So it’s goodbye Ruby, if only it had been reported on a Tuesday, we could have made a half decent song about it, but hey, you can’t win them all. Now Matt and Dicky belong to an agency with no name, until a staff competition decides what it should be called.
Suggestions posted online include “Frankless”, “Ruby Red” and “Rubric” but surely now Mad Frank is off the scene, his former side-kick will get the chance to have his name over the door. And, if it ends up as Hammersley & Co, we’ll know who had the deciding vote.
Mind you, I do miss Frank. I remember years ago he invited the young Ivan Idol to the Stella Artois championships at Queen’s. At the time, I seem to recall thinking that I had a decent chance of winning it, too. After all, I normally sank ten pints of Stella before leaving for work. So you can imagine I was a tad disappointed when I arrived to find it was a bloody tennis tournament. How boring. Luckily, I didn’t let that small detail ruin my enjoyment of the day. Apparently I had a great time. And apparently I was crowned the Stella champion just after lunch when someone bundled me in a taxi home. Ho hum, the good ol’ days.
In fact, I was reminiscing about the good ol’ days with a former Rapp (then WWAV) chief the other day. He claims that even in the Eighties the lovely Chris Albert (God rest his soul) was bemoaning the end of the good ol’ days of the Seventies, when the creatives would go down to the pub on Monday and be back just in time for Friday night drinks. Of course, these days, you’re lucky if you have time to eat a sarnie at your desk…honest.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom you know. Crack open the champagne because, according to ground-breaking research sponsored by Royal Mail, direct marketing is the future. There’s only one problem with Martin Hayward’s study… it doesn’t say whether direct marketers will be the beneficiaries. It’ll be just our luck if the admen suddenly get converted on the road to Damascus and become experts in shit that folds.
Mind you, they’ll have swot up on it and might pay handsomely to discover the difference between a DL envelope and a C4 one. Now, where did I put Hammersley’s contact details…
(Got anything you’re dying to get off your chest? Email me, discretion guaranteed! ivan.idol@hotmail.co.uk)
