The Chronicle 2022

ADDRESS BY THE GUEST OF HONOUR, MR ANDREW ROBERTSON

R

ector, thank you for the invitation to be here today. It has given me the excuse I needed to come back to a school I love but have only visited once since I left after sixth

And that’s how I fell into advertising. Forty years ago. I have been working in and around “the media” ever since. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. That and why the school rule is one of the most meaningful and brilliant pieces of copywriting ever, and to begin a campaign for its reintroduction. I have been quoted in The Financial Mail only once in those forty years. Even the mighty Google can’t find it for me, but I remember it well. In April 1996, I did a speech in Johannesburg about the way the media world was changing and what it meant for advertising. I argued that what we were dealing with was not the “knowledge economy” or a “technology economy” which were the terms in vogue at the time; since both knowledge and technology were abundant and expanding exponentially and Economics, as I had been taught, was the science of managing scarce resources. Instead, I proclaimed we were dealing with the attention economy. It was, I maintained, attention that was in ever shorter supply. Little did I know then just how extreme that would become. And I have been quoted on the front page of The Financial Times once. It was in 2004, when it was an actual newspaper made from ink smeared on dead trees – and pink at that. I had declared at a conference, whilst waving my Motorola Razr phone in my hand that “one day this will be more important for advertising than television,” which unsurprisingly caught the attention of the Financial Times journalist in the room since at that time, there was no iPhone, there were no apps, and Mark Zuckerberg was fresh out of his dorm room and rolling out Facebook to students. I would like to take credit for extraordinary prescience. The fact is, I did say it. But in truth, Motorola was a client at the time, and I was just sucking up to the CMO who was in the room. I’d like to put pins in the words “truth” and “fact” that I just used. I’ll come back to them. In the middle of the last century, Marshal McLuhan wrote that oft quoted line, “The medium is the message.” He was talking about television and how the characteristics of the medium and the way it is consumed were changing the messaging itself. If you go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, when the predominant form was rhetoric, messaging was designed to work as the spoken word, to sound compelling and persuasive. With the arrival of the printing press, we moved to a world in which the most powerful messaging was well reasoned and logical. Television was, and is a medium which delivers entertainment, and thus the messaging was designed to be just that… entertaining. Including, we should all note, that which should perhaps not be treated as such: the news, especially cable news. As a result, in the world of politics, we went from “I am impressed by what you have to say,” to, “I understand and agree But I was right. It has.

form in December 1978.

When I left that December, I was pretty sure I would collect the four A-levels I had worked for in Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Physics, and Chemistry, and that I would secure the place I wanted at Imperial College in London where I would study Civil Engineering. I did, but I never made it to Imperial College, let alone becoming a Civil Engineer. I was determined to be the best Civil Engineer possible and got a job as a trainee to fill the time between finishing school and starting at Imperial that October. After four weeks I realized I had no idea what the job really involved and hated it. I told my dad, who was great. He said “better now than after four years at university. Why don’t you just start something that you might find interesting?” I enrolled in what was then called the City of London Polytechnic. It was subsequently rebranded as the much more glamorous City of London University and studied Economics. While I was there, I worked as a bartender at The Maidenhead Conservative Club. One of the customers was an insurance broker and said he’d give me two days training, that I could use the phone at his office (important because you had to pay for the phone in those days) and I could then sell insurance and earn commission. So, I did. On Monday nights I made 100 cold calls. If I made 100 calls, I got ten appointments. If I got ten appointments, I made three sales and earned 500 pounds. A lot of money at the time. So, I was living my best life. I would do my appointments in the evening, finish at about 9:30pm, go to a nightclub from 10 ‘til 2am, then, two or three nights a week, to the Royal Berkshire Hotel to play backgammon until 4 or 5. Go home. Sleep until 11. Catch a train into college. Attend my lectures for three hours. Get the train back to Maidenhead. It went swimmingly until my final semester when my dad said to me, “You know this can’t go on. We’re happy to support you while you’re doing your degree but the day you graduate you get your own place or start paying us rent and get your own car or start paying your mom for using hers.” My wonderful life was going to collapse around me. Later that night I was feeling very sorry for myself, leaning against the bar at said nightclub as the lights came on and they started putting the chairs up on the table. There was a guy standing next to me who I didn’t know much about. But I did know that he seemed to be in the nightclub as often I was. And he had an Alfa Romeo. I said to him “what do you do for a living?” “I work for an advertising agency” he said. I said, “I think I’m going to do that then.” Rinse and repeat!

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