SadAge

Advertising, as a culture, is boring.

It’s one that fancies itself both serious and studious, but still fun and irreverent, while it’s actually none of these things. Instead it’s just as vapid and intolerant of change as any other, but wrapped in petty shows of meaningless flourish which it rewards in self-aggrandizing awards shows.

But it’s easy to make fun of, so at least that.

Which is why we need sites like Agency Wank.

The thing is, if you’ve worked in advertising for any length of time, you’ve written something like the garbage on AW, or said something like it, you’ve probably even believed it for a while, and that’s fine. Every profession has its own embarrassment. But if you can’t eventually realize the situation for what it is and at least laugh about it, then you’re an asshole.

So I was bummed then when I went to the AW website to see why they hadn’t been updating and found this:

I’ve been blown away by the number of views and shares over the past week.

However not everyone has taken it so well and unfortunately I’ve had to go into hiding.

It appears I’ve been targeted by a very angry irishman.

http://theescapepod.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/agencywank-moi-surely-not/

Do not worry though, for one day I will return to clean the wank from our industry for good.

Until that day arrives, remember this…

As a man, I’m flesh & blood; I can be ignored, destroyed. But as a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

I guess we get the blogs we deserve.

But any way, this bums me out for two reasons: first is that this was a blog that was genuinely funny, and it was genuinely funny because it was true.

The second reason is that the link he mentions which points to an insecure, threatening post on the agency blog for The Escape Pod (which only reenforces all the reasons we needed Agency Wank in the first place).

The whole post is terrible, but I feel like the end stands out as particularly bad:

But we understand that the person who created this tumblr might be a bit junior. And might not have the best judgement.

So we’d like to invite the creators of this bloggity tumblr thing to come to The Escape Pod for a drink and a laugh.

Afterwards, I personally will kick the living s**t out of you. It’ll be a hoot!

So yeah, it’s both bad and poorly written, but you want to know the absolute worst part of this whole thing?

It’s not that The Escape Pod seems to think putting commercials on YouTube is revolutionary.

It’s not even that using the phrase “bloggity tumblr thing” completely undermines their argument that they’re “the agency of the present”.

It’s not the line “I personally kick the living s**t out of you.” which makes me wonder why you’d go through the effort of childishly asterisking out the word “shit” when you’ve just threatened someone with physical violence on your company’s blog?

It’s not even their cheap and unfunny shot that the author of Agency Wank is “a bit junior” - which, even if he is, only means that he’s understood more about this industry in his short few years that most of do in our careers.

It’s none of these things.

The very worst part of this whole thing is that when The Escape Pod centered their dumb slogan, they included the “TM”.

That, my friends, is fucking amateur hour.