I'm thinking I could just be myself for a while

I wrote a script for a tobacco company back when I was still green. It was a peek behind the curtain of a world that has been much maligned and cast out, with any hopes of meaningful mainstream marketing truly crushed. It featured a cast of dozens; salespeople on the road advising shop owners of POS and other tactics for pushing tobacco in ways that were still legal. Offering the price card, for example. The product stood behind its unassuming cavern doors, but the consumer knew it was there. Did the baby-nappy brown packaging really deter smokers?

My time in their world was, well, addicting.

I found myself, as I always do, looking for an angle. That human spirit. You can find it even amongst piles of pictures of corpses and cancerous throats. There is a certain shamelessness in marketing any product. When I'm writing internal comms, I can draw on more than a decade's worth of experience being a working stiff in retail, sales, insurance, you name it. I remember being hard to engage, but I was (somewhat) willingly employed by corporations, so I brought it on myself.

My past self is my audience, and he's someone I can believe in, even if I don't fully buy the message.

So what's the difference in selling something that's deadly for human health than, say, products that don't biodegrade? Is the environment any more or less important than a human life? I didn't take that approach of course. But I'm not proud of just getting on with the work without questioning why I was ever doing it.

These days, I've found myself more and more writing for the sake of writing. Because I love it. I don't think it's helpful to constantly be putting rules around your craft, choking ambition and creativity. That feels more like producing than creating. Pure creation should have you feeling nervous, like a comedian in 2023 readying a set of hot button material, knowing that it will live or die by the fast and unbridled dogs of Twitter ready to maul it to pieces – or stand guard over it like it is the last, vital piece of commentary in the world. That reminds me, I read somewhere that Kurt Cobain thought of punk as the last musical movement that, to him, felt vital. Is there such a thing in comms?

There needs to something grating out there to keep you honest. Something punk.

So, I'm thinking I could just be myself for a while. Finding a style or a voice that makes a message feel prescient and raw takes guts. It takes a fearless love of your craft. You need to listen, not just to the 'market' but to yourself. Remember when Burger King said "women belong in the kitchen" thinking it sounded like they were taking a stand on gender equality? It was universally panned and, for my money, it was the wrong message, wrong voice, wrong time. There has been major pushback on this inauthentic, bratty comms style from companies who should know better and know their place. It all just feels so... surface.

So, what's the right voice?

The band Loose Articles, for one. Their 'kick like a girl' touring project provides young women intimate and inclusive backstage access to their gigs at grassroots British venues. Sounds like I'm trying to sell it to you. Maybe I'm trying to validate my own feelings, because when I heard the band detailing the project on the radio and their own personal stories of being dismissed as artists in venues, it made me think – yes. This is it.

This is vital.

This is punk.

Maybe my search for authenticity will bear fruit, maybe not.

It's not always up to the creator what becomes successful and what doesn't. But I think it's important to look for those moments that make you think – yes.

Oh, and the tobacco company? Job got pulled by the agency I was writing for due to, ahem, moral conflict. I might have turned it down myself. But I wasn't there yet, wasn't honest or prescient enough. I was still feeling like the Grand Old Duke of York, neither up nor down. At least next time the decision will be in my hands.

Time will tell if I'm punk enough to make it.