Rob Mayhew and the universal experience of PR
A lot of people are sending me Rob Mayhew’s sketches about agency life, correctly praising how funny a performer he is and how he’s nailed the universal experience of working in Advertising, Marketing, PR and their various adjuncts.
Taking nothing away from Rob, certain of his sketches are so close to home that they cease to be comic exaggerations of our industry, and instead paint a damningly accurate picture of a vapid, superficial, bureaucratic, status-over-substance creative wasteland.
https://lnkd.in/e8mABiZ6
The sketch about the agency brainstorm is particularly resonant in this respect because not only do I know from long and painful experience of ‘all-agency brainstorms’ that this is exactly what goes on in that room, but based on a lot of the self-congratulating on social media, agency websites and in the trade press, the hackneyed old cliches of ‘stunt’ ideas that Mayhew is rightly taking the proverbial out of are still coming to fruition.
A colleague reminded me of the industry adage that every time a successful stunt happens you get ten phonecalls asking you to do exactly the same thing, totally missing the point about what made the original successful.
The sketch took on the greatest hits of the lazy and unimaginative: projecting on parliament is such a common occurrence the Director General should just cut the pretence and hire a media planner; I’ve made my feelings about floating a giant something down the Thames abundantly clear, while the desperation with which people in our industries cling to the perceived news value of NFTs and the metaverse without really understanding their function is reaching the point of self-parody.
The hard truth underlying the funny sketches is that our industry is too tied up in performative displays of influence, creativity, purpose and studiousness, while often winging it or doing the bare minimum. If we all act like the characters in Rob Mayhew’s stages, which too many of us do, then sooner or later we’re going to get found out: if your default setting is ‘smoke and mirrors’ eventually you will choke on the fumes.
When PR, communications, marketing and advertising make more than the most superficial impact it’s often the dark arts, used for nefarious purposes. Gabriel Gatehouse’s brilliant podcast The Coming Storm demonstrates how an intoxicating combination of mythology and memes created a political movement that rocked the world’s most powerful democracy to its core. That isn’t to condone QAnon, far from it, but we should be taking hard lessons from its terrifying rise to prominence and using them to create communications mediums with real, world-changing influence. It won’t make a great comedy sketch, but it might make a better industry.