UK General Election 2010: My response to people who argue that it is boring, all politicians are the same and why should they bother?

What do you think this is - Deal or No Deal?

If you can't be bothered to use your brain for 5 minutes and try to get to grips with at least one issue - which will probably not be very interesting, and may even distract you from Eastenders - then go and sit with the children in the ball pit.

The clot of the amateur

As an advertising professional, I am keenly aware of the way in which the digital media revolution has transformed marketing practices. Especially in the last couple of years, when social media has challenged a lot of the received wisdom of advertising orthodoxy, and forced marketeers to think about their brands in different ways. Two stories this week provided interesting commentary on these trends, and made me think that, when it comes to it, maybe so much hasn't changed after all.

Business Day magazine, in Australia, heralded Twitter as calling last orders on the gluttonous ad agencies, drinking at their clients' expense. Perhaps the most revealing phrase was in the entire article was:

Why pay big dollars to an ad agency when you can create your own inexpensive in-house campaign and get your nephew to launch it on YouTube and Twitter?

Why indeed. For that matter why pay a fancy lawyer big bucks to defend you in court, when your law student daughter would do it for free? Why pay a plumber to fix your heating when you're pretty handy with a spanner yourself? There's an almost charmingly naive assumption that, until now, the only thing keeping an ad agency in business in their ability to operate a camera, or to use PhotoShop. Because the internet has the ability to turn individual creative sparks into global phenomena, we can all do it - and thanks to Blogger, Twitter and Facebook anyone can create an online presence.

I am one of the first people to denounce the preciousness in advertising creativity. It is not a cure for cancer, and the fact that agencies are cabs for hire means we can seldom claim moral worth in the ad campaigns that spill across the media landscape. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean there is no skill involved - and the risk in the fact that "anyone can do it" is just that: your campaign will look like it could have been done by anyone.

Which brings me to the Labour party's "people's poster" campaign, which this week backfired in pretty spectactular fashion. The theory must have looked great and really 'of the moment': instead of wasting money on a big ad agency, members of the public would put forward ideas, and the best would be used as an actual campaigning poster. Saves money and gets supporters involved - a win-win. Given some of the amusing content generated by sites such as www.mydavidcameron.com - driven by word-of-Facebook - you can see why the idea was attractive.

And the winner was:


Although this was supposedly the "People's Poster", the fact that its released coincided with the start of the final series of Ashes to Ashes, leads me to believe it may not have been created by a member of the public at all. But let's run with it, and assume the Cameron-as-Gene-Hunt idea was a bona fide suggestion. I'm not actually that interested in why it was a terrible concept - and that analysis has been done to death elsewhere. But by assuming the wisdom of an online crowd is an exact substitute for the collective brain-power of an ad agency actually shows not so much a lack of faith in their creativity, but a failure to use their agency properly.

An ad agency will take a brief to deliver an objective. The creative is the means to the end - to inspire people to do whatever it is you want them to do - and so, in this case, the "people's poster" process, by making the creative into the end itself, gets the cart before the horse. Maybe the answer isn't a poster (and it almost certainly isn't in today's market with Labour's diminished ad budget), maybe it's not an ad at all. Agency and client will challenge each other's ideas, using the objective as fixed point of reference, and hopefully arrive at a solution that delivers the objective. By removing the agency, and reducing the briefing to a "who can make the funniest joke about David Cameron" competition, the objective vanished and Labour's sense-checking partner wasn't there.

Both the "Twitter nephew" and "people's poster" stories are born of rather old fashioned ideas of advertising, and advertising agencies - the place where you go to waste half your money, in Lord Beaverbrook's immortal phrase. The real revolution online media delivers is explicit measurability of the outcome of your campaign; whereas once you had to guess how many eyeballs saw your ad, today you gather fans' names and addresses via your facebook page, YouTube movie or, maybe, Chatroulette routine. You work together, sharing intelligence and insight to meet commonly-held objectives. And if you want to do that on your own, you're like the man defending himself in court, who has an idiot for a client.

Appy Now?

One of the delights of being a new iPhone user is entry to the candy store that is the App Store (short for applications, nothing to do with the Apple name). Once you've downloaded the obligatory dull-but-usefuls (Facebook, LinkedIn), you can start to explore the crazier end of the spectrum, and wonder at the quirky pockets of humanity who create some of these things. Yesterday I came across an app to show you the meanings of all UK roadsigns, and I wondered how many drivers were on our roads who didn't know what the signs meant, driving one handed with iPhone in the other.

Almost picking at random, from the current Top 10 list, is an app called 'More Toast!' For a mere 59p, this app lets you make "virtual toast" and "swap recipes" (no, really). It comes in the "lifestyle" category, which makes me wonder about the lives of those who feel the need to look at pixelated bread products and enjoy the sound of a toaster popping when they're away from home. Once upon a time, computer simulations used to transport us to fantasy worlds, interstellar wars and middle earth troll villages. Now they are used to recreate the mundane so we can share it with each other as testament to our common humanity, along with our bowel movements and LOLs via Twitter, MySpace and all the other social media channels.

Fisher-Price recently raised some eyebrows when it made some iPhone apps for 2-year-olds (story here), at last debunking the myth that mobile phones are serious business tools, and not something to mess around on while waiting for the bus. And with iPhone apps set to outsell CDs within two years, it makes sense to start early with the next generation of consumers. But what sort of a generation are we creating?

Back in the last century when I was learning about marketing, the concept of a "felt need" - a problem you didn't realise you had until someone showed you a solution - was usually illustrated by the example of an electric toothbrush. Now I expect marketing course teachers simply point to any one of 1,000 iPhone apps, from The Perfect Egg Timer to Fart Machine Extreme. With apps being created to cater not just for the merest whim, but the most unlikely set of circumstances, will our children no longer learn to tie their laces upon our instruction, but download the relevant app? Well, they would if their shoes had laces in them anymore.

Better the devil you know?

The more observant of my regular readers may have noticed a tendency to make rude jokes about Catholic clergy and their desire to bugger children. Whether this is an appropriate response to vile actions largely depends on the breadth of your sense of humour, I suspect. But I would argue it is wholly more appropriate than the reaction from the Vatican's chief Ghostbuster, Father Gabriele Amorth, whose remarks about the "Devil in the Vatican" were widely reported across the British press today.

The Fourth Estate seems to have accepted it uncritically as a mea cupla for the many wrongs visited upon children around the world by the Vatican's priests and acolytes, aside from the chance to explore the ghoulish and macabre practices of exorcism. But a closer reading reveals why we will never get to the bottom of the scandal, and the Church will never admit ultimate culpability as a collective: because it wasn't their fault. It was simply a part of the Devil's work, cited alongside the attempted assassination of the previous Pope, as though there were some moral equivalence - yes, we may have ruined the lives of thousands of children in our care, but feel our pain, too, because someone didn't manage to kill our boss.

Far from lapping up the talk of exorcism, and wondering at Ratzinger giving intellectual time to the lurid showmanship of demonic expulsion, we should be outraged that Amorth, and by implication his sponsor, think this is a good enough answer. Citing the influence of the Devil is a specious argument not even fit for a playground: A big boy made me do it, sir. If the Necromancer does stalk the corridors of St Peters, does that get them off the hook? All a big misunderstanding. Naughty, naughty Devil.

The drip-drip of stories of abuse that emerged from the USA and Ireland became a steady flow this week, as investigations conducted in Netherlands, Germany and Austria have added to the pool of suffering (story here). Taken as a whole, apart from being thoroughly unpleasant, surely it is also one of the more statistically unlikely phenomena if explained purely as random distribution. For all our fears, actual incidences of child sexual assault are mercifully rare, and its practitioners drawn from all walks and strata of life. Now, consider what an extraordinary cluster of predators lurks within the Catholic church over such a wide area; this is not a local conspiracy but a global phenomenon that cannot be explained in any terms other than there is something about the organisation that attracts pederasts. It is simply too improbable for the high number of incidents in a single organisation to be a coincidence; the way it has been allowed to conduct itself and how it was viewed by the public provided a perfect cover.

Imagine any other organisation - a company, a charity, a government or police force - with the same sort of track record of its employees raping children. It would not be allowed to exist: the company wound up, charity's status withdrawn, government resigned (or voted out), police force disbanded (as with West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, for example). I think the time has come for the Catholic church to give it up and declare itself out of business. It has proved itself woefully inadequate in policing abusers, preferring to protect not punish, its secretive, male-only hierarchy is a stacked defence against attempts to open it up to scrutiny, and it seems a honey-pot for bullies, giving them means and opportunity to prey upon the powerless.

And beneath it all, at heart its apologists believe its failings were caused by the bad influence of an imaginary friend. That, I think, is the lowest point of all.

Suffer little children

I see the religious lobby achieved its controversial amendment to the bill on sex education, allowing those educational establishments bizarrely known as "faith schools" to teach personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons "in a way that reflects the school's religious character". Does this mean my local Catholic schools will now start preparing their 13 year-old-boys for sex with their local parish priest?