a face like Bagpuss and are wearing unfashionable clothes. We sold stuff chiefly through talking to people in group situations and showing them bad ideas. Not all these ideas were bad but the majority were. In my youth, I’d thought I was helping bring good things to the wider population but when I reflected more deeply, it wasn’t, of course, true.
Back when I’d started there had been more enthusiasm amongst the respondents who came to the focus groups – there was wine provided, the venues were nice and adverts were still seen as relatively entertaining. Now, all that had changed and people were savvy and resented just about everything about modern life.
Once you got people in a room, it became difficult to manage the conversation without it turning into a giant bun fight. Adverts were boring and manipulative. Products were full of salt and often faulty/dangerous. Marketing was to blame but then of course there were also parking tickets, rubbish collection, immigration, the declining NHS, school application processes, the rising cost of basic foods, pollution, the barren high streets … the list went on. One minute you would be discussing a dry packet sauce and the next you’d segue into something far more significant. It made moderating the whole shebang very tiring and you needed your wits. The objective was to steer the conversation, and emerge with something that sounded like a palatable answer for the client.
‘I know you hate the new rubbish collection system on your street, but can you remember the idea I showed you ten minutes ago for a new toilet spray that activates itself whenever you lift the seat? How would you describe that idea in three words right now?’
‘What’s the best thing about this idea?’
‘What’s your favourite word on this concept?’
‘Let’s think of all the things we agree with, yes?’
The thing was the respondents were right. The world was full of plastic stuff that people didn’t need. Happiness was not on the increase, in fact quite the opposite.
There had also been a time when I’d thrown myself into the travel that came with the job. I’d been to New York, San Francisco, Paris and Milan. The thing was it was lonely. You arrived at a hotel, checked in, went to a small, dark viewing facility, and listened to someone talking to a bunch of people about an idea that nobody liked.
The typical days back then went something like this:
5.30 a.m. – fly to Munich to research a new mustard sauce proposition
9.45 a.m. – arrive at hotel and schlep massive bag full of new mustard sauce packaging up in the lift, lie down on bed for half hour, look out of the window and then leave
10.45 a.m. – 6 p.m. – spend entire day at the viewing facility preparing for groups, looking through stimulus, reading documents that keep being changed by the client every two minutes
6 p.m. – clients arrive and change everything that you’ve been working on all day
8 p.m. – 10.30 p.m. – German colleague moderates groups, clients talk German so you can’t understand anything that’s being said. They also hate you on sight because you’re too young/blonde/British/tired/depressed. Sit behind a mirror manically typing up everything the simultaneous translator is saying, then try to make sense in terms of which of the dreadful ideas is the least negative. Tell client your thoughts whilst he/she looks at you with disdain. Leave for hotel and feel sad, wishing you were a pop star, novelist, playwright etc.
11 p.m. – 1 a.m. – order room service, send emails and start to get grumpy emails back from the clients who are unhappy because the people you spoke to were wrong and they are going to ignore everything you suggest anyway. Watch infomercials for strange vegetable slicing machines and exercise contraptions whilst brain ceaselessly whirrs around and around and you worry about whether you’re going to sleep through your alarm and miss your dawn flight home again
Okay maybe there’d been a couple of trips that had been fun. New York, for example. And you got some time in the day to walk around the city. It wasn’t all bad or if it was, why was I still here?
The last five years I’d stopped travelling – it made me too anxious. I was glad when I only had to get a train to Manchester or Leeds and if I was lucky, I could return the same night and sleep in my own bed.
Then Phoebe became my boss and things changed. The mood changed. It felt like things were even more accelerated. There was rarely time to sit down and eat lunch, and sandwiches were shoved down your neck whilst typing with one hand. It became permissible to take client calls in the loo whilst urinating. There was no down time or if there was you were called into a brainstorm.
Phoebe walked past as I was writing notes in my book. Writing notes was a good way of looking busy and avoiding her attention.
‘MORNING REBECCA!’ she boomed. ‘TRAIN TROUBLE AGAIN?’
I was glad that everyone was wearing headphones and couldn’t hear her.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was on a client call and had to miss the first train so I could finish the conversation.’
‘A client conversation with whom?’ she said walking backwards towards my desk, and looking down at my notes which so far said: must get a scented candle for Pete’s mum’s birthday and pick up coat from dry cleaners.
‘Um it was that cleaning wax enquiry. Remember? The one from a few months ago?’
She raised an eyebrow and clearly didn’t believe me.
‘Well send the brief over so I can have a quick look before you make a start,’ she said dismissively and walked off.
She didn’t walk. She STRODE. She was Sheryl Sandberg (the famous female head honcho at Facebook), to the power of ten. Later I would need to invent a reason as to why the brief hadn’t arrived. I would drop her an email, and say that some other agency had got it instead.
The other problem I had with work was the fact that there seemed to be resentment coming from the younger generation. The previous Thursday during one of our ‘Share & Care Hours’ (you had to take a colleague you didn’t know out for coffee), a young man had informed me that Gen X were to blame for everything that was wrong with our country – the flagging economy, corporate greed and corruption, not enough cheap, good quality housing in urban areas. He listed everything about my generation that he despised, whilst I quietly drank my coffee and reassured him that I wasn’t personally responsible and weren’t these coffee brainstorms supposed to be uplifting for us both?
There was a part of me that felt that there was some jealousy perhaps – we’d had fun, it was true (the travel had felt exciting for a while) and we’d been hedonistic (yes, me definitely, from what I could remember) and raved and all that, and now this generation were spending their youth taking photos of their food. The only office banter seemed to involve food or food-related activities.
There was a new Korean street food shop opening.
There was a place that sold seaweed soaked in gin.
There was a stall selling kimchi that had been aged for four years straight.
I loved eating as much as the next person, but where were the wild nights spent getting off with strangers? Or losing footwear whilst moshing at the front of a gig? Food was for old people who couldn’t dance anymore. My generation had eaten chips and didn’t worry about their ‘carb-load’. We didn’t find food sexy. We avoided it and spent our money elsewhere – fags and booze, mainly. Every time I went into the kitchen I braced myself for a lecture on the best coffee beans to buy (Jamaican, £12.99 a bag) and why I couldn’t continue using Nescafé.
About seven years in, I’d started getting the itch to leave Mango-Lab. I had a few different ideas but none of them had much of a commercial angle. These