Bad films - great marketing lessons

Lindsay Lohan's latest film may be the worst thing you have never seen, but that doesn't mean we can learn some excellent marketing lessons from it.

Head over to my copywriting site to find out more!

Quentin Tarantino - an important PR lesson

Movie director shows us how NOT to do PR...

IF Quentin Tarantino was writing a script for a movie - one where a businessman performs the ultimate PR coup in an interview, it might go something like this:

INT. HOTEL ROOM - DAY - QUENTIN TARANTINO is cool as a f*ckin cucumber. He has just delivered the best f*cking public relations line about a f*cking movie EVER.

NEWS REPORTER:

F*ck man, that's some cool a** sh*t you just said. Now everyone will want to sit their a** down for three hours and watch Django Unchained...

QUENTIN TARANTINO

Any other questions, mother f*cker?

NEWS REPORTER

(humbled by greatness)

Sh*t yea - what the f*ck is it with the guns, man?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

I have answered that question before, but to respect any newcomers to my art I'll tell you. I use my themes to bring the mother f*cking world together to discuss important topics - in this instance slavery -  and at times treat that with a certain dose of realism. But my use of violence which eventually is used to subvert this theme - and remind the audience we are in the realms of fantasy - is uniformly cartoon-like. Any mother f*cker takes my violent sh*t seriously is f*cking f*cked in the mother f*cking head.

Of course that's not how it happened. Quentin Tarantino, interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on the Channel 4 News, made himself look less like some sort of kitch daddy-cool character from some exploito-movie/airport novel, and more like a complete tool.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

But why are you so sure that there's no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

I don't... I'm going to tell you why I'm so sure? Don't ask me a question like that -- I'm not biting. I refuse your question.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

Why?

QUENTIN TARANTINO

Because I refuse your question. I'm not your slave and you're not my master. You can't make me dance to your tune. I'm not a monkey.

And then, later...

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

It's interesting that you have a different view, and I'm just trying to explore that.

QUENTIN TARANTINO

And I don't want to! 'Cause I'm here to sell my movie. This is a commercial for the movie - make no mistake.

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY

So you don't want to talk about anything serious?

It all gets much, much worse, and I've popped the video of Tarantino's PR mishap below.

But what has happened here - I mean other than Tarantino acting like a big mother f*cking baby?

Simple. He has either not been told, or not realised he is on a news programme. Now his little outburst might well have worked if Channel 4 News relied entirely on film stars. I can imagine if he had had a similar outburst at a movie magazine like Total Film or Empire it would have, quite understandably, made them sweat. But this is the news - they are in the business of what is relevant to them and nothing else. What's more, they don't have to care if they offend someone, because they will just do a story about that - and that was precisely what they did. Because his outburst was in the public interest (or at least interesting to the public) - people spend money on him, and idolise him, and this is how he acts on one of the country's main news programmes.

And what's more, all those precious fragile souls they do offend on the news - such as some easily offended politicians - will come back for more. Why? Because at the end of the day news programmes are objective arbiters... or as objective as it gets. Quentin Tarantino was wrong. He was not in a commercial. A commercial is what you buy. Commercials mean less in PR terms precisely because they are controlled, because they do exactly what you tell them to. News is much more valuable than a commercial to politicians, to businesses and, yes, to film makers, than any other way of getting your message out because it is scrutinised first. 

The solution in this case would have been for Tarantino to hold his temper  To explain that yes, the US premiere for his film was cancelled in light of the recent school shootings in Newtown - and he doesn't believe his films and real violence are linked - but right now he doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to talk about it because he does not want to court publicity on the back of a genuine tragedy. At another time and another place he will be happy to discuss it... just not now.

Maybe that would have been enough, maybe not. He should have remembered, above all else, that you don't control the news. It's what makes it so special. But what it would mean would be that he could have kept his film - and not his craggy moment - in the limelight. 

Any last words of PR advice? Maybe one of his own scripts sums it up better than I can. These lines from Pulp Fiction, when Jules tries to stop a heist in a burger bar getting out of control:

JULES

We're gonna be like three little Fonzies here. And what's Fonzie like? Come on Yolanda what's Fonzie like? 

YOLANDA

Cool? 

JULES

What?

YOLANDA

He's cool. 

JULES

Correctamundo. And that's what we're gonna be. We're gonna be cool. 

My gift of Christmas fury... internet bile and the folly of social media “promotions”

I like to think of business, a lot of the time, as a Tamagotchi pet.

For those who don’t know what a Tamagotchi is, it was how my female friends at college passed time in between lessons. Tamagotchi are kind of a keyring Pokemon, but without seizure-inducing animation. They start as a sort of monochrome ink blob in the middle of the screen, but then over time as you press buttons to feed it, nurture it and clean up after it, a creature eventually “grows”.

Good metaphor for business, see?

But god help you if it fell into the hands my old college mate Darren. I call him ‘Darren’ for the purposes of this article, because his name was Darren.

Darren was asked to mind a Tamagotchi pet for one of our friends when she went into class. When she came back, had it been a real animal it probably would have been featured in one of those behind-the-scenes animal rights circus videos you see on YouTube. You can imagine the voiceover, whispered nervously as they scan the area with their iPhone:

“Just look at how this animal has been kept, it’s making my stomach turn. There’s excrement everywhere. It seems to have been fed continuously until its insides have burst - my god who would do that?”

Companies that put their brand in the full glare of social media, expecting to be ‘Liked’ without thinking are effectively handing their Tamagotchi to a 17-year-old Darren.

Let the hate begin...

You see I used to curse my Facebook friends with genuine bile when they ’Liked’ some corporate page put together by a huge business machine, making it pop up on your news feed. It’s bizarre, but ‘Likes’ have caught the imagination of some companies, as if clicking the button on Facebook amounts to you digging in your wallet. It really doesn’t.

But then I saw the result of their social media tomfoolery.

Take Amazon’s promoted post: “Thumbs up for Christmas gifts that let you choose what you want the most. You can send Amazon UK Christmas Gift Cards in greeting cards or gift boxes with FREE One-Day Delivery, or e-mail or print your own immediately.”

Now I’m not too sure what that really means - presumably if you “Like” that page you get free delivery. Maybe not, it’s not clear. What was clear was the hate thrown back at this post in its own comments section. Here are two of my favourites, unedited:

Neil Sharples hope amazon board have a rotten crhristmas,piss off and pay the same% in tax the average person on the street has to pay.

and...

Pete Hodge Don#t use amazon until thery pay theoir corp[oration tax and stop fiddling the Briths people. *

I presume the Briths people are some sort of endangered intergalactic race, like in Avatar.

Anyway, there is lots more where that came from - out of 247 comments 23 were what I could deem as friendly to Amazon.

Then there were the mostly baffled responses to the Sony Smartwatch advert which shoved its impertinent mush into my timeline. The Sony Smartwatch is, it would seem, like having all your phone apps squashed into a small square box on your wrist, which connects to your phone anyway, rendering it pointless. Swimming amongst the hostile and confused comments - including one pointing to a poor review from The Gadget Show - the Sony social media types had clearly not grasped sarcasm. This became painfully apparent when one person said:

Lewis Phillips Do they just tell the time too~?

And they replied:

Sony Mobile GB Hey Lewis, yes! They certainly do!

But the king of the crop is Vodaphone, trying to advertise a SIM card. They had about two comments which I think were positive, and the rest - more than 200 - weren’t. Karma has to be paid back in full for making Yoda sell out with all the grace of a flea-bitten dancing bear. And it is paying, with Fails like:

Eva Chung HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOO???????? Why do I still have no signal. Carry on ignoring my tweets and post on here!!!!

and...

Anthony Ashcroft Get off my news feed

and

To which the bots at Vodaphone HQ replied, like some bizarre mannequin voiced using a stuck record:

Vodafone UK Hi guys, Thanks for your comments. For anyone having network issues please could you post on the eForum using this template - http://goo.gl/KK4vp ? You can use the 'Got a Question?' app at the top of this page to post your query .

Some of my favourites however are those people who just don’t get it. They interrupt the timeline, responding like disembodied ghost-voices on a crackly radio, as if talking to people long dead in another dimension. They just pop up in the comments, amid all the bile. Imagine all the fury being thrown at Vodaphone and then, suddenly, messages like this appear from nowhere:

Susan Baldock Merry Christmas Margaret have a great time x

also...

Norman Brierley hello stranger xx

and...

Keith Lodwick Hiya mate, when we having a beer?

None I hasten to add are talking to each other, just rattling lost voices speaking into the ether - in the middle of a social media campaign which is out of control, and nose diving straight into the ground.

Next time, perhaps it is best to take your Tamagotchi to class. Perhaps you could both learn something.

Note
* Lawyers, before you even think about me reproducing "offensive comments" 1) the comments were on your page and in effect, therefore, made by yourselves under publishing law 2) They're virtually indecipherable anyway so grow up

Leveson? Believe it or not, papers have enough to contend with...

So Leveson has written his report, and as I write controversy is erupting about whether we should have a state-regulated press - but the reality is the press was never free.

As much as I love papers - the reason I have gone back into journalism - the fact remains that the explosive investigations you see in telly like State Of Play hardly happen. At least not in the way most people in the industry would want.

Why? Because reporters don’t have the legal protection, or the resources, to expose wrongdoing on a huge scale, or on a regular basis.

There is no enshrined protection for free speech in the UK, and the newspapers themselves are on many occasions fighting against market and financial pressures from the outset.

Anyone who thinks there is free speech in the UK is wrong - and you only have to think about what free speech really is to realise that. We often imagine free speech is something noble, like being Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and every time you exercise free speech it is some tub-thumping rally-raising speech which borrows deftly from Henry V. Actually it means we allow racists, homophobes, and all sorts of unsavoury types to say what they want. This is touted but not supported. For instance we have no real written constitution, and what we do have, the European Convention, reads like the morals of Spiderman - as written by a council employee:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. (my use of bold)

With great half-arsed power comes great responsibility indeed. In fact for free speech to abide, we need to let scummers have their say, safe in the knowledge we can say something back. But instead we have introduced a raft of laws against “inciting” hatred. The law seems to decide that people are not intelligent enough to have their own common sense, and that for some reason we cannot take whatever a loony says with a pinch of salt – when on the contrary most of us do.

In America, the freedom of speech is protected by their constitution’s First Amendment. This specifically includes the press, putting off people who might want to hammer newspapers in court without a damn good reason. The claimant has to prove that the newspaper was both malicious and reckless in compiling its report. This means the doors are opened for stronger investigation by reporters, and fosters an image of reporting synonymous with prestigious accolades such as the Pulitzer Prize. And unlike the famed ‘libel tourism’ which takes place on our shores – because the laws are so stringent, the rewards largely uncapped and the onus entirely upon the defendant - in America, even if you win, you have to pay your lawyers.

Now I’m not saying this is some sort of utopia. Court cases have had to be re-scheduled and lawsuits have raged as a result. Roy Greenslade put together an attack on the American press in his blog on the Guardian website to illustrate this very point. He looked at how a paper in South Carolina, The State, seemed to point the finger of blame at a man before a trail had even gone ahead. However, a reply from an American reader said the example he used was a rare exception, rather than a rule for US papers.

Contrast this with the press in the UK. There isn’t the support in law, and libel lawsuits are rife as I mentioned. In fact, libel tourism means an American can take out lawsuits because an article, okay in his own country, has landed on our shores. Now I’m not saying that we should do away with the Defamation Act and the Contempt of Court Act – I think they have their merits for obvious reasons - but it means papers have more than enough to contend with. If the law does its job we shouldn’t have to worry.

This on its own would be fine, but the “chilling effect” of the law, and the power of the markets, can make things even more difficult for some of our country’s newsdesks. The centrepiece to Guardian reporter Nick Davies’ book, Flat Earth News, lays bare the unwritten rules which often constrain the nationals. Given half a chance, any right minded desk will break those rules where they can, and every day most of them will try to. It is fair to say that every day there will be some that succeed, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore this undue pressure. Why? Because it comes from Joe public – and I count myself in that number too. People eager to slam the press if they get it wrong, and happy to buy only what they want to read. I’ve certainly been guilty of those two things throughout this whole enquiry - jumping on the bandwagon, and reading the reports I want to believe – but this is the effect it has; the unwritten rules:

1) Run cheap stories – stories which are quick to churn out and safe in the sense they won’t cripple the paper with a lawsuit.

2) Select safe facts. Papers are often put off if an “official” source denies facts, even if it was a report of men, women and children being herded into a room and being shot by American troops in Iraq.

3) Avoid the electric fence – in other words don’t upset those with the power to disrupt media.... such as the law.

4) Select safe ideas which don’t offend popular opinion.

5) Always give both sides of the story; even if what the other side says is nonsense and clearly flies in the face of the facts.

6) Give them what they want – even if it is putting Beckham higher in the run of news than deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan

7) The bias against truth – there is not the taste for stories which have a mundane basis, and require sifting various facts. Often pieces are hooked around big events, and photo-friendly stories, rather than careful nit-picking through the facts to deliver a strong overview.

8) Give them what they want to believe in – keep up the revenues. Did your paper come out too strong against the Iraq war? Circulation suffering? Better reverse that position then, like the Daily Mirror.

9) Go with the moral panic. Enough said.

10) Ninja turtle syndrome. The argument is succinct. Ninja Turtles are rubbish. But if everyone has one you don’t want to be left out – the same often applies to news stories.

Now people and papers do fight their way through the gaps. They expose wrongdoing time and again, but not on the same regularity as any reporter, editor or proprietor would want deep down. The relationship can work as it is – the paper watches the parliament and the law, the law watches the papers and parliament, and parliament is free to publicly criticise the law and the papers. But, as the inquiry has shown, no two should be too close to one another.

If the law and Parliament drive the news agenda, next time your paper is delivered, it might not come in a plastic cover, but a straightjacket.

Can Fox News make you thick and thin at the same time?

It seemed like any other afternoon. But Andrea Tantaros shocked a nation when she became the week’s second news anchor to be struck down by NAFS.

Tantaros, co-host of Fox News show The Five made a light comment amid the gentle right-wing repartee. Amongst the usual casual fare, this time about the poor living off food stamps, she said:  “I should try it because, do you know how fabulous I'd look? I mean, the camera adds ten pounds. It really does. I would be looking great.”

But as the condition known as NAFS set in, it prevents her from justifying her alarming comment. Instead, it sounds as if she has decided food stamps are a new slimming plan for masochists. NAFS, or News Anchor Forgetfulness Syndrome (geddit?) freezes neurons like a snowman’s knackers - right at the moment a person should explain comments... comments which, on their own, sound like something uttered by things in your most shiver-soaked nightmares.

The reaction? What do you expect? Twitter, to begin with, lit up with the ferocity of a Hammer film lynch mob. Women’s site Jezebel said she deserved the heartless demon-lady award, saying of Tantaros “she giggled. She fucking giggled at the thought of slumming it that hard.”

Luckily, this cruel bout of NAFS later released its grip on Tantaros’ mind, and she used Twitter to explain what she was saying: “Food stamps were sold as a fitness plan to "look great" by our liberal, dense government - remember?”

She is actually right – bizarrely enough, there is an obscure radio advert which says someone looks great because they have been on the food stamps plan. Some might needlessly complicate the matter – saying perhaps she should have well, you know, made reference to the largely unnoticed advert to explain what she meant. Or maybe that there is a difference between “looking great” and losing weight. Thankfully, as the argument raged on, her very adult use of capitals on Twitter meant everyone could just SHUT UP.

Unfortunately NAFS affected another Foxreporter the same week. In this case, one brave news anchor forgot to reveal hitherto unknown information – this time to justify a seemingly sexist comment.

Brian Kilmeade said to a caller, when they asked how Fox assembled its news team, that they opened a Victoria's Secret catalogue, and then checked if they could talk and went to college.

NAFS stopped Kilmeade from explaining himself, halting his many quick-witted neurons from justifying what he said. What people didn’t know was that a fellow anchor, Kimberly Guilfoyle, actually was a Victoria’s Secret model years ago. Luckily, this small missing piece of information somehow found its way into the papers in the next couple of days. Some might say it was coincidence, and that reporters happened to look into something on the back of Kilmeade’s bonkers comment – that perhaps he knew nothing about Guilfoyle. Some might say we don’t need to know anything like this about Guilfoyle herself, and that the past is the past. Even more might say was that even if Kilmeade was armed with this information, and explained it on air, what he said was sexist. I would say that these jelly-legged girly-men don’t appreciate the important house-style of Fox punditry, or appreciate how NAF is triggered.

NAFS - the cause

So how does my not-at-all fictional NAFS come about? I think it is from the ongoing stresses Fox presenters tirelessly endure, to bring people the best in 24-hour punditry. Punditry means you have to have some sort of opinion, and at Fox it may well mean you have to run this in line with a memo sent down by Fox management, who clearly want the best for their media teams, and to guide them in the kindest way that they can. The writer of Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, highlights one which said everyone had to refer to the “political courage and practical cunning” of the Bush administration throughout one particular day. I’m sure that, caught in amongst all these news stories you have to report on, this particular insight is easy to forget. But the memo is a great way of getting people to remember what’s important. And fun too: like a news version of Balls of Steel.

And an additional stress will have been caused by the mean and nasty things being said about everyone at Fox News. All these “studies” by “academics” and their “facts.” In one of these, the University of Maryland ran a survey on the channel’s viewers to find out the effects of the channel on its audience back in 2004. It said that 67 per cent of respondents thought Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Quaeda – as opposed to 56 per cent at CBS, 49 at NBC, and 16 per cent who just listened to NPR (formerly National Public Radio). Thirty-three percent of Fox viewers had thought Iraq had WMD, when just 11 percent of radio listeners thought this was the case. Meanwhile 35 per cent of Fox fans thought the world wanted the USA to have its war with Iraq, as opposed to 5 per cent NPR.

Equally, they need to deal with mixed and totally unfair attacks on their channel which actually say it makes people thick. These allegations followed two tests of people’s knowledge conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University. Although researcher Prof. Dan Cassino stepped in to rebuff some interpretations of his findings, many of which had said that Fox News makes people stupid, his mincing of words, well, make it worse:

“Overall, Fox viewers were not better or worse than the average respondent at answering the questions. That said, and all salient variables being geekily controlled for, there was not merely a zero effect but a negative effect of Fox News on viewers' ability to answer the questions; meaning that Fox viewers would have done better had they been using almost any other news source, or no news source at all. Results for the similarly partisan MSNBC were... well, similar.”(my italics)

Quickly Fox responded. “Considering FDU's undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling – their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.” Yay Fox! You hit that professor – and about 12,000 students who had nothing to do with the research – where it hurts. And well done on striking back using a sound, reasoned argument.

But things have more recently been made worse by a self professed “mole” called Joe Muto, who had hidden amongst the rank and file at Fox, and stepped forward with his own shocking “opinion”. I’m sure some might say he was on some sort of Democratic mission to destroy the channel, drunk on West Wing box sets. “The people at Fox are not stupid,” he said to the Huffington Post. “They know when they have Dick Morris or one of these other pundits on predicting a landslide victory for Romney, the people behind the scenes know that it's all bluster. They know that this is sort of an entertainment. They know that a lot of these people are just hucksters ... we producers know that this is all a farce. The reason we don't step in and give a reality check to our audience is because that's terrible for ratings.”

Nonsense. How could I possibly share conclusions with this man? I mean, like I told that survey, Romney won... didn’t he?

What journalists want! An interview with a regional business editor

 Ladies and gentlemen, I am waging a war. A war against bad PR.

As you read this, at least four journalists in the UK will have been affected by an episode of bad PR. These episodes can affect the nervous system, forcing muscles in the arm to contract and slam down a phone in seconds. Brief moments of depression are often reported afterwards, where journalists wonder whether it is worth carrying on. Experts often prescribe caffeine straight afterwards to help persuade journalists not to slip too far into this state.

But you and I both know that is just a sticking plaster – one where the sticky stuff is wearing out.

Here are some graphic incidents of bad PR:

Phone call #1

PR person: “Hi I have this story for you, we’re a marketing agency representing a shoe factory in Midsummer and –“

Journalist: “We’re in Oxdown. That’s 80 miles away.”

PR: “Oh, er, sorry… bye” *click*

Phone call #2

Journalist: “This press release you have sent – says in your survey that 60 per cent of 30-year-olds have overdosed on Acme profiteroles and had hot flushes. Were any from our town? The data in it seems a bit general.”

PR person: “Oh, um, er, let me check. Bye” *click* - never rings back

Phone call #3

PR person: “Hi, were you interested in our lifesaving new product?”

Journalist: “Not sure mascara really saves lives. Thank you. Bye.” *click*

Although made “hilarious” for your reading pleasure, these are only slightly altered versions of the real thing – calls made daily from less-good PR folk who have sent out wrong, or frankly meaningless, messages to journalists.

I know, because I endured it as a reporter. As a PR man, it drags what I do into disrepute, or at best mediocrity.

One other person who has dealt with the same thing, and I concede has had much more years in the reporting hotseat, is business editor for the south Humber Bank, Dave Laister. Dave has a wealth of  “unique” reporting experiences. These include everything from being smuggled into a buy-out meeting, wearing a hi-vis 007 henchman overall and, 15 years ago, reporting on A-Level results… as he collected his.

But despite a colourful career, he maintains he is not an expert in business.

“I don’t have a single business qualification to my name – everything I know I have learned from interviews with business owners and their staff. Journalism was what I wanted to do. English was my strongest subject, and reporting was something I was passionate about.”

After five years on newsdesk, Dave felt the draw of the news patch and couldn’t resist taking up a new reporting role.

He took the helm of the business desk, and covers news as it happens across North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire ­– including industrial towns such as Grimsby and Scunthorpe – and includes Immingham, the country’s largest commercial port.

So what makes good news for him?

First it’s not any of my side-splitting examples, above. “We do get PRs acting for companies desperately trying to get free advert in the paper, for something which does not serve the wellbeing of the area. We get PRs sending stuff through which isn’t for the patch, having clearly not looked into the background of where we are,” he said.

“Then there are the odd stories which can get picked up by the national press; surveys which actually have nothing to do with your paper’s town or city. However it’s not obvious one way or another if they are anything to do with your town or city. Not obvious that is, until you ring them. Then the person on the other end of the phone says they will check their details and ring you back. Needless to say they don’t.”

So, if you think you can somehow pull wool over the eyes of someone who checks his emails for breakfast, and has done for 15 years, think again.

So what does work for him? Here is the good news. As a business editor he tries to look at every press release and takes every phone call: “I’d rather get nine pointless phone calls than none at all,” he said. “I’m always looking for a positive story about the area – we’re not redtop hacks who are going to go rummaging through your litter bins. I get no enjoyment in writing a negative piece about the town.”

In fact, it almost makes me wonder what it would be like if a mediocre PR person did get hacked, Leveson inquiry style, by a red top hack.

I guess that’s what media hell will be like – mediocre PRs being hacked by disgraced dead journalists, who will then print erroneous stories about lifesaving Acme profiteroles – before realising they’ve been scooped by a torch-wielding imp. And this goes on, and on, and on. Forever.

I’ve resorted to a “life rant” – read the shocking reason why

As those who read my old blog will know, I like to write about things which address the major issues, and all the moral dilemmas and twisty-turny circumstances which lie behind them. I always see life rants as a bit of a cheat, really, when it comes to blogs. You know what I mean: “I went out last night and it really annoyed me how blah, blah-blah blah blah…”. Where’s the ivory tower narcissism in that?

But, honestly, today my thoughts and language have ended up being those “of the gutter”. And because of that, I see no reason why my blog shouldn’t be of a similar snarky nature.

The cause? Car salesmen. And it is not for the reason you might imagine.

The reason was not because some Del-Boy Arthur Daley 80s wide boy accosted me, then prised money I didn’t have out of my pockets – and then left me cluttering down the road in a banger, with a dribble of telltale diesel coming from the back of it.

The reason is actually the complete opposite. Today I visited five (count ‘em) – that’s FIVE – dealerships with several grand budgeted on a used motor. I was not approached on a single forecourt. I was peered at, smiled at and scowled at, but not once did anybody come up to me and ask if I would like any help.

Must be that I have one of those faces. Maybe being ginger – sorry, I mean strawberry blonde – carries with it an extra ferocity which I take for granted, but which generally makes people freeze with fear. Or maybe it was cold today, and nobody wants to go out in the cold. Except me, with short sleeves; which means it wasn’t that bad.

Thing is these guy were missing a trick. They had a duck in a barrel on a forecourt crying out to spend money on a car (please don’t add all these images up, it just doesn’t work).

In my time I’ve sold suitcases, for no commission, with more passion than these guys have. I actually had a hard case roll off a podium, smack me on the head and I still carried on trying to sell to my customer… until she quietly pointed out there was red on my forehead, and that I should go to hospital, really.

Now I’m not proposing some sort of bootcamp for sales people, where I hurl ignorant abuse at them, chuck large articles at their head and have them picked off by a sniper if they don’t say hello to a dummy customer in 10 seconds (unless by some chance you are from the telly, then maybe I am – call me!). What I’m saying is if someone is stood there trying to look at one of their cars, and the effect of cars is to illicit a look of cluelessness about their face, any salesperson looking on should saunter over and take me for the mug I am.

Now I’m not saying that this is all car salespeople – I’m sure many of them are great – but, and it is a big but, you can have the likes of Mary Portas do intensive work with the government and individual shops, but it is pointless if the people don’t walk the walk and sell afterwards.

There’s a reason I’m upset. I came to the area and covered it as a journalist for years, and watched the recession sink its claws in deep. And I know there are a lot of people who do try to sell in the area as part of their day job, and go home feeling like a failure because they haven’t had a bite. I know that feeling, so it makes it doubly frustrating if there are people; maybe people they work with; who can’t be bothered to venture into 16 degrees centigrade to get that sale.

So I’ll be heading out there again tomorrow, with a wad of virtual cash on my debit card trying to buy a car again. Look out for me if you’re a car salesperson. It’s hard to miss me. ­ I’m tall, “strawberry blonde”, and have a look of cluelessness on my face whenever I look at a car. Move in.