Dan Douglass on direct

Dan Douglass

Mrs T, aka TINA (There Is No Alternative) to her cabinet colleagues, aka Saint Margaret of Finchley, aka Thatcher the milk-snatcher, aka The Iron Lady. Call her what you will, it’s 30 years this May since she came to power. She broke the unions, she made a virtue of greed and selfishness. She eschewed the principle of collective responsibility and surrounded herself with a supine, venal cabinet. She spawned a neo-liberal Wild West state in which deregulation and free-market lawlessness thrived. And this year, more than any other, the country is reaping the whirlwind of her autocratic tenure. Most of my colleagues are too young to remember the powerful effect she had on the nation’s psyche, but whether we know it or not, we in advertising are all children of her contradictory legacy. She was no friend to the arts, but she was to advertising. She employed Gordon Reece as her style guru – a man who knew nothing about politics and everything about telegenic image-making. He helped her to harness the power of the soundbite and the short-form narrative of advertising by introducing her to the Saatchis and Tim Bell. If Thatcher was still in power, we would all find her demagogic style at odds with our free creative sensibility. But, despite our tendency to demonise the woman and distance ourselves from her unblinking manic stare and cut-glass haranguing voice, we are all of us faced with an unpalatable truth. Margaret Thatcher was the high-priestess of consumerism. And consumerism is a language we’ve all profited from through the good times. In the midst of this recession, there is a stonking great 800 pound gorilla with a coiffeured hair-do in the pitch room. We’ve helped to blow this bubble up. We’ve helped to carpet bomb consumers with loan offers. We’ve helped to create the very idea of free money. We’ve brought the language of FMCG to the trading floor. We’ve turned money markets into shopping aisles. We’ve introduced the illusion of choice and control. And we’ve made plastic valuable. All under the guise of grand strategising and breakthrough thinking. So the big question is this - who’s to say we aren’t as culpable for the state we’re in as Mrs T and the bankers?