Cries of “Robbery!” at an awards event are hardly news. Sometimes it’s a disconsolate creative sobbing into his bucks fizz because his hilarious oral-sex-related brass band recruitment ad has been neglected by the jury yet again.
More frequently it’s the sudden realisation that your company is almost two grand out of pocket for the dubious privilege of eating micro-waved chicken-in-a-basket whilst watching rival agencies bounce up on stage to the strains of late 90s Brit-Pop.
But Love Creative’s loss of some eight trophies at the recent Fresh Awards, attended by some 350 revellers, probably gives them more cause for hueing and even crying than most. It does also raise a few questions.
 Tony Murray's favourite shoes
Winning eight awards at one event is going to put you in one of two states of mind, depending on the size of your ego and your state of intoxication:
a) “We’re the Labrador’s non-lady bits we are!”
b) “Eh, did nobody else enter then?”
Guess which one leads you to leaving them lying around?
Perhaps the real crime of the evening is not who stole eight awards but who was responsible for the abduction all of the rest of the guests? At its height Cream (Fresh’s immediate predecessor and inspiration (Fresh? Cream? Geddit?)) attracted nearly 3000 people across six events, now its weedy off-spring can only manage 350 at its one remaining event.
Perhaps the Fresh crew should have attended the recent UCLAN conference where “crowd-sourcing” was very much on the agenda. Here Trinity Mirror’s “Benson” (a man obviously so famous that How-Do needs, as with “Elvis” and “Dana”, only one name to refer to him by) told delegates of a brave new initiative by Liverpool’s Post and Echo.
This will see them using “crowd-sourcing” for “essentially co-opting the public and specialist commentators into helping create and populate stories and content.” For free that is.
Benson told How-Do: “One of the things we’re keen on is to get journalists to act more like radio producers, sourcing information and views in addition to generating copy themselves from their desks." Which begs the question: “What the fuck were they doing before?”
If Benson is to be believed, Post and Echo journalists currently perch on their chairs, plucking inspiration from the ether and then banging it out in solitude.
If one didn’t know better one might be led to assume that this public-empowering management speak was a nimble bit of re-packaged cost cutting from an editorial director who no more has his finger on the pulse of Merseyside journalism than News International’s Hillsborough correspondent.
But then, of course, that could never be the case.
A final thought, according to Benson, these new initiatives are to be introduced “in-paper”. Is this more cost-cutting? Are “definite articles” (that’s “the” to those of you working as art directors or in media sales) (the) next to face (the) Trinity axe? Perhaps that’s what happened to Benson’s first name.
Cost-cutting is not likely to be the issue at Manchester’s MediaVest which How-Do this week exposed as no 114 on the Sunday Times Top Track 250 (“Top Track 250 ranks Britain's biggest mid-market private companies by latest sales”). The media independent featured with a turnover of ₤221m and a profit of ₤9m.
Ah, even here in westernmost Beijing, (just by the end of line one of the subway and near the newly completed Olympic velodrome) you can hear the grinding of teeth from those agency owners who can remember the days of having their media-buying in house and when “full-service” wasn’t only available after dark on Minshull Street.
It reminds me of a dispute between the head of a media independent and the head of an advertising agency, both Manchester-based, which took place after the very first AREA awards in 1995. So incensed was the agency owner by the margins of his media-buying counterpart that he concluded the conversation by throwing a drink in his face. I won’t reveal who the two contenders were, but you can send your own guesses to the usual email address. Please mark all entries “Mike Barrington and Martin Conry competition”.
In an entirely unrelated story comes the news that Iris has been appointed to handle the trade launch of the new up dated Mr. Men series . What has mysteriously gone unreported is that the updated series re-locates the lovable two-dimensional anthropomorphisms to the Manchester marketing community.
Mr. Bump is now the tale of a man who launches an under-funded digital media venture, whilst Little Miss Naughty is the heartwarming tale of one girl’s rapid progress from PA to head of PR, by way of the agency’s calendar. Unaccountably, in one of the saga’s most bizarre updates, Mr. Greedy comes to Manchester in 1994 and launches a media independent.
A couple of final thoughts – welcome back to Manchester, me old mate, Duncan “Circumnavigator” Slater , so known for his propensity for chucking in his job and heading off round the world. Duncan Slater Great Innovator would be an equally applicable appellation – all new business guys make a fetish of collecting business cards, but Dunk has taken this to a new level. He has them all – the Advertising Agency, BJL, Attik, Cheetham Bell, TCW, Juice, Poulters etc - and all with his own name on!
One last thought with regard to timely innovations, Northwest Vision and Media may be a little unambitious with its scheme of offering would-be broadcast professionals the chance of “A Coffee with…” grizzled veterans of the TV industry. With the BBC simultaneously announcing plans to make 2,500 “respected TV professionals” redundant, rendering them both penniless and homeless, surely “A Few Cans of Tennents Super and a Fight With…” would be a far more appropriate initiative.
Tony Murray once edited a magazine called Awards World, which planned to launch its own “Awards Awards”. Tired of the exploitation and immorality of the awards business, he gave it all up and went back into pornography. He now sits in a small apartment, near the Beijing velodrome, and once a week regurgitates bile about his former life as editor of some good marketing magazines and some Scottish ones. You can email him and beg him to “Stop, for God’s sake, stop!” at tonymurray37@hotmail.com .Something to add? Then leave a comment below or email us now.
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