This week’s load of old codswallop

I got out of the tube at Oxford Circus the other day to be greeted by a pretty young thing who handed me a bag.

Here it is.


Fittingly it was made from bio-degradable plastic, as it was one of those bio-degradable ideas from the people whose job it is to sit around thinking up new ways of pissing away my money.

What it was doing, in the most inane, incompetent wasteful, stupid way was to tell me that I should go and “improve my skills”.

Inside was a fortune cookie with the message, “Our future is in our hands” plus a little leaflet clearly written by someone with the literary charm and persuasive skills of a plastic ashtray telling me I could get all kinds of training to improve myself.

If anyone in a proper commercial organisation did that sort of thing they would be shot out of the ejector seat as fast as a speeding bullet.

But of course the public sector tossers who paid for this are concerned with expenditure, not results.

And so are the people who put it together: i.e., get the fools to part with as much money as possible because they’re too thick to evaluate whether it was a good investment or not.

By the way: if you were handing out stuff to people in the street, would you say a senile buffoon like me was the right age to start a training programme?

P.S. LAST MINUTE CHALLENGER FOR DRIVEL PRIZE:

A police van getting in the way of the traffic in Piccadilly this morning.

Written on the side: “Metropolitan Police. Making Westminster safer.”

Ah, so now we know that they do. Thanks for putting me right. Brilliant!

I wonder which “communications consultant” came up with that gem.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

1 Comment

  1. Just to let you know, you have an expectant audience waiting for the rant on immigration!

    Oh, and the stripper too, but they were too polite to say that.

    I’m not.

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