed his creative brief on the door of the Big Dumb Holding Company at Wittenberg Castle (One of the Poisoned Dwarf’s many retreats)… Better known in those days as one of the Big Dumb Agencies of the Catholic Church.
He had come to the realization that the sale of indulgences to gullible clients so they would only spend a million years in purgatory, rather than a zillion in hell, was the same as selling useless clicks on Facebook, or robo-followers on Twitter. Thereby providing further proof that it’s the rich wot gets the gravy, it’s the poor wot gets fucked.
So, ramping up to the present day, I believe we are rapidly approaching the same epochal point in the ad biz. You can nail your thesis to the door of the Poisoned Dwarf’s Gramercy Park Love Nest, or his London pad next to the Grenadier Pub… It will make no fucking difference. You are no longer in the ad biz… You are now in the business of enriching people who have gone on record as saying that more than seventy per cent of their income comes from non-advertising activities.
Yes, Martin Luther is dead. So is David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and many others that made this a great business that many young whippersnappers were anxious to join, enjoy, and get arseholed in whilst creating memorable and effective work.
Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
Let us pray!
