Gotta get down on Friday

My friends. Ace my erstwhile friend, Ice Cube once said, today was a good day. (Erstwhile because…well, it’s along story. But he knows why.)

It began as usual, with my traditional early breakfast meeting with the team. 11am sharp – no fucking slouching. I nominate a different breakfast venue each week, and this time it was the turn of Nandos.

‘The full English, mate!’ I said to the waiter, my napkin already tucked into my shirt collar. ‘And don’t skimp on the extra egg, sausage, bacon, steak, beans, chips or horse meat! If you have any.’

‘We only do chicken,’ he replied. ‘And no breakfasts.’

‘Shit,’ I shot back, lightning fast. ‘Just bring us a load of whatever, then.’

‘How hot would you like it?’ he asked.

‘Well, I’d like it hot mate. Cook it. Obviously.’

‘No – how spicy, sir.’

‘Er – maximum. As hot as it can be. And then make it hotter.’

There were some grumbles from a few members of the team (or all of them, actually, thinking about it) but before long a mound of violently hot chicken arrived and it was into the first item on the agenda: eat breakfast.

Once we’d finished, popped out for a breath of fresh air, had a lie down, had a thorough and explosive dump, had another lie down and a plate of ice each, we were ready for business.

‘What time is it?’ I asked my PA, Mandy…no. (Sorry. Mandy was the last one. My PA…er, thingy. My PA. You know – hair, glasses. That one. Jesus. Erm…no. It’s gone. It’d just be simpler if she changed her name to Peeyay by deed poll. Fuck it. I’ll call her Peeyay and hope it sticks.)

‘It’s half-past two,’ Peeyay replied.

‘When’s my next appointment?’ I pinged.

‘An hour and a half ago,’ she ponged.

‘Fuck,’ I…er…panged. ‘Right. I have to go – there’s no time for items 2-14 of the agenda. Let’s pick that up, like, whenever. Or just get on with it.’

And with that, I was into a cab and right on time for my lunch meeting.

My diary simply read ‘P.U.B.’, with an unfamiliar address.

Who’s initials were they? Where would I be headed? What would I do when I got there?

Then I arrived, realised what P.U.B. stood for and I’ve been here ever since, in the beer garden, surrounded by mucky skippers in short skirts.

Told you it was a good day.

Have a good time, all the time, my friends. Dave loves you.

I am Dave Knockles! And I am wankered!

The Motherfucker List

Yup. That's you.

My friends and fellow marketing professionals. Some time ago, I published (yes – published) what I called the Motherfucker List.

Put simply, this was a list of motherfuckers.

Well, here’s another one.

The person who invented self-scanning checkouts

Now, strictly speaking, I covered this utter spunksack in the last Motherfucker List, but I think he (or she, but let’s be honest, probably he) deserves another mention.

Why? Because he is to motherfuckers what cows are to beef. He is the source of motherfuckitude, the mountain spring, the font of all that is motherfuckational, the genesis, the chosen one, the big bang.

For it was he who thought, possibly while standing in a supermarket, that the one thing shoppers need, numbed as they are into medical-grade lethargy by the sheer futility of their existence, is a chance to PLAY FUCKING SHOP.

What was it with this cuntpipe? Did he have a toy till when he was a nipper that he accidentally crushed with his big, clumpy orthopedic shoe and never got over it? Or is he just such a money-grubbing cunt that he saw an opportunity to dispense with some teenaged girls and let us do their jobs instead?

The man is a massive mound of horse shit, dog bollocks, enema water and own-brand crisps.

People in the street

Who are you? What are you doing here? What could you possibly be doing that’s worth the effort? There are literally millions of you, all filling the streets in great drifts of clammy litter. Come on. You know there’s no point. I know there’s no point. Isn’t there somewhere you could go to die?

People indoors

Look at you, all huddled up in your little rooms. Jesus. You motherfuckers.

People in cars

I am the driver of a high-specification BMW motor car. That means I have right of way, all the way, you motherfuckers. If I want to drive at 75 in a 30 zone, just pull over and let me pass. Don’t just carry on driving, for fuck’s sake! And if I want to drive at 45 in the middle lane of a motorway while I take a call, open a bottle of scotch, take off my socks, read a book, change my shirt and boil a kettle on a cunting camping stove – then I fucking will. And you motherfuckers can lump it.

People in general

Let me put this simply: go bang yourself. Yes – you. YOU. Not everyone except you – everyone including you. In fact, you especially.

Well, I think that should do it for now. If you can think of anyone I’ve left out, let me know!

You are not Dave Knockles! And you are a MOTHERFUCKER!

Please stop kicking it. It’s dead.

BMW. Oh, poor, poor BMW. I can’t really bear to look.

Jesus. What have they done to you? Your face is all smashed in and…oh, sweet Jesus! Have they…oh my Lord…they’ve….they’ve cut your balls off!

Those…monsters. Those utter, utter monsters.

Just look at this. I can’t stand to anymore.

 

Words are usually my friend. But when I saw this execrable piece of horror, they deserted me. All I could do was take a glass, smash it with a stick plastered in human remains, stir in some cancer-causing chemicals and keep eating it until my insides liquified and sweet, sweet death carried me away me on its wings of blessed release.

I didn’t actually do it, obviously. I had a lot on the next day.

So I just lamented the once massive-bollocked one-eyed Godzilla of brand girth that BMW used to be and wondered why someone, somewhere had decided I don’t want an ultimate driving machine anymore. Apparently, what I want is to mince about near a fountain experiencing the ‘joy’ of nearly getting wet. Joy flows, you see? Flows. Like water. In a fountain. With a…oh, fuck it.

I am Dave Knockles. And I am fucking depressed.

Being Dave Knockles

So. What’s new in the upsy-downsy, insy-outsy, leftsy-rightsy life of Dave Knockles, Marketing Director?

Let me tell you.

Everything is fucking amazing. I really think I’ve got this business so sussed, so thoroughly worked out, that I could send my dog, Randy, to work, and nothing much would change as long as he learned how to hit ‘Forward’ on my email.

I’ve had a wealth of internal successes lately, chief amongst them being last week’s board meeting.

Here’s how it played out.

Presenting to the board. It's all about balls, teeth, tits, spine, guts and spunk.

After a really boring load of toss from Big Alan Cockson, Finance Director, about sales and figures and profits and all the stuff I’ve never fully understood, it was my turn to present the thrust of the new financial year’s marketing activity. And I presented its cock, balls, tits and ass off.

‘This year’s marketing plan revolves around  three groundbreaking marketing tools: gladvertising, dadvertising and padvertising.”

“What the fuck are they?” replied Big Andy Poleman, our MD, along with everyone else in the room.

“Gladvertising. Using a unique online monitoring tool, we’ll hijack any positive piece of social media activity and hijack it with the message ‘You think you’re happy now? What if you had the new Cleanasmic Washman Pro 1600?’ This will literally revolutionise everything, ever. In fact, it will revolutionise revolutions.”

Silence in the room. Bang.

“Next, dadvertising. We know our target audience is mums, right? And what are mums always looking at? That’s right. Dads. We’ll recruit fathers aged 25-45…no, sorry, 25-44…to wear commercial messages on their ties, t-shirts, foreheads, whatever, saying things like, ‘Darling. Isn’t it time we got a Cleanassimo Spinchief 1200?’ Again, this will revolutionise everything. This has never been done, ever. Nobody has every attempted it.”

Silencier silence in the room. Double bang.

“Finally, padvertising. Pads are everywhere. Everyone uses pads. People. Adults. Children. Even fucking old people, if you can bear to think about them. And pads are also where people live. Those are pads. Then there are lily pads. And ladies use pads when they’ve got the painters in. Basically, the world is bursting with pads. So why don’t we advertise on them?”

Echoing, chilling silence in the room. Triple bang – what I call a bangtrick.

“Can I ask you a question?” grunted Big Brian Humpage, our Sales Director.

“Sure!” I said.

“Did you come up with all those because they rhyme with ‘advertising’?”

“Of course! You’ve got to have a theme to your presentation.”

“Right. In that case, I’d say we can call everything you showed us ‘sadvertising’.”

The room erupted in laughter.

Wow. I was quite taken aback.

Imagine. An entire room full of your bosses, peers and professional contemporaries – all howling with laughter at you. Openly, uncontrollably.

I don’t now how Brian is going to get over it, myself. He must have felt really stupid for failing to see the potential of gladvertising, dadvertising or padvertising – and everyone in that room saw it straight away. I mean, they were mainly looking at me and pointing while they laughed so hard they started coughing or, in Big Alan Cockson’s case, had another fucking stroke, but they were clearly just waiting for me to join in. It was my presentation after all.

So I did. I just stood there laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing! And laughing. And laughing and laughing and laughing AND LAUGHING! Laughing until the tears ran down my face in great, cleansing rivers. I laughed until I thought I might die!

(I need to make clear now that my tears did not fall into my hands with splashes that seemed to echo with the sound of my mother’s voice, screaming at me only half in control of herself, standing over me with a broom, hurling the words ‘You’re useless! You’re a little fuck-up!’ at me like sharp stones.)

I haven’t heard anything in terms of confirming budgets for my proposals yet, but with a reaction like that, it can only be a matter of time.

That’s the thing about this game, my friends. Big risks get big reactions.

I am Dave Knockles! And I am still laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing!

Oh, do fuck off

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I’ve been a very busy boy lately. I’m working on a project that I can’t tell you about.

Oh, go on then, if you’re going to twist my fucking arm.

I’m writing a book. I don’t have a publisher, or a firm idea of what it’ll be about, or much of a clue about how you actually write a book, or the time to write one, or the inclination, particularly. But I’m going to write a book. It’ll be about me. Or somebody else. Or a boat, maybe.

Anyway, I saw a website today that made me want to punch myself in the balls for working in marketing. Sometimes, an ad or a campaign or a 360 ideacentric communications vehicle comes along that makes me wish I’d been a farmer, or a dog walker, or a fucking cowpoke, or whatever.

But I was gripped by an urge to set fire to my face when I happened upon this pompous wankival over at Mercedes.

This is a marketing idea that even the public doesn’t buy anymore, surely. ‘Hey, look! We’ve gathered a group of experts together and they’re telling us that our product is amaaazing! Look! There they are, SAYING IT! That’s not us saying it! NO WAY! It’s them, in their own words! Look! It’s on a film! They’re totally unbiased – they just think our product is fucking brilliant, they virtually forced us to film them talking about it!’

When I say ‘this is a marketing idea that even the public doesn’t buy anymore’, I fully intend to insult the vast, turgid vom-slick that is Mr and Mrs Everyone. These are people who will happily buy exercise videos, for fuck’s sake. And watch X-Factor. And not even X-Factor, but AMERICAN X-Factor. The public is a huge army of nano-brained fucknuts, most of whom produce nothing more useful in their entire lives than the soupy shit they squirt out after another fucking microwaved Weightwatchers Gillian McKeith Nazi pasta.

And even those dipshits can see through this balljuice.

That aside (although putting that aside is like putting genocide or genital torture or psychotic episodes aside), I direct you to the doris with the wonky bristolas. Now, fair enough, they’ve put the talent on first, which is a shrewd move. But couldn’t they have found someone who has on their CV ‘Can pretend to look interested about subjects that don’t interest me in the slightest’? This bird looks for all the world like she’s being shown a tub of own-brand margarine for the 8,000th time.

Next move onto the irony-vacuum that is ‘Peyrou’. My dear old mother always told me to be wary of people who give themselves one name. I mean, I think this was down to the slightly dubious character she took up with shortly after my father left, who called himself, simply, Freedom. Turns out the freedom he enjoyed in life was down to the savings accounts of vulnerable women. But there you go.  Anyway, just watch Peyrou’s video. Then leave me a comment describing him in ten words. You won’t be able to do it.

Then you get a model agent, an architect and a bloke who makes chairs, all telling us that they find this new Merc execmobile so unbelievably stalk-inducing that the only conclusion left for people of a sound mind is that this car is, objectively and officially, worth fucking up the exhaust pipe. Of course, it’s all so smug and shitheaded that you’ll end up self-harming.

But wait until you get to the video to the bottom right, titled ‘Karolina Kurkova meets Craig McDean’. This will change your life. In a terribly, horribly, irreversibly scarring kind of way.

Over footage of a model being photographed next to a car, the VO tells us that the aim of the exercise is to capture ‘a design masterpiece, plus the most beautiful woman IN THE SAME PHOTO’. What? WHHHAAATT? A frigging car and a model, IN THE SAME SHOT?

Shit. The. Bed.

That, my friends, is ambition. And the truly amazing thing? THEY FUCKING DO IT. No – seriously, they do. This photographic genius somehow – and I really have no clue how – manages to get a car and a woman within a single photographic frame. Can you even imagine?

But that’s not all.

Craig says he doesn’t just want to make advertising. He wants to make a fashion image. For him, it’s about ‘collaborating the woman with the car’. Whatever that means. Anyway, whatever, he fucking nails it. The girl absolutely collaborates with the car. By standing next to it, mainly.

Check it out. It’s remarkable. In the same way that if you ran as fast as you possibly could into a wall made of nails, hand grenades, nettles, cheese graters, shit and angry dogs, it would be remarkable.

I am Dave Knockles! And I want to collaborate with Karolina Kurkova!

Hands-on management

Sometimes, management is about taking a hands-on approach. Below is what I recently said to someone working for me who, in my opinion, hadn’t performed the designated task to a satsifactory level. This might help demonstrate for you the essence of a good hands-on, decisive management approach.

Oi! OI!

You! YES – YOU!

What the fuck are you doing? No – don’t look all innocent. What the FUCK are you fucking doing? You dipshit! If we weren’t in a public place, I’d fist you a new plophole!

Why? I’ll fucking tell you, pal. What’s this?

What do you fucking mean, ‘What?’

THIS! THIS CUNTING THING HERE, YOU COCKPILE!

It’s fucking WHAT? Speak up, Mary Ellen! And stop fiddling with your fucking tie, you dickbag.

Right. Now. Tell me what this fucking thing is. I’ll give you  clue what it is. I’M FUCKING POINTING AT IT.

Pardon?

Good. Thank you.

Now. Is it right?

What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ It’s a simple cunting question, you bucket of spunk! IS. IT. RIGHT?

BRA-FUCKING-VO! CORRECT! IT’S NOT RIGHT! IT’S NOT FUCKING RIGHT IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER!

Is your mother proud of you? Is she proud of what you do? Would she be proud of you right now, while you stand there sniffing and…OH SHIT, ARE YOU CRYING? ARE YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING CRYING, YOU CUNTPOT?  YOU SHITWICK! HA HA HA HA HA!

Oooh, do shut up, you fucking puddle of piss, you. Stop blubbing, pick your fucking balls off the floor, grow a fucking spine and listen: THIS IS A LOAD OF SHIT. You know it’s a load of shit. I know it’s a load of shit. So stop the little boy act and do it again, only about four billion times better.

What? What do you mean, ‘I’m only nine’? I don’t fucking care if you are only nine, sunshine. If you go about knocking on doors offering your services as a washer of cars for the scouts and some cancer charity or whatever, DO IT FUCKING PROPERLY AND DON’T TRY TO SCAM ME BY MISSING THE ALLOYS! Now get on with it, you little prick. And I’m not paying, by the way. You have foregone your right to payment by being completely shitballs. Just do it and fuck off, or I’ll lock you in the garage until you’re 25 and make you eat rat shit.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Dave’, you’re thinking. ‘Why go so easy on the kid?’ Well, this is a more restrained and equitable DK you know these days. There was a time when I would have, if I’m honest, been quite insulting.

Still, I hope today’s post helps you approach the thorny issue of staff motivation / discipline with an extra methodology arrow in your management quiver.

I am Dave Knockles! And you will not miss my alloys!

Ad of the week, no 3

Ad of the week this week is this one from Volkswagen.

The premise of the ad (and I imagine the pitch to the client) goes:

You know, right, you know when you’re, like walking down the road, and like, somebody is coming towards you, like, right towards you, like, on the same pavement and everything, yeah? Well, like imagine that, right, only there’s a guy, like reading a paper, and a woman is walking towards him, and they, like, do that awkward ‘Gaah! You move, no YOU move!’ thing, and they come right up close and he thinks she just can’t get out of the way and it’s, like, oh my god so awkward BUT SHE’S LOOKING AT THE POLO AD ON HIS PAPER BECAUSE THERE’S SOME OFFER OR OTHER OR WHATEVER ON THERE AND IT’S REALLY, LIKE, BRILLIANT AND SHE IS LITERALLY TRANSFIXED BY IT!

It continues a long line of VW ads featuring a price that distracts punters.

Like this one.

The difference between the two is, to my mind, clear. You might think the second is the better ad because it’s a lot funnier, is a better idea, is executed infinitely better and has a wonderful implied ending that allows the imagination to work.

You’d be wrong. You’d be wronger than conjoined twins performing a simultaneous Gary Glitter / Michael Jackson tribute act. The first ad is infinitely better. Why? Well, to the untrained eye, the ending is just the ending. But I can guarantee you that the shot of the car driving down the road next to the woman (that’s it – the shot that looks like it’s been crowbarred in by a burglar with no hands) was added at the request of the client who said something like, ‘Where’s my car? I want my car. It’s a car ad. Hold on! I’m having an idea! Why doesn’t the car just drive past at the end? Brilliant, eh? I told you I was a bit creative, didn’t I?’

At which point, the account man laughed long and hard and agreed to do exactly what the client had asked, while the creatives turned slowly to face the wall, hopeless even beyond tears, knowing that their time had past and that they were the mere carriers of other men’s shit-slopped bedpans.

And a fucking good job too! If they’d just ended after the ad had made its point, they’d have had something like the award-winning second ad. And everybody knows ads that win awards don’t work. And if they do work, they make the agency look better than the client, and what kind of felch-pipe wants that? A felch-pipe heading for the dole queue, that’s who!

So, in summary, bravo to the client for rescuing what would have been an otherwise disastrously subtle ad. PHEW!

I am Dave Knockles! And I want my car!

CultureSmash 2011

My friends, for the last few / several / however many days, I have been buried deep in a bunker of thought, introspection and professional advancement at a marketing conference focusing on the question of the consumer’s self-image and its effect on rationalised sales data. As you can imagine, my head feels like it’s been fucked by a horse.

Over the course of this conference, several significant thoughts have occurred unto me. First, I have no fucking clue what the consumer’s self-image has to do with rationalised sales data. Not one. Not even a small slice of half of a clue. Second, I have no fucking clue what rationalised sales data is. Third, I should NEVER agree to attend a conference without first checking whether there will be booze there. A conference in a ‘dry county’, as the Yanks call them, is a fundamentally stupid idea. In fact, it’s FUCKING stupid. I’d go as far as to say it’s more stupid than Robbie Williams.

The most striking thought to…er…strike me, however, was this: as a communications expert, marketing thought-leader and advertising inspirationalist, I thought it was about time I stopped going to other people’s conferences and staged my own. I’m in the early planning stages, but I’ve settled on the name CultureSmash. (I originally went for CultureFuck, but my mother (who’s nearly target audience) said it would offend God.)

What I want CultureSmash to be is a completely 360 imaginarium that brings together experts from the worlds of advertising and communications, social media and branding, and puts them in a cross conversational environment with members of a range of other everyday professions – doctors, teachers, postmen, strippers, nurses, sexworkers, massage professionals, eroticians and so on. You know – just a cross-section of the public.

What a conference room at CultureSmash might look like if this was the type of room I actually booked.

What I also want CultureSmash to be is the conference that end-games the sectorised reliance on silo-specific jargon. I want it to establish a commercial and social truth in and pertaining to the methodologies, strategies and conventionalised behaviour-patterns surrounding the societal deployment of online social tools.

I can’t make it any clearer than that, really. I think.

A smaller conference room of the sort that may or may not be available at CultureSmash. Imagine if it was available, though, eh? Imagine if it was!

Here’s a tentative agenda for the day, based on my experience of conferences, and my firm beliefs about how they should be organised.

Friday (date TBC), 12.30pm

Meet and greet at Dog & Hog, or Radish Bar, or Dog Bar, or God Bar (depends one which I haven’t been ‘de-customered’ from on the day).

An informal session that will give delegates the chance to get to know one another in an informal setting. Drinks available at delegates’ own expense.

Friday, 7.30pm

Keynote Speech

With the informal meet and greet out of the way, delegates are welcomed to the main venue where Dave Knockles will deliver the Key Note Speech: Emulsifying The Now. Disseminating The Future. (I came up with that in the bath. Once I work out what the fuck it mean, I’m pretty sure it’ll be amazing.)

Friday, 7.40pm

Networking at Delilaz Executive Dance Bar

Keynote Speech over, it’s time to let our hair down. Delilaz, my preferred erotic lady bar, has agreed to lay on some fish paste sandwiches and a selection of executive vol-oh-vonts. (And if I know Delilaz, those crazy, naughty, over-enthusiastic, borderline law-abiding girls will be dishing out handjobs for 45 notes a go! They are incorrigible!)

This is your chance to really cut loose before the Army-standard schedule I’ll be enforcing tomorrow.)

Saturday, 3.30pm

Breakfast

No fucking about. NONE. If you had a lager shandy too many last night, tough shit. I will personally be rousing delegates with a visit to your hotel room. You think I’m joking? I’m not! I’ll probably be in one of your hotel rooms come morning anyway! HA HA! (Seriously, though, I won’t be booking myself a room so I am expecting a bunk-up.) We really need to be up and about by 3.30pm. Well, okay, let’s be reasonable, 5pm. Or…let’s think about this…everyone will need a shower and shit and a bit of a rest, then a cup of tea…okay – let’s say breakfast is at 7pm on Saturday, but NO LATER. Unless you’re late.

Saturday, evening-ish

Seminars and shit

I mean, what does ‘evening’ mean? Could be 6pm for some people! Could be 11pm for others. Let’s just stay in touch. Text me, I’ll pick it up. Anyway, I’ll have all these rooms booked, so let’s use them. I’ll do a seminar on, like, ads and shit, and you lot can fill in the rest, right? Just sort it out amongst yourselves and…you know…have fun! Just make sure that by the end of it, we’ve got an answer to all the major media, digital and advertising problems of the age. Yes? Agreed? Good.

Saturday, later…like…whenever

Networking

You really have no idea how important networking is. So let’s fucking network our tits off.

Sunday, all day

Sunday will be devoted to calm reflection, analysis of the issues facing us as a society and some other stuff I will fill in soon. Above all, it’s about calm reflection. For fuck’s sake. Calm. No noise. Just sit there and shut the fuck up.

I think that works, right? Let me know if you fancy it and I’ll put it on a long list of things I need to get round to.

I am Dave Knockles! And I am the king of the conference!

How to own a meeting

I know you lot. You are professional, talented, motivised, enthusergetic and driven to achieve your short, medium and long-term career ambition goal targets. Of course you are. That’s why you’re reading this blog.

So let me give you a little bit of advice on how to get to the top faster. (Not as fast as me, obviously. It took me just 17 years to go from marketing manager to marketing director. This is unprecedented in the world of marketing and has never been repeated.)

I want to help you do the one thing that will make you stand out against the herd of moronic dickpipes you work with. I want to help you own every mothershitting meeting you attend.

Is this toolbag really owning this meeting? No. One of those other dickpoles should seize the moment and shout something like 'PROFITABILITY!' or get their tits out.

But what does ‘owning a meeting’ mean? Simple. It means that no matter what people went into that meeting room to discuss, they leave talking about you. YOU!

So, what’s the first thing you need to do when you want to own a meeting? You need to prepare, right? You need to research the subject of the meeting and be as informed as you can be when you go in, right?

WRONG!

Planning to own a meeting just means you’ll look like a fucking know-it-all spunk flannel who’s got an answer for everything, never looks flustered and seems to have a finger on the pulse of everything affecting the business. And who wants to look like that? YAWN! No. Owning a meeting Knockles-style means being spontaneous, thinking on your feet and – ideally – having a few cheeky pots of booze-flavoured liquid at lunch. (This will help you stay loose and improve confidence. Remember – they say the English are always two drinks behind the rest of the world in terms of confidence. So if you have four drinks, you’ll technically only have had two drinks, if you apply international standards, which you should.)

So, you’re in the meeting room, people are filing in, things are about to get going. What do you do? You look for a dominant position.

This means at the head of the table, to the right of the chairperson, or, best of all, standing imposingly behind them, just a little too close for their comfort. (I always measure it like this: if you got an erection mid-meeting (which can happen) then if it poked them gently in the ear, you’re the right distance away.) I always find that lurking menacingly behind someone while they’re trying to do something constructive with a room full of people will always undermine them.

Why do you want to undermine them? Well, that’s the first tip! Try to undermine absolutely everything the chairperson is saying, always. If you’re standing right behind them, you can do this simply with sarcastic facial expressions or obscene hand gestures, but any method is fine. If you’re sitting with everyone else, you can interrupt, chortle, wear an almost-disgusted look of confusion that lets everyone know you’re thinking ‘What? What the fuck are you talking about, you incompetent cuntslice?’ This makes you the king / queen / transgender monarch of the meeting. Never mind the dickbottle who’s trying to run the meeting and achieve something for the company and blah blah blah. His inability to own the meeting is his problem, not yours. You’re just doing the Dave Knockles Do, right the way to the top of the tree!

She's lurking right behind the guy trying to run the meeting, where she's free to make faces, shake her head at everything he says and mouth the word 'Wanker' constantly. She's owning the meeting!

How about owning a meeting when someone tries to own it off you? What if some fucker is trying to own your meeting? Well, it’s time to go nuclear. The very nano-second you think your authority is being challenged, do one of these three things: 1) smash your fist on the table and shout ‘FOCUS!’, 2) stand up very suddenly and hiss the word ‘Waaaiiit!’ while looking to the ceiling as though receiving divine inspiration, 3) start quietly repeating the word ‘agenda’ again and again and again while poking the printed agenda in front of you, making a kind of semi-audible wall of sound that will, if you keep going, make everybody stop talking and look at you, at which point you can say, ‘Can we get back to the agenda?’ (It doesn’t matter if you were on the agenda, incidentally. People are usually so amazed at how cool your are they just stare and, occasionally, get up and leave.)

Everyone is looking at you! Congratulations! Consider this meeting owned! By you. Not that dirty old boiler at the Nobo. Everyone knows she let Phil in sales bend one through her fudgehole in the disabled bogs on seven.

What about meetings where you’re the lowest member of the food chain? This only happens to me these days when I’m in a meeting with my MD, Big Andy Poleman, but you, being corporate plankton, probably struggle with this a lot. My advice is to avoid the obvious. Don’t do a load of research and try to sound clever or useful or like you’ve got potential. They’ll just nick what you said, claim it as their own and you’ll still be floating about at the bottom of the cesspool in five years. You need to get on their wavelength – which probably means golf, birds, beerz and, if the mood of the meeting is jocular, stories about the time you shat yourself.

By way of example, let me tell you what I said as a marketing manager at my first board meeting back in 1988. The CEO had just told us the sales figures and asked for ways we could improve them. I’d had 8 drinks (by international standards) so was very keen. So I said,

‘Never mind improving the sales figures – how about improving your swing? From what I hear, you’re so short off the tee, you might as well use a cunting snooker cue! It’s probably that fucking bird of yours, isn’t it? She’d sap anyone’s strength – I bet you bang her till she snaps, don’t you? Jesus! The fucking tits on it! I bet your wife would take one look and say, ‘Fuck me – fair enough. Carry on!’ The boys reckon you putt like a parkinson’s sufferer too! But that’s because you drink like a fucking fish, innit? I opened your desk drawer and it was like a fucking branch of Threshers in there! There was more booze than I drank when I shat myself all over the barman, barmaid, manager, waitress, customers and passers-by at the Dog & Hog! Aaaanyway, I think we could look at some short-term promotions to give the numbers a boost.’

And just 16 years later, I was Marketing Director. (It might have been sooner. Turns out that after the meeting my CEO’s wife left him, he was ejected from his golf club and shunned by his colleagues, his heavy drinking descended into full-blown alcoholism and he lived the remaining five years of his life under a canal bridge in a turnip field in Kent. Oopsie!)

Those are just a few ways to own a meeting. But however you do it, own it you must! Otherwise, you’ll just be another stupid prick trying to get ahead by being good at your job.

I am Dave Knockles! And I own your meeting!

The big idea

I know what you're thinking. 'Ha! A light bulb? What a cliche!' But how can it be a cliche when I'm using it? It can't! Why? Because I'm one step ahead of all you fuckers - and I say light bulbs are back. So go bang yourself. With a brick.

Advertising agencies – yeah, those fuckers – seem to have this thing about ‘big ideas’. They’re all about the big idea. Big ideas, they tell me over the course of 224 agonising slides, are the future. If you’ve got an idea that isn’t big, well, take it out into the car park, beat it without mercy or a moment’s guilt about the face and neck, then wrap it’s head in cling film and chuck it down a fucking well. Small ideas? Small ideas deserve to be treated with genocidal contempt.

Which is all well and good, but then you see what they actually mean by ‘a big idea’.

The ‘big’ bit of a ‘big idea’ doesn’t actually mean that the idea itself is big. Like E=MC2 is big. Or ‘I think therefore I am’ is big. Or Pot Noodles is big (massive, actually). No, no – that’s no what they mean.

What they mean is the idea they’ve had is so bland they can make it fit into any size of ad, on the telly, in radio, online and as an annoying piece of bin-fodder that falls out of the magazine you’d taken into the bogs to have a nice jostle over.

(Actually – funny story. I once nipped to the executive washroom for a quick fumble over the latest copy of whatever lads mag was winning the porn race at that stage. I dropped the trousers and moved the undercrackers to mid-calf, parked myself on the lav and tore open the litte plastic sac the mag came in. Obviously, there was a snowstorm of junk, vouchers and BOGOF pamphlets – and one of the items (I can’t be sure which) caught me with it’s sharply-folded corner right on the bell-portion. Well, you know how nasty paper cuts can be. This was a doozy! Blood everywhere. I probably shouldn’t have gone ahead with the wank, really. But I did. And the cubicle looked like a slaughterhouse at the end of it. (Well, a slaughterhouse someone had been wanking in.) Told you it was a funny story!)

Where was I?

Yes – the ‘big idea’. I was once taken through a presentation of…oooh….over 4,000 slides that lead to what they described as ‘a genuinely BIG idea’. When we got there, I was shown a little cartoon dog (called ‘Squoochie’ – still don’t know why) and then several dozen pieces of differently-sized creative with the dog in various whimsical poses saying things like ‘Squoochie loves clean’ and ‘Squoochie needs soft’ and ‘Squoochie wants gentle’.

Squoochie, obviously, would have his own Facebook page and Twitter feed and every  woman in the Western world would sign up to interact with my brand through a series of heartwarming conversations.

Another time, I was shown a big idea that consisted of the words ‘You are dirty’ rendered in ‘knowingly naive typography’, then placed on literally every type of media ever devised. They even showed it to me plastered on a baby. A BABY. Bambinovertising, they called it. ‘We just want to show you how big this idea is,’ they said. (Actually, bambinovertising is brilliant. I tried using it for a Durex campaign once. The babies would have the words ‘Or you could have had a new car’ stencilled on them, just above the Durex logo – right on their foreheads. Did anyone offer their babies for it? No. I just do NOT understand people sometimes.)

Anyway, let me tell you what the biggest idea in advertising is: bristolas. Nobody has ever come up with a more flexible, more powerful or more broadly appealing idea than the female nork. And that’s the end of the story. If you think I’m wrong, you can take your big idea and wham it sidewards up your fudge-tube until it pokes out of your ears.

I am Dave Knockles! And I’M a fucking big idea!