A day in the life of dealing with fucking Weetabix.

This is a story that may or may not be true. It’s a story as old as time.

Told across Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans, WhatsApp… you name it.

It’s called:

‘The client has no strategy for reactive communications but spends 24hrs wasting several agency’s time on getting ‘something quick’ up in response to Weetabix and Beans’.

You know the one. You’ve heard it a thousand times.

Forget the plans you had.

The meetings booked.

The other work you had on.

No no.

Drop all that.

The client saw something trending on Twitter last night and emailed everyone this morning (a full 24hrs after the initial tweet) and not only do they want something up ‘super-fast’ but they’ve also emailed enough people (whose total annual salary easily tops over half a million quid - by some margin) to try and make that happen.

The media agency. The creative agency. The PR agency. The social agency.

An absolute fucking joke.

If you didn’t hold the keys to your Twitter The morning after the Weetabeans before, you had no chance. It’s like fucking DUNK IN THE DARK. Or that fucking ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE. All over again. No lessons learnt. No business objectives tied to yelling JUMP at people into the double digits so they can all shout back in unison: HOW HIGH.

Because what the fuck is life.

A smart person might say ‘What is this?’ ‘Why is this interesting?’ ‘IS this interesting?’ ‘What can we learn from this?’ ‘Has this done anything for anyone?’ ‘And do any of the answers to those questions actually help my overall business and brand objectives?’

A thick as shit person might say ‘Look at that amazing trending thing yesterday, shall we do something REACTIVE today?’

It’s the 2021 equivalent of the client reading WIRED and calling you up to tell you how massive QR codes are going to be and that they need to be on, oh I don’t know, every chocolate bar wrapper we make for the next 20 years.

A waste of fucking time. A waste of fucking money. A waste of fucking talent.

I love my job. I miss the office. I would like a manicure.

I hate twat clients.

I hate that I can’t tell them to fuck their ideas into the sun.

I hate agency politics – and the ‘inter/cross’ agency bullshit that hangs around it.

And I hate the fact that I lost a day of work to this heinous waste of space.

John Wanamaker said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – I’m pretty sure he’d know if he were alive today.

Reactive content my ass.