Tetherd Cow Ahead

For quite some years I made a very good living by writing music for advertising. That period of my life is pretty much over now for a number of reasons, and since it’s unlikely that I’m going to ever reclaim my glory days helping to sell shampoo and cars, I figured I might as well start a series based on my exploits in what must rank as one of the most pretentious, overpaid, frustrating, lunatic-filled businesses on the planet. It’s not like it will matter much if I offend anyone anymore. So without further ado:

The Reverend’s Adventures in Advertising, Episode 1.

I thought I’d kick off these reminiscences with a story about a campaign for which I was asked to apply my creative genius to the promotion of a lesser-known, but quality brand of Australian cheese.

My usual procedure for accepting a commission ((For that’s what it was in those days – a commission. Jobs were awarded on merit and talent, and advertising agencies actually sought out creative people based on their reputation. That concept, in Australia at least, has become a thing of the past, and is one of the reasons that I’ve moved on.)) was to ask for a copy of the script, and if I thought I could do anything with the idea, I’d take it on. I turned down a lot of work. This particular spot was not something that was in my usual field of interest, but it did have a certain Monty Pythonesque je ne c’est quoi and I figured it could be amusing, so I agreed to give it a go. This was the pitch, as kooky as it seems:

A farmer is leading his cow off to pasture. We hear bucolic country sounds and pastoral music. Suddenly there is a clap of thunder and the surprised farmer turns to see the clouds parting and the Hand of God reaching down into his barn, from whence it retrieves an enormous block of Brand X Cheese. An angelic choir sings! The farmer watches in awe as we hear a booming voice-over proclaim “Brand X! The Chosen Cheese!” ((I kid you not. I totally swear I’m not making an ounce of this up.)) The angels swell into an uplifting coda.

Kinda cheesy, I’ll agree, but sometimes these nutty ideas, if done with enough aplomb, turn out OK. And besides, the money was pretty good.

Now I need you to understand that this is not just the pitch that went to me, but was also the script that the client (I immediately dubbed him The Big Cheese) had already received and approved (generally, by the time I was called into a job, the ad had been completed except for the sound and music and the final visual effects. This spot was no exception).

A few days later the edited images turned up, and I was relieved to see that they were passable, as far as these things go. After a brief phone discussion with the ad’s Creative ((This has to be one of the most duplicitous job descriptions in existence. In my experience, advertising Creative Directors seldom know their asses from their elbows when it comes to any level of actual creativity. Mostly they are pop-culture sponges who suck ideas out of other, better pieces of work and re-tool them (usually badly) to fit their own agendas.)) Director, Phil, ((For reasons that are obvious, the names of the products and personnel involved in these escapades will remain anonymous. I don’t really care if you infer any of the details, but knowing the litigious tendencies of this business, I don’t aim to get myself sued…)) I set to work whipping up a convincing chorus of angels, shimmering with heavenly harp arpeggios. This sort of work is actually a lot of fun. It’s not like you can be too over the top with a concept like this and !!!B-R-I-I-I-I-I-I-N-N-N-G-G!!!… I’d only been at it for two hours and Phil was already on the phone.

“Um… mate… [everyone in advertising calls everyone else mate]. Mate, looks like we have a tiny bit of a problem”.

“Oh? How so?” I ask, a feeling of dread settling upon me.

“Er, well,” says Phil, “The client is not too happy about the religious connotations of the spot”.

“You what?” I say.

“Yeah, they think it’s a bit Christian“.

Now this is one of those moments in which the universe suddenly ceases to make any sort of sense whatsoever. Personally, I thought the ad might have been straying a little on the Jewish side, with the ‘chosen’ cheese & all, but it’s a joke, right – you’re not meant to think too much about it. But it was the general overall religious aspect that Phil said the Big Cheese was having problems with, as astonishing as that seemed to be at this point in the proceedings.

Now it’s pretty clear to me that when your concept takes on quite this much water, you simply cut your losses, scuttle the ship and head for the lifeboats. But what’s this? Quite unbelievably, Phil was still bailing…

“So what we want to do now is try and make it less religious…”

My brain went into a mode which I imagine is very similar to how Robby the Robot feels when he’s given an order to harm a human.

“But it’s GOD!” I say. “It’s GOD’S HAND reaching from HEAVEN. How the crap do we make that less religious?”

“Well, OK… we’re considering the idea of making the hand a little sooty with a bit of digital work, and with the help of some Wagner-style music, turning it into the hand of Thor, the God of Thunder! How do you think that would work?

Well I thought it would be about as successful as putting fishnet stockings on a pig and attempting to pass it off as Dita Von Teese, but I remained stuck for words. Further, it dawned on me that the the whole sink-or-swim for this spot had somehow been deftly passed right down the line to me. If the ad failed, well then, it would be my fault! And this was not to dwell for even a nanosecond on how the whole shebang had managed to get this far without the Big Cheese making at least some little squeak about his unhappiness with the religious tone of the whole affair. It’s not like they were hiding it from him!

Phil then went on to say that there was no intention, not even the merest suggestion, of altering the tag line ‘The Chosen Cheese’. This was most definitely not to be touched. It had been sold through to the client as the catchphrase for the whole campaign. Are you with me here, as I try to comprehend the inscrutable insecty thought processes of the Advertising Hive Mind?

So, in the next few hours, after a short break taken up mostly by uncontrolled alternate fits of sobbing and laughing, I found myself wheeling out the French horn and crash cymbal samples and vainly attempting to conjure Das Rheingold. It didn’t work terribly well. Now God simply looked like an interloper at a bad Salvation Army Band fundraiser. I considered phoning Phil and suggesting they have the hand take out a giant box of crackers and a plate of lamingtons as well. It certainly couldn’t have made things any worse.

After a few days, the digital image amendments had been completed and Phil, and all the other hangers-on that an advertising campaign seems to involve, turned up to take a look at what I’d done with the music.

“Hey, that’s not too bad!” he exclaims. “It says Thor, the God of Thunder for sure! What do you reckon, mate?”

Now I hate it when advertising people ask for your opinion, because you can be sure that the one thing they never really want to hear is your actual opinion.

“Sure,” I say, crossing my fingers behind my back. “Sure, everyone will think it’s Thor, the God of Thunder. You guys have done amazing things with the digital work. Unmistakeably the Thor of the Norse Pantheon. Only an idiot wouldn’t get that!”

All the while I was imagining the cheque for my fee fluttering like a tired homing pigeon into my bank account, and the numbers clocking up like the meter on a Sydney taxi heading off along the Eyre Highway.

They eventually did put the ad to air, much to my complete amazement. Evidently the Big Cheese had forked out so much money he needed to explain to someone where it all went. A few days later my mother, who knew nothing at all of the above debacle – only that I’d written the music on a Brand X Cheese ad – called to say she had seen ‘my’ ad on air.

“It was really good!” she said, in the way that faithful mums show their undiscriminating devotion, “But there’s one thing I don’t understand – why was God’s hand so dirty?”

I did end up mowing the lawn yesterday (well, you have to fill in your time somehow until the world ends…) About halfway through, in the midst of the hideous racket that is the sound of a petrol-driven set of rotating blades shearing through vegetation, a magpie turned up and settled down on the clothesline, apparently oblivious to all the noise. I was amazed that it didn’t seem at all fearful of what I would have assumed was a pretty confronting spectacle for a bird.

But birds are smart.* This little guy† has evidently learned that the sound of a lawnmower means the opportunity for an easy meal. Sure enough, after I’d finished, he hopped down off his perch and helped himself to the bugs and snails that had been disturbed by the mowing.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Some people don’t think so. We can only assume it’s because they feel their intelligence is threatened by superior bird brains.

†Or gal. Bit hard to tell with magpies.

___________________________________________________________________________

OK, in what must rank as one of the stupidest things that an Australian has said in public since John Howard announced that global warming was just fiction, Dr Mark Rose, the general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, has told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that girls may become infertile (or worse!) if they play the didgeridoo.

The VAEA has called for the Collins-published The Daring Book for Girls to be pulped because it encourages girls to just put their lips to the didge and blow, thus demonstrating ‘an extreme cultural indiscretion’. According to (some) aboriginal beliefs, you see, the didge is strictly Men’s Business.

This great cultural respect for the didgeridoo is apparently new-found – as far as I can see, the didgeridoo hasn’t been any kind of ‘sacred instrument’ for decades. It gets played on pop songs, in film scores, by buskers (aboriginal and white alike) on street corners for money and in performances in pubs to rock arenas. Didjeridoos are sold in just about every tourist shop from here to Innamincka (and they most certainly don’t come with warning labels saying ‘Not to Be Played by Women’). No-one seems to have been overly-concerned about any of these secular appearences of the painted hollow tree branch that makes noises.

I’m all for respecting people’s cultural beliefs, but sometimes the earnestness of some folks to do so has them bending so far over backwards that their head goes straight up their arse.

And political correctness aside, Dr Rose’s declaration that:

We know very clearly that there’s a range of consequences for a female touching a didgeridoo — infertility would be the start of it, ranging to other consequences. I won’t even let my daughter touch one.

… is superstition of the highest magnitude. Who the hell ‘knows very clearly’ that a female touching a didgeridoo would be rendered infertile? There are lots of women didge players all over the world – I bet we could find at least one who’s managed to have a baby. And as for the ‘other consequences’, Dr Rose threateningly leaves dangling – well, like so much irrational belief, the vague open-endedness of that contention smacks of yet another attempt by a religion to replace reason with fear.

What century are we living in again?

In Australia, September 1, the first day of our Spring, is also called Wattle Day. And true to form, around Cow Central, the wattle is putting on a magnificent display – the bush reserve upon which my window opens, is today splendiferous with yellow blooms.

Australia has nearly a thousand different species of native wattle (Acacia) and most of these are endemic. They range from small, inconspicuous shrubs to trees of 50 meters or more in height.

The wattle blooms vary in colour from pale cream through soft lemon to fluorescent, vibrant yellow. Many species are scented with beautiful and distinct perfumes that can differ considerably. Wattle can also trigger allergies, and the beginning of Spring is, for some, the onset of the Hayfever Season.

Wattle typically makes a poor cut flower, the blooms disintegrating into thousands of tiny yellow hairs within a day or so of being in a vase. Which is why, on beautiful Spring mornings, it is much better to go for a stroll in the park and admire this versatile and attractive plant in its natural setting!

Happy Wattle Day!

___________________________________________________________________________

NB: For all the Australian pedants out there – yes, I am aware that I’m posting this on September 2. That would be because I am declaring this the first Internet Wattle Day, and accordingly I have adjusted the post date so that it falls about halfway between September 1 in Australia, and September 1 throughout the rest of the world! You heard it first on The Cow

___________________________________________________________________________

Since I posted about the unique Cheeky Whissstling Gnome a little while back, I know that you’ve all been yearning for more treats from the wondrous Penny Miller Catalogue. Today I present for you the Motion Activated Owl, a fit companion for the Whissstling Gnome if ever I saw one!

Yes, this owl, with its ‘menacing glow in the dark eyes’ is not for the faint-hearted. Featuring a ‘true to life hooting sound’ it joins forces with the Gnome to make sure that your garden is cleansed, not only of unwanted intruders, but of ‘birds and other unwanted animals’ as well. Penny Miller, with her Owl & Gnome Army, is evidently aiming to single-handedly demolish both the pest-control and security industries in one fell swoop!

Of course, with all the whistling & hooting, and the staring eyes, it’s distinctly possible that your garden could start to resemble a buck’s night at the Oxford Tavern so you might want to give your neighbours a heads-up. Especially if you live next door to me – I’ll need to get my air-rifle out of the basement.

Excellent! Some sad, unemployed thoughtful soul has hand-delivered me one of those bizarre catalogues of cheap knick-knacks of which I am so fond (long-time Cow Readers may recall past musing on such must-have items as the Leopard Print Toilet Seat and the Portable Plasma™ Globe from the awesome Innovations people). Today, I present for your scrutiny, from the Penny Miller Catalogue, The Cheeky Whistling Gnome.

Most people, when conjuring up a mental picture of Hell, imagine a place of molten lava with sulphurous flames and black oily smoke, populated by demons with pitchforks.* For my own part, I see myself arriving on the doorstep of Hell to be greeted by a Cheeky Whistling Gnome and ushered into a suburban house comprehensively decorated with useless bric-a-brac from Penny Miller. Thence I expect to be introduced to some irksome proponent of Intelligent Design who will regale me for all eternity with a diatribe of smug ‘we-told-you-so’s‘.†

But I digress: now for a mere $19.90, you too can have a door-stop gnome that will almost certainly propel your visiting friends into a state of near psychosis by assailing them with a cheeky/bold/naughty whissstle every time they approach your house. Somehow, this very same whissstle will also magically ‘deter’ intruders. Unwanted intruders, at least. Wanted intruders will be OK.‡

In addition, you may ‘Delightfully surprise your guests while allowing this cheeky gnome to greet them…’ I’ll accept suggestions for what sort of delightful surprise you might spring on visitors while they’re distracted by the warbling garden ornament.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Now where, do you suppose, that the idea of little red devils with pitchforks ever came from?

†No, Mr Creationist Visitor – I don’t really expect this to happen. This is a literary invention, offered here for the purposes of humour.

‡It strikes me that this gnome is MUCH scarier than this gnome…

___________________________________________________________________________