Write What You Know: Lessons in Monkey Business
Just when you thought you’d flushed him away, Snap London’s Liam Wilson returns with an extremely long essay that nobody asked for. He is the Liz Truss of advertising. Although to his knowledge, he has never sunk a nation’s economy one month into a new job. In his ‘Write What You Know’ column, he sets himself the task of out-bullshitting the bullshitters of thought leadership. His words offer no real insight and cannot make you better at your job, but they can steal approximately seven minutes of your time. Time that you should be using to complete your timesheets. Tut, tut.
In my never-ending quest for column content, I have pilfered sacred Balinese holiday memories shared with my ex-girlfriend, now current wife, and applied them as tenuous advertising analogies. These are nine lessons I have learned.
Lesson 1: Beware of spineless pricks
I was, at least for a period of time, the only recorded case of a sea urchin injury at the Royal London Hospital.
I had lost all feeling down the side of my left hand and little finger. A problem that persisted two weeks after returning home from holiday in Bali. So I decided to rock up to hospital and get it checked out.
Nobody in the hospital knew what to do with me.
They’d never encountered anything like it.
Incidentally, the same reaction my mum received when I was born.
They didn’t know whether to send me to tropical diseases or to a hand surgeon.
I sat in front of a junior doctor who googled what to do right in front of me.
Funnily enough, she arrived at the same answer as me - which was to visit a hospital and see a doctor.
She then sent me on to someone more senior.
He had his own office and a fancy title.
Yet he was also clueless, having to refer to a massive medical encyclopaedia.
The encyclopaedia told him to google it or ring a surgeon.
He rang the surgeon, but they were too busy in theatre.
Honestly, no wonder the NHS is on its knees when its doctors are down the West End watching Hamilton.
The surgeon said they could open my hand up and take a look inside, but there was a risk of nipping a nerve and paralysing my hand.
I toyed with this option as it would be a handy excuse for whenever clients see my god-awful scamps.
In the end, I just gave up and went home.
And after a couple more weeks, sensation returned to my hand.
I feel like this is a very appropriate metaphor for what I like to call a ‘bastard brief’.
About once a year in adland, a bastard brief lands at your desk.
They’re time-consuming, painful, and nobody really knows the answer.
A brief that shouldn’t really exist yet inexplicably does, having been made for any number of reasons, but most likely down to agency/client politics.
These briefs tend to cause the most anxiety as they seem to have been made purely to hurt you for no apparent reason. The bastard brief is a sea urchin.
It lurks around the department floor from juniors to seniors and nobody can crack it.
You work on it, hoping that somebody else will nail it soon so it can be banished from your life.
And then one evening you go home from work only to arrive the next day to find the brief has died a death. The clients have changed their mind about that one.
Turns out you cancelling Wednesday’s theatre date wasn’t necessary.
Neither were the hours of reading and research you did, nose deep in an encyclopaedia.
But hey, at least you didn’t cut your hand off!
The humble sea urchin. Creatures with no backbone! Bottom feeders! Full of pricks!
The perfect advertising metaphor!
I had been snorkeling when I received that injury.
I was walking back through the shallows to the shore when a big wave crashed into my arse and sent me tumbling forwards. My hand lurchin’ for an urchin.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a wee fella. It was just a smidge smaller than a World War Two naval mine, (according to the notes I gave the Royal London Hospital).
The spines were about nine inches long (according to the measurement system I encourage my wife to adhere to).
And there were about twenty of them sticking out of the palm of my hand.
As I flapped around in the water looking down at my hand which now looked like it had just performed a prostate exam on a hedgehog, I was rescued by a group of local surfers.
I was quietly pleased with their horrified reaction as it meant I wasn’t being a complete wimp.
They all showed me their sea urchin injuries they’d acquired from surfing.
They said the nearest doctor was on the other side of the island and it would be very expensive.
They told me the best course of action was to hammer my hand with a rock so that the blood would make the spines rise to the surface so that I could pick them out with tweezers.
I liked this approach.
Rather than endless meetings talking about the meeting about the meeting for the meeting where we’d discuss how to go about it, we’d just hammer it out with a small group of people experienced in that field.
I didn’t ask six doctors to pitch their ideas for free over the course of two months.
I went with the friendly guys I liked who knew what they were talking about.
The perfect advertising metaphor!
Lesson 2: Don’t pretend you know everything
The first day we touched down in Bali, we headed across the island to the place we were staying. We had a shower to freshen up after the flight and made plans for dinner.
Our very friendly host showed us around her beautiful place.
She was very keen to let us know we could make use of her moped during our stay.
In fact, she was bordering on insistent.
Rather than admit I had never ridden a motorbike before except for playing Isle of Man TT in an arcade at Knutsford Services, I agreed to driving the scooter to dinner.
Turns out the technique needed to blast down the pixelated chicanes on a Sega arcade game doesn’t get you far on a moped in Indonesia. I ended up with a front wheel in her Koi carp water feature and a girlfriend questioning her life choices. The owner immediately took the keys off me and suggested we take a taxi to dinner.
Being too egotistical to admit you don’t know something?
The perfect advertising metaphor!
Lesson 3: Make friends and do favours (and check your budget)
I was so embarrassed I didn’t hang around to book a cab.
We just started walking to dinner, too ashamed to turn around and see the woman shaking her head and revving her moped disapprovingly.
Google Maps said it was a 25-minute walk.
But it conveniently left out the bit where the walk quickly runs out of pavement, there’s no street lighting, and lorries don’t slow down for bends or pedestrians.
After ten minutes, it became apparent it was not safe.
And the howling noises from the jungle weren’t helping as I didn’t fancy getting mugged by a marauding troop of monkeys, especially on an empty stomach.
So we walked up the grand driveway of a luxury resort we couldn’t afford and approached the front desk to try and see if they could order us a cab.
A friendly driver turned up and we got chatting on our way to the restaurant I had booked.
We asked him lots of questions about Bali and his life and he was happy to oblige.
It was only as we pulled up to the restaurant and my wife got the money out to pay the man, that she realised she’d got her maths completely wrong by some distance.
She’d brought a bundle of bills with her; in fact she looked like she had severely cheated in a game of Monopoly.
But the 800,000 Rupiah she brought out was only worth about £43.
We explained our fuck up and he very, very kindly insisted we use our money to enjoy a meal and offered to pick us up afterwards so that we could pay him when we get back to our accommodation.
What a bloke!
We had a beautiful meal and sure enough, he was waiting for us afterwards.
When we told him the address of our accommodation, he checked the street a few times in disbelief.
“That’s my auntie’s house!” he exclaimed.
It didn’t feel like the right time to let him know I’d crashed said Auntie’s moped into said Auntie’s house, so instead we delighted in the serendipity of the evening’s events.
He told us all about the family connection. She had married his father’s brother.
It would also transpire that his father was the local religious leader – a position of great authority and reverence in the area. A position that the taxi driver was in training for as he would one day succeed him. He said that he would show us around the village the next day as a favour to his auntie’s guests.
Being the cynical copywriter I am, I had my suspicions that this was all a great bit of fictional storytelling on his part and any moment his cab company’s logo would fade up on screen with a call to action telling me to pay £100 for a guided tour. But his story was legit.
He was indeed a nepo baby.
The perfect advertising metaphor!
Everywhere he took us, people shook his hand.
He knew the best waterfall spots. He gave great history and geography lessons.
We rocked up to a packed restaurant up in the rice fields, he greeted the staff who knew him, and suddenly we had the best view in the house and lunch was free.
It was like being out with a post-production company.
As the old Indonesian proverb goes: Good things happen to those who crash a motorbike, walk off in embarrassment without any money, have a lovely dinner and befriend a local cab driver.
Lesson 4: Escape your bubble
On our trip, we only spent two or three days in each place before moving on to somewhere else on the island. I had booked somewhere secluded to have a romantic holiday experience: spending the night in an inflatable bubble on the beach.
Proof that sometimes an idea should die before it gets to execution.
The bubble was on a stretch of secluded beach and deliberately difficult to reach to add to its privacy. Airbnb doesn’t give you the exact whereabouts until the day.
We met a woman at the top of a cliff. She spoke no English. We spoke no Indonesian.
She guided us down the cliff. It took 40 minutes in the daytime, passing gangs of monkeys and random cows staring like they wanted beef with me.
We had an infinite beach to ourselves. There was not a soul in sight once she left. And no phone signal either, as we would shortly discover.
Oh how we ran free! Naked! Frollicking across white sands!
In the bubble there was an inflatable mattress, a deck of cards, a torch, and a pair of bongo drums.
Once you’ve lost nine consecutive games of rummy and serenaded your partner with a Bongo rendition of Coldplay - ‘Yellow’, there’s not much to do. Especially as she’d spent the whole time thinking “He’s going to propose. OMG he’s going to propose. But I haven’t done my nails? Is he going to propose? We’re on a private beach in Bali. He’s definitely going to propose.”
Reader, I was not going to propose. She had just beaten me nine times at Rummy and critiqued my singing voice. And I had no ring.
Suddenly, the sun slipped away beyond the horizon.
Orange turned pink turned indigo turned black. And it would be that way until morning.
So we laid under a canopy of stars.
The Indian Ocean a few feet away from our toes.
Enjoying life in our little bubble.
CUT TO:
2am. I wake up to something dripping on my face. The heat is intense and overwhelming.
I wake my partner up and fumble for the torch.
Our bubble is deflating rapidly, like a creative who has just received an email titled ‘A few tweaks from client’.
As soon as the two-inch-thick plastic makes contact with you, it wraps around you like cling film.
The heat choking us of oxygen. The lack of oxygen choking us of oxygen.
The only thing keeping the bubble from becoming completely 2D are the bongos acting like a tent pole.
We desperately scramble around to find the zip to the door, but the exterior of the bubble has folded into one mass of plastic. We look like vacuum-packed Cumberland sausages.
Eventually we crawl out, coughing, sweating, swearing and spluttering.
We drag ourselves out, straight into a storm.
Torrential rain and lightning that is far too close for comfort, illuminating the beach.
I grab the bongos and sing “and it was all yellow”.
“NOT THE FUCKING TIME LIAM” she screams.
“I think you’ll find the next line is actually ‘Your skin, oh yeah, your skin and bones’,” I mumble under my breath.
The bad weather had caused a power cut up the top of the hill, which had stopped the generators inflating our plastic home.
We had no phone signal.
We could see a light from the top of the cliff doing some sort of Morse code, but between us we didn’t know how to flash FUCKING HELP US OUT OF THIS HELLHOLE NOW with a torch in Indonesian.
Spoiler alert: we survived. But there was a point where I thought we’d be washed out into the Indian Ocean in a bubble, only to return floating down the Thames looking like some sort of back-of-the-pitch-deck PR stunt idea.
I like to look back on that experience and imagine that when Tom Hanks in Castaway is yelling ‘WILSON’ at his inflatable ball washed out to sea, he’s actually yelling at me and my wife for booking something so incredibly stupid.
Lesson 5: Be wary of social-responsibility-purpose bullshit
After a traumatic experience, we needed to chill out.
Bali is the perfect place for that.
It’s full of yoga retreats and massage places.
I’m not really into my pilates. The first time I tried to pronounce it, I gambled on it going the same way as the word pirates.
The new place we were staying in was a little community of health spas.
All of them declaring how they cared about You and Planet Earth.
Until I walked around the back of our wooden hut only to discover a mountain of plastic.
“What’s the deal with all the plastic?” I said to someone who worked there.
“Oh don’t worry. That will be gone soon. We build it up and then burn it all in one go”.
For the record, I care about purpose and doing the right thing.
What I don’t care for is brands pretending to be something and hiding all their dirty business out back.
Call them out when they want you to engage in that shit.
This is a memo for me as much as it is for anybody who has made it this far with the article.
A local person explained to me that the issue of disposable waste was due to poor education and poorer infrastructure (in both senses of the word).
For thousands of years, the indigenous population had eaten from the land.
Want banana, take banana, eat banana, throw banana, grow banana.
The concept of eating something and it not degrading or regrowing was alien.
And with the boom of tourism and thus consumerism, they’d never caught up with how to treat waste.
I’m sure my junior creatives could probably find an analogy for me getting to grips with new social media and technology in that story somewhere…
Lesson 6: Entertain your target audience
You may read lesson six thinking: why didn’t you do us all a favour and practise what you preach from the start of the article, Liam.
Well, joke’s on you because you’re still here, motherfucker.
If I had gone to Bali and started posting pictures of waterfalls on Instagram with the caption ‘Dreams don’t have expiration dates, go chase them,’ my mates would have wished I'd suffocated in that bubble and then been picked apart by crabs and cows.
Instead, I went to the Monkey forest and got a photo of two monkeys shagging behind me.
Sometimes, audiences don't want spiritual enlightenment. They want silly stuff.
Lesson 7: Sometimes cute things will try and mug you
At the monkey forest, I was sat waiting under a tree while my girlfriend nipped to the loo and bought some water. Four Japanese women went into the toilet block, tailgated by a gang of monkeys. Adorably cute, cheeky monkeys.
The screams that came from the toilets were not so adorable.
Perhaps these women had stumbled upon the aftermath of whatever carnage my girlfriend had committed in trap two, I thought.
But then I realised it was actually because they had been taken hostage.
After a couple of minutes of shrieking, the simian terrorist group casually strolled out, armed with a woman’s shoe, a water bottle, and two hats.
One of the monkeys then lit up a cigarette, clocked me staring, and said, “Have we got a problem, pal?” making sure that I acknowledged the AK-47 slung over his shoulder.
These are like the clients you occasionally get, who on the surface seem cuddly and cute. But at the drop of a hat, have you over a barrel and demand you do more work for a reduced fee.
The clients that become a tourist attraction – one that every agency would like to have on their roster – are usually the ones who turn out to have quite a nasty streak. I much prefer a client who respects the people that work with them and their efforts. One that doesn’t have me crying in the toilets.
Lesson 8: Remember the people on your way up, you’ll meet them on your way down
Perhaps the most important one, not just in Bali or in advertising – but life in general.
On our flight out to Jakarta, a tubby little fat man was being extremely rude to a member of the cabin crew. Considerably more rude than my last sentence describing his appearance.
We intervened and stuck up for her and told him he was being a dick.
He proceeded to boot the back of my chair for the duration of a 14 hour flight.
It made watching ‘Creed II’ on a nine-inch screen a much more experiential cinematic viewing, feeling every blow to Michael B. Jordan’s kidneys.
I wish I could say we had the same air steward on the way back and she upgraded us from economy to business, with a personal shout out from the captain.
But not all stories, clients, or indeed long-winded articles on industry websites, have the budget for a Hollywood ending. This is advertising in 2023. We’re in economy, baby.
However, I did see tubby little fat man on my descent, at the end of my trip.
Only this time, he was in the seat in front of me.
It had been a while since I’d watched Riverdance, but I thought it the perfect time for a bit of Flatley. 14 hours of it. On repeat.
I remember a lecturer at uni telling us to be nice to everyone as it’s a small industry and everybody is connected. There’s a good chance your new account grad is the Balinese cab driver and the CFO is his aunt and your Airbnb host, and your client and another agency are the two monkeys shagging behind your back.
But even if that wasn’t the case, it’s always nice to be nice.
It’s nicer to be in Bali though.
Lesson 9: Enjoy the sunsets
There is no better thing in life than sipping a cocktail with someone you love, watching a vast expanse of sky and the endless ocean.
They are fleeting moments
When the good stuff happens in advertising, whether that’s winning an award, a pitch, seeing your campaign go live, being amongst the magic of a film set, or simply working with talented people and having a laugh, you have to take a moment to soak it all in and celebrate it.
Because before you know it there will be a monkey armed with a knife telling you to do your timesheets by EOP or else.
