Death of an Online Salesman

Written with petulant contempt by Peter File

Dear Mr Gschwandtner,

I write in response to your recent missive regarding the article I penned last week for the Mobar Gazette. As the editor of such a well known publication as Selling Power, I am honoured that you were able to find the time to read and respond to my paltry literary effort. I can only hope that one day, the Mobar Gazette shall reach the lofty peaks of online popularity that you inhabit.

A scurrilous rumour was circulating in the wake of your communiqué. Some of the other writers here had the gall to suggest that you did not write the letter at all, and that the response was generated by some sort of futuristic advertising robot with the power to pick up the scandalous misuse of the phrase “selling power” and post automated responses, and possibly also vaporise naughty writers by shooting them with deadly laser beams.

I vehemently disagreed and put it down to professional jealousy. As enamoured with your professional interest as I was and still am, I feel that I must extend you the same professional courtesy you have afforded me and point out one or two errors in your response.

You claim “the word ‘Selling Power’ is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness.” Firstly, selling power is in fact, two words – selling of course being the first word, followed soon after by the second word, power. I would also disagree with your assertion that it is used erroneously as a synonym for sales effectiveness. It is an entirely accurate substitution for sales effectiveness, as I’m sure anyone with a dictionary and a couple of years of primary school education under their belt will confirm for you.

You also claim that I wrote “And does her opinion have selling power, does her word really equal higher figures?” I wrote no such thing. I also find it concerning that the example you have used seems to betray an underlying misogyny present in an industry only willing to include women when they are clad in bikinis, selling power tools. The phrase I used was “I’m a firm believer in the selling power of lies”. It was meant to be a witty contradiction, but I now accept that it was really only a contradiction.

On a more positive note, may I express my most sincere gratitude for the plethora of alternative terminology you offered for the next time I dare to utter the sacred phrase “selling power”. When suffering from writer’s block, I often yearn for the vast linguistic knowledge of a salesman. As a token of my appreciation, I thought I might offer you a few alternative terms for “salesman”. Try one of the following: soulless bottom feeder, vile guttersnipe, parasitical sham, slimy invertebrate, silver-tongued eel, parthenogenetic lowlife, or if rhyming slang is your thing – James Blunt.

I also noticed a lot of references to the misuse of your trademark. The phrase “selling power” is allegedly your legal trademark, and you don’t condone such uses of it. Oh NO! You don’t condone it? Well, I don’t condone people drinking bottles of vodka through funnels and then attempting to operate heavy machinery, but I can’t stop them from doing so.

You also expressed a fear that “selling power” could be declared, by the courts no less, a generic word. Let me allay those fears – the men and women in positions of power in the courts generally have a couple of educational qualifications under their robes, and would almost certainly be more than happy to tell you that it is a phrase, not a word. They would then probably go on to tell you that you can’t trademark a phrase, possibly hold you in contempt of court for being an unholy carcinogenic drain on society, then tell you to get back to hawking useless kitchen appliances on late night television.

I sincerely hope that this written acknowledgement has been of an acceptable standard to you and your reptilian ilk. I would like to leave you with a quote from a man you may be familiar with – Willy Loman, a well-known salesman like yourself.

“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

Yours sincerely,

Peter File

Moral Decay? Take The Mobar Gazette Toothpaste Six Week Challenge!

Written with moral outrage by Peter File

Moral decay manifests itself in a myriad of forms. This is of course because, for the most part, the degradation of society is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Raunchy music videos may titillate some and cause them no concern whatsoever, whereas others may see simulated sex acts and the gross misuse of carpet pythons as a damning reflection on society as a whole.

Personally, I am probably on the liberal end of the moral outrage spectrum. It would take quite a base, depraved act to even attract my attention let alone cause me to act upon my fear that a fiery gateway between the pavement and the pits of hell was about to open and swallow up everything pure in this world. Every generation has its horrors, this one just happens to be receiving more media coverage than the previous ones. Bearing in mind my seemingly insatiable ambivalence to just about everything, it was with great surprise this week that I found myself muttering about society going to hell in a hand basket.

What raised my ire so? For the sake of avoiding litigation, I’ll call it the INSERT EVIL MULTINATIONAL COMPANY HERE Six Week Challenge. There’s really no need to include the company name, because it could be just about any business these days. They’re all at it. Advertising has reached the point where it’s not enough to use humour or on the odd occasion, facts, to convince the consumer that your product is better than all the others. Even lies won’t cut it any more, and I’m a firm believer in the selling power of lies. Nowadays everything is a challenge, and if you’re not taking the challenge, I don’t know…move to somewhere that doesn’t like challenges, you flaming communist.

The existence of such advertising is not the root cause of my belief that things really are going from bad to worse; shit advertising has been around since the dawn of time. Two things irk me, the first of which being that the agencies employed to write these ads really couldn’t come up with anything better than a preposterous attempt at bringing reality into the selling of the product. The companies flogging these “challenges” can afford to advertise on television and radio. Therefore, it stands to reason that they can similarly afford to employ a professional ad agency to write and produce these shameful attempts at promotion.

Professional ad agencies, while generally filled to the brim with coked-up narcissists with a penchant for prostitutes and intriguing fetishes, do have a knack for churning out copy of a certain standard. While in the eyes of a regular punter the end product may not quite justify the obscene salaries, they get the job done. Hence why it astounds me that agency after agency is happy to litter all media with these inane excuses for ads. Furthermore, it beggars belief that company after company has paid for this bile. I see…so you’re challenging the consumer to take the challenge of purchasing and consuming our product for a set period of time. Brilliant in its simplicity, but I guess that’s why we pay you the big bucks!

The second irksome fact about this whole pseudo challenge business is that people are quite literally buying it. I am basing this belief on two theories. Firstly, if advertisements don’t translate into increased sales, they are deemed to have failed and are relegated to the scrap heap. Therefore, a greater volume of people are purchasing these products off the back of this drivel. Secondly, the testimonials are disturbingly believable. Generally agencies will only employ professional actors to extol the benefits of products. Sure, they look pretty and sound articulate, but we all know they didn’t really eat pauper yoghurt for a fortnight – they had a small part in that cop drama last week, so they can clearly afford the fancy stuff.

The calibre of human guinea pigs in these challenges leads me to absolutely believe everything they say. They have the crooked teeth, the monosyllabic vocabulary, the middle-aged paunch and the pallid complexion of someone who spends their days under fluorescent lighting, perhaps sorting things on a conveyor belt. They have faced their fears, and said YES! I am courageous enough to eat this particular breakfast bar every day for a month and am now amazed that I cannot live without it and its irrefutable breakfast bar benefits.

Don’t think for a minute that I’m hopping up on a preachy high horse with George Carlin. Capitalism is brilliant. Useless possessions might be useless, but they’re nice to look at and fun to use. Rampant consumerism doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but it will be if we continue down this challenging path of non-challenges. If advertising continues to suffer such a public display of erectile dysfunction, the rest of us don’t have much hope.

And therein lies my problem with these fatuous attempts at flogging products. Advertisements should reflect the moral fibre and strength of a society, they should capture the mood and sell accordingly - e.g. ridiculously extravagant lies in ads should indicate that society is riding an infectious wave of self-delusion and couldn’t be having a better time if it tried. If a communist nation tuned in to western television and saw us running ads like that, they would be so disheartened that they may potentially renounce their core beliefs and get on the capitalism express. Imagine if they tuned in right now. Kim Jong Il would be wetting himself. Hey, look, western consumer just drank skim milk for six weeks and is going to continue buying that particular brand of skim milk. BOMB THEM!

That’s what it boils down to, really. Allowing these inane advertising challenges to continue to permeate our already fragile existence will result in the total destruction of our way of life, culminating in every freedom loving country being annihilated in a deadly shower of North Korean nuclear weapons.

World's Deadliest: Sabre-Toothed Commerce Duck

Written with arrogant chutzpah by Annette Curtain

For those of you who are au fait with Greek mythology, the story of the phoenix is a familiar one. Sporting a vibrant plumage and a tail of scarlet, purple and gold, the phoenix lives for nigh on 1000 years. Faced with its own impending death, the creature builds a nest from myrrh twigs which promptly ignites and burns both bird and nest to a crisp. Then, defying the laws of physics, a new phoenix rises from the still smouldering ashes, destined to live for as long as the previous one.

Like almost all Greek mythology, this story is little more than a myth; a colourful tale to pass the time between being hand fed grapes by bed sheet clad servants and indulging in non-standard sexual intercourse. While you may find yourself entirely disillusioned by this exposure of the lack of truth in myths, it does at least provide one with the opportunity to use this colourful tale as a poorly chosen and considerably drawn out analogy, or metaphor, or simile…as if you really know the difference between them anyway. Oh, the digressiveness.

It is hard to believe that nearly a year has elapsed since the spectacular collapse of the financial industry. Rather than myrrh twigs, the industry had been built upon a rock solid foundation of irresponsible lending, ponzi schemes and 125% mortgages for anyone who could see the sound thinking behind such products. Alas, the hard working architects of the sub-prime mortgage market could do little more than enjoy a final money bath, devour the last of their ill-gotten cocaine and watch helplessly as their years of honest and hard work went up in a fire as fierce as the pits of hell.

The blaze was all encompassing; it consumed bank after bank, vaporised government surpluses, and caused property prices to drop faster than an overfed credit analyst plummeting from the window of a 37th floor boardroom. And so it has smouldered for the best part of a year, torching stimulus packages and government bail-outs as though they were tinder dry kindling. Fearful of its fiery power, banks have refused to risk lending to each other. There seemed to be not a skerrick of hope for a recovery – until now. For just as the noble phoenix once rose triumphantly from the remains of its myrrh rich nest, a winged symbol of optimism for a new generation is soaring above the charred remains of the British financial industry – the sabre-toothed commerce duck.

A joint initiative between the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, the sabre-toothed commerce duck is steeped in mystery, rather than the rich plum sauce most City bankers are accustomed to. As its name suggests, the duck is armed with a pair of razor sharp teeth, and if early reports are anything to go by, it is entirely unafraid to use them.

Nigel Chuffington-Twixley, a 49 year old senior lending manager with the Royal Bank of Scotland, was last week enjoying a quiet brandy with some of his colleagues after work. Witnesses claim that almost immediately after Chuffington-Twixley had described the chances of RBS increasing lending to small businesses “as likely as me not having kinky sex in the spa with a bunch of high class hookers tonight”, the sabre-toothed commerce duck swooped into the bar and dragged him through the door before he had enjoyed the laughter created by his hilarious remark. Patrons exited the premises in time to witness Chuffington-Twixley being ripped limb from limb by the duck and deposited in a bloody heap of body parts in the middle of busy Oxford street.

Mere hours after this vicious attack, a group of Lloyds TSB debt collectors were sprayed with the blood of their colleague in a trendy karaoke bar in south London as the sabre-toothed commerce duck struck again. Lucy Vaughn-Polo, a distraught witness, described the scene in which her co-worker, 26 year old mortgage arrears consultant Jonathan Fluffbury, was disembowelled by the merciless water bird. “’E’d just got up to do ‘is song, an’ ‘e dedicated it to anyone who was be’ind wiv their mortgage. Then when ‘e star’ed singin’, this duck flew in an’ proper mashed ‘is ‘ead up!” Other colleagues confirmed Fluffbury had sung Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Baby I Got Ya Money.

Neville Sadler-Simpson, head of the FSA’s bio-mechanical research division, was unapologetic when questioned about the attacks. He claimed that lenders were all too happy to accept government bail-out packages, yet refused to share their newfound solvency with business clients. In the eyes of the FSA and Bank of England, this was justification enough to release the deadly duck. Sadler-Simpson went on to issue a dire warning to the banks – start lending, or expect to lose an employee a day to duck related attacks.

The sabre-toothed commerce duck is the evil brainchild of resident malevolent FSA scientist Dr Julius Blackheart. Blessed with an abundance of government funding and a cynical yet accurate worldview, Blackheart began creating the duck two years ago. After successfully injecting a duck embryo with the sabre-toothed gene, the cape-clad super villain set about partially mechanising the normally minute brain found in the skull of a duck. After a CPU was successfully installed, it was merely a matter of programming the vicious bird with a series of trigger words and phrases that, if uttered, would cause the winged assassin to unleash a furious vengeance upon the unwitting speaker.

The unprecedented success of the scheme thus far has led to a similar scheme being implemented by financial chiefs in the United States, who are said to be extremely impressed by the no nonsense attitude taken by the British duck. Laser guided grizzly bears have been deployed in major cities around America, and initial reports indicate that they are having a positive impact. Texan pancake farmer Bob “Short Stack” Carter described with rural glee his success in applying for finance for a new combine harvester. “Well Mr Morgendörffer, the bank manager, he done told me, “Now Bob, you ain’t getting’ no new combine harvester, see,” then this big grizzly bar come runnin’ into the bank and done ripped his throat clean out! So then Mr Bushworthy, he’s the assistant manager, he just asked me how much I wanted and how soon I wanted it!”

Back in the UK, bespectacled Bank of England chief Mervyn King is as bereft of sympathy for the arrogant chutzpah of City bankers as the reptilian suits of the FSA. King, by all accounts deeply proud of his growing collection of snappy sound bites, responded to criticism of the heavy handed tactics employed by the sabre-toothed commerce duck by stating “banks must understand that while in previous years they have had to deal only with bear or bull markets, if they continue to thumb their noses at struggling business clients, they shall have to endure a duck market.” King went on to clarify the difference between the current duck market and the bustling and aromatic duck markets usually found in downtown Beijing.