Arthur Groenewald, Creative Director at TBW Smith Jones Wallace Broadbent and Ndimande, arrived at his disciplinary this Tuesday hearing wearing a black beret. Questioned by media journalists about his head gear Groenewald stated the item was ‘in line with his life as a conceptual revolutionary.’
Groenewald – chairman of the Young South African Creative League – has been brought before the TBW Smith Jones Wallace Broadbent and Ndimande Disciplinary Committee on multiple charges, including bringing the company into disrepute, storming into an executive level brainstorming session and announcing a planned Young South African Creative League intervention of sub-standard agencies in Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique.
“We will never abandon the creative revolution,” a defiant Groenewald said at the league’s press conference. “If it means we need to infiltrate these countries to ensure an end to meaningless brochures and toilet paper ads, then so be it. Our cadres are ready to be deployed.”
His assertion was given resonance by the arrival of three thousand drunk graphic designers and copywriters, bussed to Hyde Park by the youth league from regions as distant as the Northern Cape. The unruly demonstrators set up an industrial strength sound system and ran riot across the normally subdued Hyde Park streets, propelled by high energy trance music. Protesters hurled lollipops through agency windows and threatened to create advertising anarchy until their leader was exonerated.
Groenewald made a half hearted call for calm mid way through the day as several agencies bosses were threatened in colloquial phraseology they were unable to understand. The youth leader asked creatives to restrict themselves to formal English and to refrain from graffing area walls with rouge copy and imagery. The call had immediate impact. Groups of advertising youth retreated to various street corners where they changed to hip hop music and held impromptu cyphers – featuring the ongoing use of rhyming couplets – for the rest of the afternoon.
Groenewald was asked to remove his beret at the disciplinary hearing by agency bosses, but refused, citing his track record as an experiential marketing revolutionary as justification for his atire.
The outcome of the hearing is uncertain, with agency leaders reportedly divided over the role Groenewald should play at the agency. His notorious hi-jacking of a major sanitary pad account on behalf of the agency has split executive opinion. Half the agency’s board members wish to distance themselves from Groenewald’s initiation of mass social media complaints by 12 year old school girls. But insiders says the other half of the board is less morally alarmed by recent events and would relish the chance to use Groenewald’s street cred and viral power to gain more accounts, in the FMCG sector specifically.
Groenewald, for his part, remains adamant that young creatives should play a larger role at his agency, and across the industry in general. He reiterated ongoing calls for earlier bar opening times, the provision of free Sennheiser headphones to all creatives and a broad based relaxation of rules against sexual coupling on office premises.
“We are the youth and we are not scared of wielding our power,” Groenewald said, concluding his tirade at the press conference by removing and replacing his beret over a largely bald 39 year old head. “We are the only ones who understand hip hop, who know a broken beat from a break beat and who can great each other in all the official languages. The imperialist agency bosses cannot continue to reap their profits without us, so they will need to compromise.”
After the day’s proceedings a TBW Smith Jones Wallace Broadbent and Ndimande spokesperson announced that the venue for the hearing had been moved to Port Elizabeth, and that the next sitting would take place ‘sometime after January 2014.’
– Andrew Miller has been a media and corporate ghost writer for the last 13 years. He used to write marketing satire under the John Doe pseudonym for Brand Magazine and Media Toolbox. When not releasing communications bile, Andrew runs Newtown’s Unity Design, a socially orientated arts and media company. Catch up with Unity on Facebook and Twitter.