It’s official! I’m an ass … but I should be feeling a lot worse than I do

Two people in the last 24 hours have told me that whoever among my motley crew does the optimising has got me down as Drayton Bird Ass.

Quite right too, and after my son Phil’s annual Christmas Party last night I should be feeling a lot more asinine than usual – but I’m not, even though I drank too much as usual.

The secret is my terpsichorean prowess, about which I have kept quiet. I feel more or less OK because of four hours’ solid of getting down with it.

This little talent is something I normally keep quiet about, but my performance as Elvis Travolta, complete with white suit with flares and ludicrous wig at an Awards do a few years ago is still spoken of with reverence, only to be compared with the day I danced across the stage at Shanghai to the astonishment of the Chinese three years ago.

I don’t get to trip the light fantastic that much nowadays, but the two things that made me happy last night besides the Pol Roger champagne were the fact that a few people came up and told me how much they like the blog, and the girl I was dancing with who asked who taught me to dance like that. (Nobody; I picked it up in the shady side of Manchester over 50 years ago).

Heavily censored pictures will be available for a small fee.

(Signed) The Ass in Associates

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.

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