The First Screen And Violent Desires

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can remember a chap at a conference referring to mobiles as 'the third screen' (after TV and PC) and, some years later, someone putting on one of those Arthur, King of the Britons voices to prophetically announce that the mobile was now the first screen. Cue gasps from audience, challenged by speaker's uncanny insight.

Which is all well and good, but this whole constant screen lark is getting out of hand. I'm increasingly infuriated by the experience of lift doors opening to reveal people gazing at their mobiles. It's like a ritual, as dependable as Southern Indian men walking into lifts with mirrored back walls (cue comb whipped out from back pocket and furious primping of hair, usually by someone who hasn't pushed the button for the floor he wants and rewards you, when you get out, with that 'tch' of irritation as he realises he's in the car park and not, in fact, the 43rd floor). The slack-jawed mobile gawper stands there thumbing away at his handset, oblivious to the ten people staring at him and wishing him dead as their own lives ebb away, waiting for his convenience.

After a few seconds, he realises and either looks up and dashes for the lift or, worse, just belatedly blunders in with his head still buried in his mobile. Not buried quite as far as I'd ideally like it, I can tell you. On good days, the doors close painfully on his shoulders and I have to struggle to contain my elation.

I have little fantasies of being alone in the lift, the camera lens in the corner obscured by some fiendish device invented for one of my novels, grabbing the back of his head and dashing it against the mobile screen propped against the lift wall, bouncing his ugly pate against the little rectangle until splinters of Gorilla Glass are embedded in his...

Okay, I have to rest for a few seconds.

Aaaand we're back.

Stuck in traffic on the benighted MBZ, watching the guy in front leaving a hundred metre gap until the car in front of him, his eejit features dipping like one of those wee birds with felty heads you used to get that pivoted on a plastic base to dip eternally into a glass of water. And you know that means he's texting or Whatsapping or Facebooking or whatever other neoloverbism you want to dub his slavish infosharing with.

I hate him. I watch cars push into the yawning gap he's leaving; one, two and three people all getting home one car, two cars, three cars ahead of me. I want to get out and go knock on his window, perhaps talk to him, point out that directing a tonne of steel, glass and, increasingly these days, plastic might might just be a teensy weensy bit more important than sharing photographs of Rima's first puke. Or even rip the mobile out of his fat, hairy hands and toss it under the wheels of the jerk in a brown Renault Duster who's undertaking us both and filling the permalacuna that mobile-head is leaving in the flow.

But the one that really, and I do not want to understate this too much, really, really gets my goat (I don't have a goat, but if I had one it would get it. Probably comprehensively eviscerated.) is the blithering dimwit who walks into me in the shopping mall because he is gurning into his mobile, his sago-slack features lit by the flickering of the YouTube clip of a cat whose arse is being used as a pencil sharpener by a dog egged on by a buttered mandrill.

I mean, right into me. I'm standing quite still because my wife is consumed by the enormity of the choice between Wallis and Chic. Shoes or dresses. She's torn, uncertain. I'm waiting for her to reach the epiphany of the indecisive shopper and Elie The JerkTard actually walks into me. And, finally, my legion suppressed fantasies of violent urges silently played out on numberless witless screen-droolers find their outlet. Sarah's headed for Chic, because there's a Lebanese man with male pattern baldness hanging out of the smashed plate glass window of Wallis, his body jerking as arterial blood spurts, drenching the long cougar-print dresses drooping from their circled hangers.

And yes, I do feel better now, thank you very much.

Liars

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am never at my best in job interviews. I’m a disastrous candidate (I was once stopped in the middle of an interview to be told my ‘interview persona sucks’) and even worse as an interrogator. Never a great lover of formality, I find the stilted nervousness appalling.

The other day a candidate asked me what was the difference between PR and advertising. It struck me as an odd question to ask in an interview for a PR job, but I did my best to answer it. And my answer boiled down to this.

Public Relations - as I see it - is the communications discipline. It is about driving structured, benefit-led change. In my professional career, fifteen years now, in public relations I have never told a single lie. Never.

But advertising is all about lying. It's what they do, constantly. What amazes me is how we put up with it, consigning it to the dump bin of background noise when actually we should be protesting it. Look at HSBC's most recent radio ad in the UAE. "At HSBC, we believe that..."

No you don't. That's simply a lie. You do not collectively believe in personal loans with 'keen' (6.5% is competitive, apparently.) interest rates. It's not a corporate value. In fact, your offer is not driven in any way by a "belief", other than a commercial imperative. So why do you find it appropriate to so glibly misrepresent yourselves in this way?

Axe does not make men attractive. Oh, sure, it's an amusing way to highlight the 'brand essence' of the product. It's also a lie. It smells like toilet freshener. I have yet to meet a woman attracted by the smell of toilet freshener. Pantypads don't make you a more successful mum and microwave dinners don't mean more time to enjoy the family. Famously, I would contend a Mars a day doesn't really help you work, rest and play. It just tastes nice and is bad for you. There's no medical evidence to support the unsupportable claim.

It has long been a catechism for me that assertion without proof is a lie. And yet this is what advertising does constantly. Feel the radiance warm your skin, taste the joy of the open road. Dare to dream the dream. Oh, and while I'm at it, why does the 'Hundred reasons to buy a BMW' radio ad only ever feature reason 82? Do you think they even have a list of 100 reasons to buy their blasted cars?

And on and on we go through a litany that touches pretty much every commercial we see. A constant barrage of the untrue, indefensible and mis-characterised. And we let it wash over us rather than pushing back and asking brands to kindly just stick to the facts, the truth.

Which is what you have to do in public relations. Because if you don't, you'll get called out. In public. It used to be by journalists, now it's by every mobile phone in the country.

I can't say the interview was a great success. It contained some very long silences...