January 2008 Archives

This week, I had dinner with Ken Forbes, the former MD of SsangYong, a client at my old agency, Electric.

SsangYong make huge SUVs much derided by Jeremy Clarkson but actually offering insane value for money – besides which, I’m very proud of the work and really it deserves to be in the LP Greatest Hits section of this site. Any ad that invents a word – ‘bigness’ – deserves to be here!

I was caught slightly off guard. He starts to tell me how fantastic Electric was. ‘You walked in off Gresse Street and you could feel the energy in the room. It was electricity, it was electric. You felt the tangible collective zeal of all these young minds – well except yours, of course! – thinking about your brand and your challenges. "

He remembers the funky L-shaped space with the wooden floors, the banter with the receptionist, the laughter in the meetings with too many of us crammed into that tiny Board Room around the oval table that actually came from Ikea.

You know, I’ve hardly thought about Electric since I sold it in 2006 – you don’t, you live in the current challenges, you live in The Now. But hearing my friend Ken’s words as we power through a veritable banquet of Turkish food and not a small amount of Sauvignon Blanc (at Ozer in Langham Place - a great restaurant), I feel genuinely proud.

Yes Percival has a better website, a more cool identity, a more targeted offering, and has probably done as much sound work in six months as Electric did in four years. But as I sat in the taxi, zipping me home from a really fun dinner with The Scotsman, I indulged in a bit of tipsy reminscence about my long-gone offspring.

Thanks Ken. Yes, Electric was electric.

Procrastination is the arch enemy of every creative, The Darth Vader, Voldemort, Joker and Green Kryptonite, all rolled into one.

When I was a kid and procrastinating on my English essays, my mother used to sing the jaunty George & Ira Gershwin song to me: ‘Fascinating Rhythm’. Except she changed the words to ‘Procrastinatin’ Rhythm.’ Nice one, Mim.

As I cited in the launch post of this very blog, I have a novel stalled half way, a manuscript that sits on my desk – it’s bulk making it that much more intimidating. It’d be so much easier if it was a few half-conceived notes. But there it stands, bulky like the Pentagon, a Buckingham Palace of tangible failure – and the worst thing is, I can’t even take it up where I left off five years ago.

The world of sport has changed. The novel is a sneaker book, set inside the global world of sneakerdom, where the big brands fight like jealous empires to put sneakers on shelves and logos on feet.

The trainer industry is awash with Big Characters, often far more fascinating than even the athletes, and through Nike, Mizuno, Puma, Saucony and now Canterbury, I’ve been lucky enough to meet quite a few of them.

Draft One – if I’m honest – crumbled under the giant weight of its own ambition, and because I centred the action in the U.S., and indeed in Miami – the epicentre of zeitgeist at the time I wrote it – well, I probably should have pushed it to New York agents.

In the event, I was put off far far too easily. My friends and family loved the scenario – which I won’t share with here for fear someone might nick it. But it’s part morality tale, part romance, part social commentary. And a chance for me to immortalise my love of sport.

I sent it to a successful novelist, Boris Starling, a chance acquaintance. (he’s written some corkers including ‘Vodka’, and ‘Messiah’, as seen on TV.) He absolutely loved it – he read it one Easter along with some other manuscripts – and came back full of positivity and encouragement. However his agent (Caradoc King – he handled ‘The Horse Whisperer’ amongst others) didn’t go for it.

To put it mildly I was gutted. I unsuccessfully tried one more agent, and that was it. I was founding Electric, and my other creative love – this very business – took over.

But I still believe, a thousand per cent, in the central premise of the novel – and there are five years’ more experiences and wisdom (hopefully!) to put in it.

I was going start at Christmas, but a wonderful project from one of our key clients took over the holiday season, and January has been busy on all fronts. But now it’s time – the ship of this sneaker book needs to leave port, and this time we need to make land the other side.

London is the new key location, and let's face it we're talking The Capital Of The World and of course soon host to The Olympics.

So here goes. No more procrastinating rhythm. And I will of course keep you posted!

P.S: From my Mizuno campaign of the Nineties, here's the image (athlete Mike Marsh, photographer Mike Powell, Art Direction LP) that I'd love to recreate for the front cover. Except given the plot, the athlete would be a woman.

I feel about as creative as a breeze block.

‘Block’ being the operative word. I need to write for projects both corporate and personal, but the page is unforgivingly blank.

Wind and rain are crashing against the windows. Inspiration has left the building.

Nothing is working. 

It's odd, because over the past couple of months, ideas just flowed. New people, new opportunities, shoots, we've felt a surge of energy through the festive season.

But this morning the weather sucks, the news is rubbish, I’m drowning in admin, and my nephew gloats from Sydney about the surf and the 35 degree days at the beach. Grrrrr. Thanks, Lachlan. G’day mate. Bonzer. 

I feel like having a rant, a real one. We need to look at The Dark Side. 

I brave the rain and take my Vaio round the corner to Pret, seeking coffee and salvation.

I want to write about something. Anything. Let's write about here, this place. So here goes:

......“Pret a Manger. Pret. If ever one brand defined the Smugness of Now, it’s the omnipresent Pret. A sign outside this morning says : ‘Diets are sad. Instead, enjoy proper food, three times a day. Not too much, not too little.' 

Now c’mon guys. Your ‘All Day Breakfast’ sandwich boasts 560 calories, 49g of carbs and a stunning 27.5g of fat. 'Classic Super Club'? That weighs in with a meagre 548 calories, 38g of carbs (enough to make Dr Atkins rotate in his grave - presumably he's thin enough to do so) and a love-handle inducing 31.5g of fat. 

Mango Smoothies have 31g of carbs per bottle. Mango overboard, I'd say.

If you ate three All Day Breakfast sarnies a day, washed down with the aforementioned Smoothie, you’d make Mr Blobby look like Keira Knightley.

Plus all the sandwiches are so fussy. Can’t they just do Ham and Cheese? No, it always has to be things like Organic Quail’s Egg with Essence of Wild Salmon and Olives Picked At Dawn by Peruvian Goatherdsmen and Drizzled with The Sweat of Finnish Elk. And Random Capitalisation. 

It’s like having someone else’s taste literally rammed down your throat. And they put about 3 whole lettuces in each sandwich. Don’t you know that some of us don’t like having forests of green bits in their teeth – they can seriously damage your sex life!

Pret takes hypocrisy to Olympian heights. They’re owned 40% by Macdonald’s for Crissake! MacDo's, that temple of health and low-fat nutrition.

Plus there’s that tone of voice……it’s so PATRONISING.

‘Diets are sad’. Ugh. They’re not sad when you lose thirty pounds, feel like a God/Goddess, and start getting hit on by the opposite sex. (Or the same sex, if that’s your calling).

And the labelling is so cutesy and cringe-making. Pret are suffering from a terminal Attack Of The Cute Ickle Copy. A plastic bag is labelled ‘A little bag of nuts, fruits and seeds.’ Well thanks guys, I can see what it freakin’ is because it’s little and it’s transparent and it’s got nuts, fruits and seeds in it.

Innocent, the juice company, really started the craze for cute ickle copy. When they opened for business, I always thought it wonderfully paradoxical that they came across all natural and cute and childlike and, well, innocent, when actually they made the stuff at an industrial estate off the darkest part of Goldhawk Road where you need an AK-47 stuffed up your overcoat to stand any chance of survival.

Across the land, copywriters are now drowning in a vast vat of gooey tweeness.

My gym has caught the same disease. A broken StairMaster this morning bears a circular – and expensively produced – sign which says "I’m a little under the weather today. But I’ll be back on my feet very soon.”

Now I don’t know about you, and I can see it’s quite engaging to endow machines with human qualities (my cars have always had names) – but I haven’t really found StairMasters to be great conversationalists. You wouldn’t really want to go for a cheeky beer with one. So wouldn’t a piece of card with ‘Out of Order’ have done the trick pretty well?

But they label everything at my gym. The men’s changing room bizarrely tells you that this is a ‘Girl-Free Zone’ as you enter. Well I should hope so, matey.

The lifts even have a little sign above each one that says ‘Lift’. Well what else are they? If you see sliding metallic doors which have up/down buttons to one side, they do tend to be devices for moving between floors!”

………And so my rant went on, and got more and more angry, certainly beyond what I’d post on a public blog. Most of it, I really don’t mean. It was to be The Post That Never Was. Except having reviewed it 48 hours later, I thought I’d share it with you.

Because however forced, however dark, I'm writing again. Job done. Now I can move onto the real work. Sometimes you need to get angry to get creative.

(PS: I'm a total hypocrite. I drop about a tenner a day in Great Portland Street Pret. The line moves quickly, the latte's great, and I love their drink Yoga Detox Bunny - despite the cute  ickle copy.)