"Here is Satan's engorged member." "No thanks. Bye."

"I made £600 last week on commission."

"Yes, and you're going to live in hell forever. Bye."

I take it you didn't like it?

Something like that. Man, I felt absolutely sick and disgusted to my stomach. The last straw was when the maneger did his motivational team talk - "We ARE going to make 300 sales this week!" and everyone in the room shouts back "YEAH!" Another quality moment was when he asked "What motivates us?" and then wrote 'TVR' on the board, followed by the remark "I'm looking forward to paying cash for it this weekend, so cool..."

The suit only ever comes out again for weddings and funerals.

I might become a gardener.

Oh brilliant! Marketing meetings are the thing I hate most about my job. Hearing a senior executive say "brands are what matter. The brand could exist without the magazine," is really galling when you've worked a 48 hour week on a tenth or less of their salary to put out the bloody magazine "that embodies the brand spirit."

[She says, posting from her corporate e-mail address. Nick you are very brave.]

Marketing != Sales. It's what sales call themselves to fool people. (Marketing call themselves 12 Foot Lizards, obv.)

What's my name? Fuck You, that's my name.

Remember your A B C.

etc.

You see this watch? That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy, I don't give a shit. Good father, fuck you! Go home and play with your kids! You wanna work here, close!

congratulations - it's a pleasure to see someone act on their ethics. well done!

what tom says x 100. There are swathes of marketing people at work here who really do work described as "sales support". people here are obsessed with job titles, and the status they signify. creepy.

I'm currently designing a billboard for my company. Should I mention Satan's engorged member? I have limited copy space.

The compromise between horrible capitalism (but money! hooray!) and doing what you like (but no money!) is tough. Congratulations. Personally, I've swung backwards and forwards without ever doing anything shameful. I'm an analyst-programmer nowadays, which is pretty bad, but I'm very pleased to be working for a university rather than somewhere where the prime objective is making some riuch arseholes into even richer arseholes.

"We WILL make 300 sales this week! We WILL beat the Cardiff office in the league chart! I WILL pay cash for that TVR on Saturday! I WILL stuff my face with cocaine in the bogs in five minutes!"

I had a very brief chat with the manager, which basically consisted of me saying that the job definitely wasn't for me, and that I wasn't motivated by money or cars or houses in Ireland (?!) and that I was after some sort of spiritual and emotional fulfillment in my life, and he mentioned his son or something as a vague attempt to get me to stay possibly, and I just shrugged and thought "Man, your son's life is fucked already 'cos Satan got his soul in a 2for1 alongside yours."

1. if your so fucking anti-marketing and unconcerned with the material world, why did you go for the training course in the first place? It seems like you have enough opportunities to congratulate yourself as it is without having to sit through an hour and a half of marketing training just so you could leave in a huff.

2. Do you really think you're making the world such a better place by going back to the pub and then on to a record store job? Isn't selling records, uh, sales? So selling cool objects to cool people is OK, but selling uncool objects to uncool people is satan's work? please. get off the cross, we need the wood.

selling uncool objects to uncool people is satan's work?

Well, yes. The ads told me so.

Nick, buy a boat. Buy a boat and sail away.

Anna: these marketing people obviously don't register that someone has to put the 'mag' in Mixmag. Probably it's time to talk about pay rises and they want to inhibit folks asking for more money by making them feel valueless.

And don't be too hard on Mr Southall. You really haven't lived until you've gotten a summer job selling crap over the phone which features a supervisor prone to bells and whistles upon first sale, eg. 'losing your virginity to the company'. Back in the days when summer jobs were difficult to get, one had to convince the supervisor that, yes, really you were thinking of packing in your place at an exclusive East Coast college to work with them for $4 an hour because it seemed like a good career move. And then spend the rest of the summer trying to resist the impulse toward impromptu testicle removal vis-a-vis said manager.

Anna's marketing person is theoretically right but in this case the Mixmag brand is no way big or extended enough to survive without the magazine (almost no media brand is - maybe Playboy but that's about it). It would probably be true to say that the brand is more important than any given contribution to the magazine (Marketing's form of the Heap Paradox!) but that does even less for employee relations. Marketing people in these advanced stages of brand-mania do have a real phobia of the products they're suppopsedly selling - beware them! They've had people like my bosses selling them snake-oil (12 foot lizard-oil) for ages and they've turned reptilian.

My main point wasn't some anti-advertising, anti-capitalist, pro-No Logo May day riots schtick, because I've read No Logo and the like and I've had people I know go to London for the May Day thing and I think it's largely a crock. I'm normally dressed in Carhartt, Levis, Adidas and Nike for god's sake, I've got a Sony minidisc and a Sony mobile. My main point was that I walked away from a potentially very well paid job in marketing (sales) because it was shit and would have made me miserable, and I'd rather earn a lesser wage working in a book shop or a pub or whatever, because I'd be much, much happier doing it. Sell people books / beer / records vs have to face an awful motivational team speech every morning and then knock on doors / train people to knock on doors. Moss Bros and Clarks vs cords and Campers. Being fucking miserable vs Not being fucking miserable.

Tis the difference spiritually between selling people things they want and things they don't want. Of course the good people in advertsing/marketing may have a hand in making them want what they eventually buy - but possibly the greater the sales of the generic product, the less influential the ads are. (I'm thinking mainly of beer and records here. Like I always do).

Unfortunately booze advertising is super-effective. (not so much for draught beers IIRC, further proof that pints = best).

Is it effective at making people want booze, or want a particular brand. Looking at the promotional spends it is all about making the brand more promenant - the first one to hand etc etc.

I think booze purchase in general is on the rise - but IIRC where it was most effective was in persuading boozers to switch category within 'booze' - alcopops are an excellent example of this. So while the need for booze was not created by advertisers the means of fulfilling this need certainly was (that's if you believe that advertisers/marketers create needs anyway which I'm not convinced they do).

Anything over and above the bare minimum requirement of nutrients to exist doesn't qualify as a 'need'

"Need" is limey slang Dave Q, like "dodgy".

Hearing a senior executive say "brands are what matter. The brand could exist without the magazine," is really galling

The egg could exist without the chicken, but it would be empty.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To add value to another egg.

Why do individuals exist? To pass on DNA. Why do corporations exist? To give shareholders a return on their investment. Why do eggs eggsist? To make more chickens make more eggs.

Me, I find the incidentals and accidentals more interesting than the express intention of these cold formal systems with their meaningless self-replication. Call me an eggsistentialist.

that's if you believe that advertisers/marketers create needs anyway which I'm not convinced they do

Yeah but they create desires and exploit ones that you already have and in my experience there's not much difference.

Call me an eggsistentialist.

I'm not sure if that's exactly the word I was thinking of.