Ironic detachment on the road to cosy-adjacent-metrosexual-mystery writing

I’d like to think that I was a pretty good creative agency planner. And should anyone want to work with me again, then do get in touch. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got it. After all, it just involves figuring out what an audience might want to hear, that dovetails with something that the client can legally say, which at the same is distinctive within the relevant sector, and which doesn’t fly in the face of contemporary social discourse. As a former doyen of the London agency scene once said to me, ‘advertising isn’t complicated, but it is difficult.’ I’ve always been capable of holding several thoughts in my head at the same time, so it’s a job I can do.

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And yet, I’ve never had what it takes to get to the very top of the advertising business. I’m arrogant enough to think that it hasn’t had anything to do with me not being smart enough. There haven’t been too many times when I felt out of my depth owing to a lack of intellectual firepower. So, for some time I just reasoned that I didn’t want a big job enough. After all, if you can persuade an agency’s management team that you’ve got a capable pair of hands, and that you can successfully look after important accounts with minimal, or zero, supervision, then you can get paid pretty well. On the other hand, if your commitment to the agency cause, to your ego, or to the size of your mortgage, demands that you become a Chief Strategy Officer, then that is going to come at a much more significant personal cost.

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For me, it was never simply about avoiding those additional hours. I put my life on hold to get class swat grades on an executive MBA programme while holding down a day job. More recently, I’ve acquired what my Spanish wife describes as an operational level of her language, though a combination of stoicism and pure bloody-mindedness. If there does exist such a thing as a natural talent for linguistics, I don’t have it. So, I don’t think that I’m just inherently lazy.

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Instead, I think that my long run problem is that I’ve always been reluctant to drink whatever version of Kool-Aid that’s been served over the course of my career. And I've never been a sufficiently accomplished actor to behave as though I’ve drunk it. My personal marketing manifesto is short on magic and big on pragmatism. I believe that – within certain parameters – well-executed advertising campaigns can support both short-run sales uplifts and long-run brand benefits, which in turn can translate into market share gains and improved margins. However, there’s nothing inherently mysterious or alchemic about the process – most good campaigns just tell people something that they want to hear in a way in which they weren’t expecting to hear it. It really is that simple.

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And yet, along the course of my career I’ve been asked to sign up to a never-ending stream of ideas that just aren’t true. These can range from the little things, such as having to pretend that an agency has a working philosophy that is sharply differentiated from every other agency’s way of going about things. Given the frequency at which people jump from one place to another, if there was some secret sauce it simply couldn’t remain secret for very long. Then there are the times when you have to pay lip service to a client’s missionary zeal. I once had to pretend to believe I was empowering people to live their best lives by selling 100% interest rate loans to the financially vulnerable. And then there’s the whole sector’s almost cultish enthusiasm to claim that the world is on the cusp of some new paradigm that will render obsolete all previously accrued knowledge and skills within the sector.

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The bubble of intense excitement around NFTs a while back is a case in point. Now safely protected by hindsight, I’m now sufficiently emboldened to admit that I never saw how their existence was likely to have any impact on mainstream consumer marketing. As a tradeable certificate of authenticity, I reckoned they had much in common with the non-digital market for autographs. If you’ve got Van Gogh’s signature on a canvass featuring some sunflowers, then you could be very rich. Whereas, if you got a version of that same signature on the back of a napkin, most likely you’d better not quit the day job. Context matters, and if the certificate of ownership can be completely abstracted from a body of work, then it’s unlikely to prove a copper-bottomed asset class. And yet, for a short while, these tokens were going to be a game-changer.

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According to a source quoted in the FT, if you’re on Elon Musk’s payroll and he says the sky is bright pink, you have to say you’re excited the sky is pink.?Not that I’m likely to be asked, but I don’t think I could work for him. Over my years in advertising, I’ve developed a sense of ironic detachment as a form of psychological self-defence. So, rather than believe in six impossible things before breakfast, I’ve tended to retreat into the role of bemused social observer. And in the context of the advertising business, I recognise that this isn’t a good thing. Winners don’t do irony because they don’t need to.

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So, in an attempt to celebrate the absurd, rather than have to professionally sign up to it, I’ve started to write a series of murder mysteries that explore the wonderland that is our contemporary culture. Much like agency planners, my detectives try to get under the skin of people and understand what makes them tick, but unlike planners their goal is to identify killers, not to sell them stuff.

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I think that in writing cosy-adjacent-metrosexual-murder-mysteries I may have stumbled on my true calling. But if you were to follow this link and try reading one, you could be the judge of that.

The Slater & Mahoney Mysteries