Guess who has the most fun – and pays the price?


I don’t know whether I’ve said this before, but when I used to bang out six marketing columns a month someone asked me how I managed it.

I said all I had to do was open any marketing publication anywhere in the world and it would take about two minutes to find something stupid which I could then write about to general amusement.

Actually the principle doesn’t just apply to marketing, although I suspect the industry has far more than its fair share of posers, fuck-wits, pompous idiots and all round tossers, too many of whom, by the way, rise mysteriously to high office on the shit floats principle.

One field where idiocy flourishes to an extraordinary degree, and which is not restricted to the madcap world of marketing, is research. Yesterday morning I saw in the paper that the Health Protection Agency (one of the many bodies employed to waste taxpayers’ money on fatuous “initiatives” of one kind or another) has done some research that discovered something perfectly obvious to anyone not terminally stupid.

It seems that “young people accounted for fully half of all sexually transmitted diseases”, despite making up just one eighth of the population.

Well isn’t that amazing? Who would have thought that young people screw around a lot more than older people? Could this explain why the only times I managed to get a couple of doses were over 35 years ago when I was jumping into bed with anything that said “yes”?

The only fact of interest here is that in those days we didn’t have the benefit of the Health Protection Agency and we did have a better educational system, so we tended to think a little more for ourselves. Maybe that’s why there was a lot less disease around.

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.

2 Comments

  1. Amanda

    Perhaps I should start my own column…I'm certainly no expert, but when I came home today I received direct mail that was ten years old. I'll explain: Borders.com mailer, the first sentence reads “Welcome to a real bookstore–online.” Hello?!?! That was Amazon years ago & that's why you're going bankrupt!!!
    My significant other exclaimed about their coupon: “That's F'ing offensive!” I agree w/ him, Borders coupons, which nearly exclude buying anything at all in their stores/online, are insulting. For $5–really you think they'd love anyone to buy anything from them at the moment, so to exclude buying items that are worth hundreds of dollars……my god, even I can do better Borders, & have.

  2. Amanda

    Perhaps I should start my own column…I'm certainly no expert, but when I came home today I received direct mail that was ten years old. I'll explain: Borders.com mailer, the first sentence reads “Welcome to a real bookstore–online.” Hello?!?! That was Amazon years ago & that's why you're going bankrupt!!!
    My significant other exclaimed about their coupon: “That's F'ing offensive!” I agree w/ him, Borders coupons, which nearly exclude buying anything at all in their stores/online, are insulting. For $5–really you think they'd love anyone to buy anything from them at the moment, so to exclude buying items that are worth hundreds of dollars……my god, even I can do better Borders, & have.

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