Pigging it up

I was talking yesterday at an Ordnance Survey conference. Don’t ask me what it was all about, but if you’re in marketing you know that maps are very important for targeting.

Although many people liked my usual selection of tawdry jokes, the best speaker of the day was Gerald Ratner. If you ever get a chance to see him, do. Absolutely hilarious and wonderfully self-deprecating.

(For those who don’t know who Gerald Ratner is – get on the internet. He is a very unlucky man, really.)

I was told they were going to have a Hog Roast the night before the conference, but I couldn’t make it. I’m a pig for hogs and I was sulking about this till I learned that the swine in question didn’t turn up.

Two footnotes on the subject of swine (you can guess some of what’s coming, can’t you?)

1. I see most of the pigs in Parliament still can’t tell the difference between right and wrong – especially Gordon Brown, who condemns one person (Hazel Blears) for doing something almost identical to what he condones in another (Hoon – a slimy creep, by the way – I was in a meeting with him years ago).

2. My dear friend Daz Valladares who is from those parts tells me that in Kalina, a Bombay suburb, they used to have the festival of St. Roque. Part of the fun was a game where the men of the village formed a circle within which a pig was set free. The person who captured it was allowed to take it home.

Concerns about Swine Flu caused this harmless East Indian custom to be abandoned. What a shame.

Daz says he went to school with someone from Kalina, and “it used to be a quiet place with tamarind trees and quarries which used to fill up with salt water when the tide came in. These were crystal clear and deep ponds. I enjoyed swimming in them.”

There is something very touching and sad about that, don’t you think? Not as sad as the way even small places far from anywhere are being persecuted by bureaucratic idiots. They are probably related to the idiots who destroyed the homes of those two adorable Slumdog kids.

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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