Joker's 20-20 Interview: Part One.

Way down there in my blogroll is a line that reads You Want to get into advertising? No you don't.

Anyone who is considering a career in this industry is well-advised to read the blog it points to, entitled Why Advertising Sucks.

Why Advertising Sucks is a collective of disgruntled advertising people who write in a hilariously fresh, no-holds-barred kind of way about their sad, pathetic lives chained to the particular wheel of commerce we call advertising.

One of these people is Joker. Joker's output is heroic in scale and content. He is a writer's writer and wears his heart on his sleeve. Everyone in this nasty business - which is about to get a whole lot nastier - can identify with Joker's experiences.

One of Joker's projects has been to pose twenty questions to people around the advertising blogosphere and Joker was kind enough to ask me.

Here are the answers to the first five of Joker's twenty questions, because as everyone knows I can't get the whole job done in one sitting.

1. If you had to draft an honest job description for a position in advertising, what would you include in it? Pick any job you like (more than one if you like).

Copywriter wanted. Must be prepared to work long hours writing copy great enough to impress a creative director who thinks he is Hemingway; short enough to impress an art director who hates more than three words in a headline and two paragraphs in body copy; long enough to actually convey some kind of convincing message and creative enough to sell a bad product to a non-existent target audience in a tanking economy via a 10 x 2 ad in a trade magazine published in January. Money used to be great but now an IT geek two years out of school gets twice your salary.

2. What are the pros and cons to working in Australia?

Pros: Australia is a small-to-medium economy with most major world brands thanks to strong economic and cultural alignments with the UK and US; bringing with it all the benefits of exposure to multi-national companies. Meanwhile proximity to Asia draws immense wealth into Australia. The downside is that Shanghai's building boom has consumed eighty trillion tons of steel, leaving a giant hole where the State of Western Australia used to be. Its capital, Perth, should fall into the hold any day now, taking with it its population of drug dealers and grifters, so maybe it's not such a downside. (There is even an advertising agency in Perth called Marketforce, which is a kind of black hole, having swallowed up all the other agencies who were stupid enough to set up in the horrible, wind-blown backwater that is the world's most isolated city.)

Cons: Australians are lazy in a kind of laid-back, fun way which is fine until the drinks run out. The you're on your own.

3. Ten visual clichés you'd like to see doused in holy water and burned at the stake?

Slow motion hair. Dogs. Children. Rosebud lips tasting stuff. The face the male actor pulls to show that he is stupid. The face the female actor pulls to show that she is intelligent, smart, savvy or infinitely more superior. Or vice versa: I don't care. Most stills from most car ads. Most stills from most beer ads.

4. How often do you get foreign people in your agency? How would you describe their attitude depending on where they're from?

The British continue to invade Australia, getting off the plane and going straight to St Kilda Road where they pretend to be strategy planners. This would be immensely annoying except that they are better than Australian strategy planners. Australian strategy planners have neither strategies nor plans which makes them completely useless. Europeans are less common which is a shame. I want a female Swedish art director but they are hard to come by here, for some reason.

5. When was the moment you decided to pen the happenings of an advertising agency on a blog?

Many of the early stories were on disk, having already been written clandestinely during moments of extreme boredom at an earlier agency in between ducking out 'round lunchtime to go sit in empty cinemas - a great idea; it gets you back to work around 2.30 p.m. refreshed and revived - and reading entire books online at Project Gutenberg*. I transferred these stories from old-fashioned disk to blog in early 2004 and it took off from there.

*Project Gutenberg here. It's an indispensable tool for writers with a computer screen in front of them and too much time on their hands.