Joker's twenty questions, continued.

More answers to Joker's 20-20 interview. (Part One here and Part Two here.) I'm getting there. Three questions to go.


11. What's more frustrating, doing crap work that the client absolutely adores and tells everyone about, or doing great work that ends up in one print ad in the ROP section and gets mentioned in an unknown ad awards show?

The first. Being forced to do crap work is the bane of the industry. If you do great work that remains obscure, you still have the satisfaction of knowing you can do great work.


12. You get a mysterious phone call from a serial killer that says he's going to kill your most hated client and he wants your input on how to make it a special event, what do you reply?

"Hi, Craven. You're up late!"


13. An ideal agency needs______.

Luck, brains, money and talent.


14. What workshops would you give creatives, accounts people and clients to make them better professionals?

If creatives are any good they don't need workshops. You can't teach a writer to write and you can't instil an art director with an innate sense of design. So if they don't cut it they get to go to the New Job Start training workshop at Social Security. Accounts people will benefit from workshops such as finance management to help them maximise revenue and lateral thinking to reduce time-wasting and endless reporting. Clients? Probably the same as accounts people.


15. Worst category/ies to work on and why?

Good question. Varies with time and place. Financial services was great from last century up to about, oh, a month ago? (In fact, finance and banking has been tanking since about last year. You wouldn't believe the off-the-record stuff I heard from my mortgage originator clients from late 2006 to the present. It went along these lines: "There's bad news and good news. The bad news is we're fucked. The good news is so are the banks!") The traditionally great category in advertising was cigarettes. I started soon before cigarette advertising was banned by governments (but not their sale, which tipped billions into their coffers).


16. Ten things your average layman does not know about Australia that you think would be of interest.

(a) It's not Austria. (b) It is a littoral society (no-one lives in the middle, which is why we win more Olympic swimming medals than we should. Also you can't swim in the rivers because crocodiles eat you). (c) Its two major cities - Sydney and Melbourne - warred over which should be capital but, being Australia, no-one could make a decision and instead, they built a new capital in the 1930s in dense bushland halfway between the two cities. (d) In recent times, kangaroos have been reclaiming the capital, invading sensitive Defence Department land and inflaming the debate about whether we should farm and eat the animal, hitherto protected. (e) Kangaroo meat is the most nutritious, low-fat meat you can eat. (f) Global warming has fed into this argument, with proponents of kangaroo farming claiming cows and sheep emit alarming levels of carbon. Kangaroo farming would, therefore, alleviate both global warming and invasion of Canberra. (g) New Zealand is a small nation independent of Australia to its south east in the Pacific Ocean. It is so insignificant that most of its population lives in Australia ("across the ditch"). (h) New Zealand has the highest proportion of sheep to people in the entire world. (i) Ultimately, Australia will invade New Zealand, sell off all the sheep, introduce the kangaroo and export its meat to the rest of the world. This will drag Australia out of the coming world depression and introduce the world to the joys of eating kangaroo meat, naturally lean because of all the jumping. (j) Then there's Tasmania. Maybe another day.


17. The single best put-down you've ever witnessed.

A verbose accounts guy called Gale was debriefing a major new business pitch presentation to the CEO of an agency. He finished, looked enquiringly at the CEO who, after a pregnant pause, replied, "I haven't understood a fucking word you've said, Gale." Dead silence in the room.