“When copywriters argue with me about some esoteric word they want to use, I say to them, ‘Get on a bus. Go to Iowa. Stay on a farm for a week and talk to the farmer. Come back to New York by train and talk to your fellow passengers in the day-coach. If you still want to use the word, go ahead.”— David Ogilvy, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather

 

My happiest moment of the first working day of the year came when the boss asked me to run errands, delivering documents to various places. Whilst everyone else was celebrating being back in the office, I was celebrating my precious minutes away.

Yes, I make no secret of the fact that I detest the office and I detest sitting at a desk looking at documents. There is nothing so dehumanising as being stuck in front of a desk looking at a screen or a file for one third of your life. Let’s be totally honest here, what value to desk jockeys actually produce other than whatever comes out of their private parts as they spend their days jerking off to the amount of paper generated? Covid made it very clear that the guys who actually contributed to the well being of society were not in offices. The world carried on without stockbrokers, bankers and other “respectable” professions that are office bound. By contrast, we could not do without the guys who swept the streets and cleared the trash.

 

 They are successful – but what good to they actually do for anyone beyond their magic circle? – Copyright The Straits Times

I admit that I work for someone who is office bound because it pays better for the hours, I put in than blue collar work. I try to make it clear to my employer that asking me to do office work like writing reports and reading documents is a sure way to create a disaster and I am only good for dispatch work. I think of PN Balji, my former boss, who described me a good “guerrilla PR man,” but God help anyone who wants me to write a strategy paper.

My mentality has made me a failure in the Singapore context. However, I can live with that because, well, the alternative would be worse – being a prisoner to a profession. This would mean only mixing with people like yourself and more worryingly, you develop the mindset that what you do, or your profession is the be all and end all of everything. I’ve noticed this in the professions that I’ve either been in or worked with closely (advertising, PR, law and accountancy). Spending a third of your life only with people like yourself is bad for the brain.

If you want to be an effective working professional, you need to avoid in-breeding and to ensure that you see the world rather than your corner of it because, well your corner actually depends on the rest of the world. The industry that’s most guilty of forgetting this is advertising, where the common criticism of advertising people is that they’re more interested in winning awards (judged by other advertising people) than in selling products.

I think an ad that was run by “Tiger Beer” many years ago, which ran around the lines of “What Time is It – It’s Tiger Time.” The people I spoke to in the industry thought the ad was awful. My friends outside the industry couldn’t stop raving. The CEO of the ad agency that produced the ad made the point that they were interested in working for their client rather than to impress their fellow professionals.

https://advertisingarchive.asia/ads/tiger-beer-time/

 

 Didn’t Impress fellow professionals – but it got the customer thinking

In a way, the title “working professional” has been abused in as much as it makes people in the said profession think that they’re magicians of sort because they went to certain schools and more importantly went through the rigors of licensing. Again, I think of the number of communications professionals who are hung up about the fact that they are “communications professionals” but thought of who they were communicating to as an inconvenience.

Ultimately, working professionals need to remember that they are a small cog to their client’s overall business. Yes, they need to know their craft, which requires a good amount of studying. However, there is only magic in that craft if it adds something to the final product. Hence, PR works if it enhances the brand. Advertising is only magical if it gets products sold. Accounting is only valuable if it allows businessmen to manage money better. Lawyers are only valuable if they can serve their clients.

So, to achieve that, you need to live beyond the magic circle of your profession and the only way to do that is to move beyond people in the same field, which means not a third of your life trapped in a cubicle only talking to people who are exactly like you. Genetic science has shown that incest is bad. The same can be said for only in-breeding with people in exactly the same profession.