Blonde. Left of screen. Black top.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Viacon meeting in five.’

Viacon’s our client, a major mobile phone manufacturer whose latest project meant hawking entry-level phones to the poorest people on the planet. Of course, they wouldn’t say ‘poorest people on the planet’ on the brief. It was always ‘Entry level consumer’ or ‘Base of the pyramid audience’ or something like that. It’s fascinating how they come up with these marketing euphemisms. This is what million dollar marketing men do when they hit the consulting circuit, presumably. I bet there’s a guy out there somewhere who’s living in a castle because he invented the term ‘killer-app’. And I bet he’s American.

But I don’t mind Viacon. As a brand, that is. The only thing going against them is that they’re a bit boring. And their phones are about as trendy as oatmeal. But you can throw a Viacon against a brick wall and it’ll still keep working, know what I mean? I’ve actually seen this shit on youtube. You can do what you like to these little fuckers but they just keep going. But Viacon’s never going to come out and claim that, are they? Run our phones over with a lorry and see.
I don’t think there’s any industry that watches as many youtube videos as ad people. It’s all out there… real people putting up trillions of gigabytes of their own creativity up in a virtual world, giving you a telling insight into what they they think, feel and get off on. A lot of it is absolute shit, of course. But that’s because a lot of the people in the world who know how to work a computer and upload videos are cretins. The larger sub-set of any group of people are cretins, that’s what I believe. You can go into the deepest reaches of Papua New Guinea and find a tribe of cannibals there. Do a survey and you’ll find the assholes to regular guys ratio will always be skewed in favour of the assholes.

In the marketing world, as you’d expect, this ratio is a lot higher. I’ve always wondered what makes a guy enter a profession like marketing. More often than not, it’s because he didn’t have the grades at MBA school to get into something more lucrative, like Investment Banking. I know a guy from way back who’s in this racket. We went to school together. Regular fellow. Never an entertainer but a conscientious, sincere sort of species. Always scored in the high eighties, if not nineties. Went to engineering college and to an IIM (which makes him an alpha male in the arranged marriage market, coincidentally) and because his grades were good, fell into banking.

Five years later, he’s quit banking for a job at Turone, peddling coconut oil in B-towns, because it was more ‘exciting’. Exciting? Lingerie models with breathy voices are exciting. Car chases are exciting. Even stock market speculation is exciting. Marketing? What the fuck?
Anyway so this guy gets into Turone, attends all his dipstick sessions, rural immersions, focus groups and sales talks and he’s hooked. Seriously, he’s hooked. That’s what he tells me. His job takes him to different hole-in-the-wall stores along the highway and see if they’re stocking his coconut oil, talk to the traders and customers and submit his assessment. Ditchwater is stupendously more exciting, if you ask me. Crazy bastard. But you never know. He could be immortalized once he hits the consulting circuit.

The Viacon session is in progress. There’s a slide explaining what first time consumers are. Not the teenager in London whose Mum gets her a first phone on her fourteenth birthday. It’s financially constrained consumers in developing markets. There’s an image of a Guatemalan farmer carrying a bunch of bananas. It’s a nice photograph. It’s not cheesy, in a stock image way. But, because an amateur took it, shows no deliberate framing, or filters or a faux-realitsic dramatic moment. Just a man carrying a bunch of bananas, broadly grinning at the camera, like he was told to. Very family album. Right, so he’s the man we’re talking to. We pore through an interminably dull succession of slides detailing in several neat bullet points, targets and objectives.

The meeting is a three-way video conference call, with London, Shanghai and Finland staring each other to talk shit. Sorry, that’s four-way. We’re looking at the people in the London office. They look bored shitless but being Brits, put on a brave one and adjust themselves from time to time and pretend to look enthralled. I try to amuse myself by focusing on the hottest one in the screen. A skinny blonde. Stylish. Nice legs. Her skirt kept riding up. Text from Imran, a junior art director. ‘Blonde. Left of screen. Black top’, I give him an ‘I know' smile. Imran’s a horn-dog. He has an unbelievable stash of porn on his hard drive. She’s nice, in a neat sort of way. She also looks like she wears kinky knickers. Or maybe I watch too much porn. This fucking meeting. When will it end?

I catch sight of Hugh. He’s an Australian who joined us two months ago. Batshit crazy. Take my word for it. But all the same, he made life interesting, so it was always fun to have him around. Among other things, Hugh always carries a black marker on his person. He uses this to draw on himself. Sometimes it’s a ring of thorns, or a silly star. Otherwise it’s notes and ‘ideas’ that strike him unexpectedly. And it’s weird, because, if you actually read the notes he’s made on himself, it’s the most pointless stuff. Like, in the meeting, if they said ‘We’d like to sell jars of oyster jam as an aphrodisiac to the native people of Nagaland using a funnel-down marketing approach’, he’d write ‘funnel-down’ on his fore-arm. He’d pick the most irrelevant, stupid part of the discussion and inscribe it on skin. Like I said, batshit crazy.

I looked at Hugh. I gestured at the account man talking and rolled my eyes towards Hugh, like I was dying. Hugh makes a vigourous wank gesture with his hand. In the London office, an elderly planner catches sight of this on camera and smiles. Nobody pays any attention. Now, they’re playing a video. Somebody in the office went to South America and lived in a ghetto for like, a month or something, to research the consumer. I’m impressed. Camera shows us the shantytown and its people. It’s pretty deplorable standards of living, even seen through Indian eyes. Makes you sick to think that we’re trying to make money off these people. I point that out to the assembly.
There’s a grave silence. People look sombre. Some angry that I brought it up. Others merely chewing on that. Finally someone speaks up.

‘It’s not like we’re trying to sell them an XBOX, are we?’ Darren says. That’s true. It’s a phone, not Kalashnikovs for crying out loud. Jeez, when did I become such an activist? I am ashamed of myself. I vacillate between unashamed capitalism and occasional tree-hugging.

Everybody’s woken up now and there’s a lot of insights and personal experiences on the table. I’ve prolonged the meeting. Imran and a couple of others are eyeballing me. Sorry, I was just trying to stay awake.

Meanwhile Hugh’s at it with the marker. He’s sketched a dotted line across his throat to show he’d dead bored and has now commenced work on a line of black tears coming out of the corner of his left eye. I hope that shit washes off.

At first we thought the eccentricity was an act. See, the thing about advertising, the thing that ties all of us together, is that, at some point of time, almost all of us have considered ourselves failed artists. Or as whores who’ve sold our souls. Some of us who aren’t actually mad, like to fake it from time to time, to show we’re wrestling with our demons. There was this one Creative Director I knew, who made it a point to turn almost every social situation into a hostile situation. The thing is, deep down, he was a regular, harmless sort of chap but somewhere along the line, he decided to mould himself into a maverick.

And here’s the rub. It worked.

People actually gave him a wide berth, attributed it to his creative genius. There was this one story of him yelling his head off at some poor suit in the hallway because he had the temerity to address him by his first name. But those of us who knew him, knew it was a façade.

Hugh wasn’t putting on an act, as far as anyone could see. The poor bastard really was bonkers. He once asked me for directions to the dentist. I draw out a map for him on a piece of paper. Fairly simple. It was left, left, right and left. 5 hours later he comes back to the office.

‘Woah man I saw the planes take off from this close… it was awesome’

‘How did the dentist thing go?’

‘Didn’t go. Couldn’t find it’

‘Dude it was simple …left, left, right and left… where’d you go wrong?’

‘Well, at the first turn, instead of left, I took a right’

‘By mistake?’

‘No. Right just looked more interesting’

He sat through this one pitch meeting selecting ringtones on his phone. It was fucking hilarious. Sadly, he was asked to leave shortly. For a fortnight after that, everybody in office was real nervous whether Hugh would get his hands on a gun and pull a Columbine on us. He didn’t. So on second thoughts, it may have been an act.