The centenary blog. What we’ve learned so far. Part 3.

If you’ve been in advertising for any amount of time, or indeed have written or produced anything creative whatsoever the ‘rule of three’ will not be new to you.

The three wise monkeys, three musketeers, three wise men, three little maids from school, an Englishman an Irishman and a Scotsman walk in to a bar. Vorsprung durch technik. Just do it. etc all rely on the rule of three.

The number has a cadence about it that suits the set up for a joke or the structure of a play or film but is curiously, also the smallest number you can create a pattern with – if you are into useless facts. And so dear reader, I am compelled to only write three centenary blog reviews. Two seems too few, four is too many and much like the Holy hand grenade of Antioch, ‘five is right out’.

I don’t make the rules.

So I thought I’d point this final review of my 100 blogs in the direction of what got me started and all opinionated, sassy and above my station in the first place.

Namely, this wondrous sector I call Pharmaland, but most people call Healthcare or even sometimes if we’re feeling particularly virtuous, ‘Health and Wellness’.

I guess I must have been in a reflective mood when I wrote ‘Is Pharmaland a one way ticket?‘. Maybe a few years under the belt trying to find new ways to depict angiogenesis or talk about a low target level HbA1c had made me wistful for a straight-forward global car launch TV brief.

The question had been sparked by a prospective hire enquiring about what a career in Pharma was like and worrying it would forever taint him if he tried to go back to consumer. It’s not that it will taint you, it’s that we are invisible to our consumer cousins and so almost irrelevant. They are muggles to our wizardry and choose to only see what they see. It’s an observation I wrote about in ‘Pharma’s invisibility cloak‘ after Campaign magazine failed to even mention Havas’s network of the year win at Cannes in an article about the UK’s dominance that summer.

When first tinkering with this sector you worry that you are playing lower league football, rather like (if you’ll forgive the rather pompous analogy) George Best, David Beckham or Lionel Messi going to the USA to play ‘soccer’. Then I started to try and remember a single consumer campaign I’d seen that had been memorable in recent years and began to struggle.

Then I looked at the kind of work agencies like Area 23, Havas lynx, McCann Health, Klick and FCB or Langland, VCCP Health, 23 Grams (and obviously the legendary CDM London!) were doing and I felt reassured.

So here’s a thought: Maybe, like the Paralympic Games, Healthcare is actually made up of super-human creatives? We essentially do the one-legged long jump every day.

It’s an idea I touched on in ‘Why Pharma creativity adapted to the sea floor‘.

Remember that spate of corporate bullshit during the first few weeks of the pandemic? Ads that suddenly vomited on to our TV screens as soon as the streets became empty and we all started working from home?

Every ad spoke about ‘in this difficult time’ or ‘now more than ever’…remember? Some clever person sewed them together and the result was quite depressing.

This is what I wrote at the time:

“And what struck me first about this edit was not just how cookie-cutter all the messages and imagery were. That’s a given.

It’s that, faced with the same brief, the most top-knotted, pig tailed, bearded and tattooed consumer agencies collective creativity couldn’t muster a single original film between them.

Now, granted, you can see why:

Limited funds, no time, a conservative client and a deadly disease.

This is no time for creativity!

Wait, that brief sounds rather familiar to me.

Where have I heard that before….?

Oh yeah, only every fucking Pharma brief ever.“

I rest my case.

lastly, if you thought I’d gone completely doolally and overly besotted with this sometime infuriating sector I’ll leave you with a more recent one.

‘The eleven brief’s of Pharma‘ returns to where we started this review blog – with the acknowledgement that there are rules for everything.

“Scott Dikkers, a founding editor of The Onion claims that every joke can be categorised in one of 11 funny filters.

For instance; irony, character, reference, shock, parody..etc (read the full article here)“

So, I thought why not try to write something along the same lines for us Pharma-types? I missed out a few probably (American DTC being just one) but it’s a pretty good guide if you are planning to buy that ‘one way ticket’.

It’s a ride that sometimes is purchased after a change in direction, career-wise.

So it was ironic somewhat that only last year I wrote ‘The redundant blog‘ for reasons obvious to those who are keen followers of my LinkedIn page.

Unfortunately redundancies are no less common in Pharma advertising than Consumer and can happen to any of us, so that at least will always bind us together- we have all signed up to be victims of the same practical joke. The reasons are usually based on the same three principles of money saving, re-structuring or mergers. Sometimes all three.

Shit happens. Move on.

But what I also still believe is this:

‘I have been made redundant three times in my life and all three times occasions led me on to more interesting and better opportunities.’

Fingers crossed that’s still true.