Admen rally to the cause of cutting unwanted teenage pregnancies

Finally, something to cheer up adland: the hunting season is about to reopen. The advertising regulator has just announced it is seeking to abolish 9pm watershed restrictions on TV condom advertising; and may also permit pro-abortion ads for the first time.

Result: hysterical consternation among Catholic and anti-abortion groups. But what do admen care about that? This new development can only mean one thing:  some frenzied pitching – at last! – all in the worthy cause of cutting teenage pregnancies. 

The controversy has been stirred by an outline proposal from the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP), which have decided to review the current advertising rules. We can now expect almost round-the-clock condom advertising – the exception being when programmes are aimed at children under 10. So not during Horrid Henry but straight after GMTV. It's all part of a review of advertising codes which is being put out for public consultation. The scrutiny closes on July 19th.

Currently condoms cannot be advertised on Channel 4 before 7pm and on other channels before 9pm. But the soaring growth of teenage pregnancies has prompted calls for change. (Hands up, by the way, anyone who can remember a condom ad on telly, even after the watershed? I thought so: the manufacturers clearly don't see TV advertising as the way forward.)

Not surprisingly, there has been more outraged opposition than support for these controversial proposals. More particularly for the one that would allow abortion clinics to advertise on TV. The ever-entertaining Tory MP and blogger Nadine Dorries has already registered her disgust. It's  "just plain sick", she says.

"I am quite sure that any adverts will depict smiling pretty nurses, gleaming reception areas and leafy car parks," she writes in her blog. She goes on to complain that the ads will not highlight the risks involved. She's pretty ill-informed on the technicalities, as it happens.

Opening up new categories to advertising might, however, do something to restore confidence in an industry trussed by new legislation and battered by lobby groups calling for ever more stringent curbs. Worthy cause or not.

When will Sugar turn sour?

Maybe it's just reverse psychology. That harassed, careworn fisog is so traced with the parchment lines of gloomy cynicism that, in a curious way, its every appearance on the box acts like an antidote to depression (or rather, since we're talking business here, Depression). Search me for any other convincing reason that explains the charmed life of The Apprentice. 

But success it has been. Sir Alan Sugar's return to BBC1 attracted 8.1 million viewers and a 33% share in the 9pm hour, according to unofficial overnight figures.

Let me offer a heretical opinion: its success won't last. That's not simply because it's a long way through its natural programme cycle as it embarks on a fifth series. But because the format is now too much at variance with reality.

Now, I know what you're going to say. It never was a realistic depiction of any known business environment in the first place. Nor has Sir Alan been a particularly successful entrepreneur, and therefore credible role model. All right, he did make £800m at one point in his career (enough to keep most of us in M&S socks for the rest of our lives) but most of that was in property – wasn't it? – so it doesn't count. In short, the only thing that's ever been real about The Apprentice are the first four letters in 'reality TV'; it's pure entertainment. And, on that level, still pretty funny.

But is it? There comes a point where the camping up no longer hits the spot, or captures the zeitgeist. That point is where the producers fail to realize that they themselves are part of the parody: we've reached it now. The yahoo capitalist culture seeded in Thatcher's eighties, of which Sir Alan is such an eminent example, is curdling in a deepening dyspepsia of public disapproval.  

At the head of the list of emerging anti-heroes is, of course, Sir Fred Goodwin – the supreme demon of unrepentant greed. But where bankers lead, lesser acolytes of the creed are sure to follow. As the 'L' of the Nasty Noughties Depression elongates, so contempt for capitalism's cruder, more benighted evangelists will become commonplace. Just this week the European heads of seriously over-bonused AIG have quit because they can't take the heat any longer and even Ken Clarke is getting flak over his unhealthy interest in offshore "investment". Indeed, (I am indebted to the FT's Lombard for this little gem) we are not far from parliamentary committees beginning their investigation with the following question: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the financial services sector?"

That's not good news for wannabe capitalist attack dogs in search of 15 minutes of fame. And, give it another year, it won't be good news for TV ratings either.

Who rules, suits or creatives? Garry Lace explains

Who really calls the shots at a successful advertising agency, the top suits or the creative supremo? It's a tired old saw which received new stimulus earlier this year at an IPA Client Services debate featuring Robert Senior, ceo SSF Group, and Ed Morris, recently departed executive creative director at Lowe.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Senior flattered to deceive by exalting creative excellence as "the fuel without which the bus goes nowhere." Leaving Morris, cast as patsy, to argue the lame pedestrian virtues of the account man as "grand orchestrator between creativity and commerce." The vote? Er, 44 to 6 in Senior's favour.

But wait just a moment. Doesn't history tell us something entirely different, and isn't Mr Senior the living embodiment of this alternative truth?

I call to witness none other than Garry Lace, one of London's most consummate suits. Lace it was who first highlighted an increasingly bizarre phenomenon in creative agencies: the wilful decision to dispense with chief executives and entrust agency management to the precarious hands of creatives, planners and the like.

For Lace, of course, this unfortunate trend has the poignancy of a parable – with himself cast in the role of Jesus Christ. Look what happened to Lowe after I left, he might say: a creative (Morris) and a planner (Rebecca Morgan) have presided over its ruin. And now just a planner...

Strictly speaking, that's being a bit economical with the truth. Lace's flamboyance was his own undoing; and besides, there was Amanda Walsh in between.

But in a wider sense, he has a point. Euro RSCG, which has recently dispensed with the services of its chief executive, Mark Cadman, seems embarked on the same path of self-destruction – led by a planner (Russ Lidstone) and a creative (Mark Hunter).

Self-serving though these words of Lace may partly be, I feel I ought to quote them in full. "I've always worked on the assumption that companies need a leader" he says. "That person for whom people will work harder and care more because they are able to construct a vision for the business based on experience and instinct and articulate it in a powerful and motivating way. That person who proves to be a magnet for talent and clients alike and for whom nothing is impossible."

Lace may yet get an opportunity to prove his point. He has been languishing recently as managing director and part-owner of Admedia the "out-of-home" (read toilet advertising) specialist. But rumour is the strangest thing. It has thrown him into a start-up venture with Robert Campbell, former creative powerhouse of RKCR and current co-founder with ex-Times man Toby Constantine of tgi50, a website portal aimed at the 'just over' 50s.

Even stranger is another rumour: the one that links Mark Cadman with ... Ed Morris, in a similar venture. If either of these ventures gets going, maybe we'll be a little closer to the truth. Who really does rule at an ad agency, the suit, or the creative?