I’ve long thought that age can be a real problem challenge when you work in advertising, especially if you’ve chosen to forge a career within the agency system. Agencies tend to want to be seen as hotbeds of hyper-cool-cutting-edgery, clients want to reach the 18-39s, and there are always plenty of hungry 29-year-olds prepared to work 70 hours a week. If you’re over 40 and still working in an agency, it’s not hard to feel like you’re mere moments from complete obsolescence.
However, if you’ve played your cards right, by 40 you’re the Creative Director or Group Account Director or something, and you’ve got more influence and control over the stuff your creative teams are doing.
In my teens and early 20s, I spent a fair amount of time (and money) on esoteric pop music: I’d track down whatever indie imports NME was raving about Comsat Angels, Jazz Butcher, Pale Fountains) and buy them without even hearing them first. But I hardly ever met anyone else who’d heard of them, and in those pre-internet days, it wasn’t like you could just join a Comsat Angels Facebook group or whatever. So I was happy to discover that there are lots of other pop music geeks in marketing, especially in the creative department.
Why do I mention this? Because I’m starting to hear all kinds of music I like and recognize in tv ads, and I’m pretty sure this has a lot to do with the fact that my peers (i.e. agency types in the 38-48 age range) are picking the tunes.
I’ve been noticing it more and more in the past few years, but the current Fruttare ad really caught my attention:
The ad is kind of awful, but fast-forward to about 0:22 and listen to the soundtrack.
Now, listen to this Marine Girls (the band Tracey Thorn was in before Everything But the Girl) song from 1983, from about 0:05-0:17:
Here’s what I like to think happened:
The (44-year-old) creative director in charge of this spot didn’t love the backing track the creative team came up with, so one night he went through his record collection to see what inspired him. He came across the Marine Girls track and thought it was just the sort of randomness that might be perfect. They tried to get the original song, but no one at Cherry Red had any idea who owned the copyright any more, and anyway, someone lost the masters years ago. So creative director guy told the music house to come up with a sort of ‘soundalike’ that had the same vibe but wasn’t going to cause any legal problems (soundalikes are quite common, BTW, when clients can’t afford the original tracks).
And then creative director guy sat back, a little sad thinking that probably no one else in the world would twig to the Marine Girls connection – but feeling just a little cool, too, the way he did when he was 15 and he was the only one in his school who’d even heard of Marine Girls.
Is my imagination running away with me a little? Maybe. But if you show me a list of people who worked on that Fruttare spot, I’ll show you a person over 40 who had a Marine Girls album in the 80s.