Lighthouse in a sea of banality.
If you’re youngish, you might not know there were once great times. They were known as the 1970s to the 1990s, when nearly everything in the culture, even advertising, was amazing.
Especially true in ‘90s Singapore
The powerhouses fueling the industry’s written side tended toward masterful scribes who’d read everything under the sun and could quote anyone from the Bard to Gibbons’ Decline and Fall to Cormac MacCarthy to MLK Jr. to Joan Didion to Rage Against the Machine. Many had travelled widely and wildly, possibly owed a yacht, lived in homes both exotic and eccentric and took epic liquid lunches with peers stretching into the dinner hours. These men and women loved nothing more than tackling a business problem with a mixture of logic, wordplay, brutal honesty and absurdism.
Art directors were esthetes, devotees of the arts
Many were failed painters, disgruntled architects, art school grads and dropouts. Or they were simply visual savants born with a gift, a refined instinct for making imagery, whether moving or still, into things of beauty. The souls toiling in supporting roles for these creative pillars of the agency structure applied a professional, knowledgeable flair to their craft that was also inspiring to behold.
I stumbled into all this in the Singapore of ‘94
Long story short, I met a guy who gave me another guy’s number which I called and for whom was asked to write dummy ads for the brands his agency represented so he could determine if I had chops. Evidently, I had something, as I soon found myself at his agency sharing a private air-conditioned office with a brilliant Singaporean art director and a stack of creative briefs. It was the most exciting career jump I’d made – especially given I’d been varnishing yacht exteriors under the sun for $10/hour just days beforehand. After three weeks freelancing there, producing ad copy for global clients like Club Med, Compaq Computer, TGIFriday’s and local brands like Singapore Telecom and Raffles Light Beer, I was effectively welcomed in by the Singapore advertising community.
Jamming with and mentored by giants
These giants were locals and people from the US, UK, Aussie, Europe, NZ, Taiwan, Japan and India. Single-minded, fiercely dedicated to The Work, they went at it non-stop. That was the ethic. And I happily swan-dived into it. Successfully cracking an idea took sweat, heartbreak and repeat attempts. To give up was to fail. There was no option but to keep writing, talking it to death with your art director-partner, clashing with your creative director, going for beers in hopes that an altered mental landscape would shake loose the muse.
I knew to treasure those years
I haven’t given up on a return to classic advertising form and am doing my bit to help it. And with success. Late in 2024, the CEO of ergoCentric, a major Toronto office furniture manufacturer, approached me to write an ad campaign for his company’s top-of-line product, the tCentric mesh desk chair. He’d produced his own ads in-house for years, focusing on features and ergonomics, but with no ‘tude. He wanted new ads nodding to adjustability and support, but with humour, cynicism, anything to make people read it, react and want to buy. He rose to the occasion with a generous fee. This enabled me to devote sufficient time to writing, research and competitive analysis.
Not new to office furniture
I met the client at ergoCentric’s showroom in the King Eddy Hotel, adjacent to Toronto’s business district, where I did a tCentric test-sit. The instant its adjustments were set to fit my body, I knew the designers had thought of everything. The tCentric is, I believe, more comfortable and adjustable than any chair on the market. As a guy who sold dozens of trailer-loads of office furniture for a Steelcase dealer in a past life, I know something about chair design, and that the tCentric’s key competitor was the Herman Miller Aeron.
The Aeron was a great concept imperfectly executed
I’d been sitting on an Aeron at my desk for 25 years. It cost me $1,200, and at least that amount again since. It broke every few years, requiring pricy replacement parts. I loved its design, but not its poor build quality and ergonomics. Its biggest flaw was allowing my 205 lbs, via my glutei, to push down the mesh seatpan enough to touch the top of the base.
Posters in the subway
The CEO and I talked media, and I put out a theory: That everyone’s so overwhelmed by boring analog and digital ads and influencers that running ours with smart, funny headers on TTC subway car posters next to the exits would move chairs. His main showroom also happened to be a block from King subway station. He bought in, and I went to work, a week or so later delivering hundreds of headlines. He quickly produced the two ads shown here, placing them in dozens of subway cars and in the Globe & Mail, Canada’s biggest newspaper.
Chiropractic pain
Within days of launch, I received a call from him saying the head of the Canadian Chiropractic Association had written him a complaint letter protesting the ads’ alleged impugnment of chiropractors (seriously?). This written proof of our campaign’s disruptive qualities pleased him greatly. Better still, the ads had significantly boosted tCentric sales (last I heard by 30%) and showroom traffic. He told me these were the exact results he’d hoped for.
Good ads move product. Great ads disrupt
There are four takeaways here:
- Print advertising is not dead.
- People will read ads – as long as they’re being entertained and/or rewarded for the time invested.
- There’s no audience like a captive audience. Subway passengers crammed in rush-hour trains can’t miss a poster ad, especially if it makes them laugh. Same for drivers stuck in traffic behind busses. And trust me, Torontonians have had enough ambulance-chaser ads.
- Boring, insipid, ugly ads have earned no space on this beautiful planet.
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