You can take the boy out of advertising, but you can’t take the copywriter out of the middle-aged man. I was standing on a street corner in London when I discovered this. I had just been told by a Harley Street specialist that the biopsy of what my GP had taken for a harmless bump in my throat had shown it to be a very aggressive cancer, and that even with the vigorous treatment the specialist was now urging, my chances of seeing the year out were not great. I suspect most people in receipt of such information would have left that clinic asking themselves questions like, ‘How long do I have left?’ and ‘How am I going to tell my children?’ Instead, as I emerged onto the pavement, I happened to glance up at a wall plaque and found myself thinking, with the same satisfaction I get cracking a headline, ‘It shouldn’t be called Harley Street; it should be called Medicine Avenue’.

That was fourteen years ago, but I know my inner wordsmith is still alive and well because it announced itself just as forcibly a couple of months ago when I saw the first of a series of full-page advertisements in the Australian announcing Qantas’s new direct flights to Europe. If you don’t remember seeing this ad yourself I wouldn’t be at all surprised, because this was the headline: ‘Flying to over 95+ destinations across Australia and around the world including Paris from July 2024’. The visual accompanying this dreary, witless, tautological (‘over 95’ or ‘95+’, please, but not both) word salad was only marginally more engaging: An aerial stockshot of the French capital with a Qantas Airbus 380 photoshopped in at an altitude which, had it been a real plane on a real flight would have caused mass Parisian panic.

It didn’t make me panic, though – it just made me angry. Not as a quondam employee of an agency which used to win awards with the advertising it created for our national carrier, but as a humble Qantas shareholder. You don’t have to read the business pages to know how much scandal and poor governance have devalued the Qantas brand over the last few years – and that restoring confidence in our national carrier is a priority of the post-Joyce management. You don’t need to have read a recent article in the Australian’s marketing section to know that advertising which isn’t in any way ‘creative’ has now been proved to be a waste of money. And you don’t have to work in marketing to know that full pages in the Australian aren’t cheap (they start at around $30k, since you ask). I have no idea what the advertising agency responsible for this particular ad got paid. But I do know it was given a brief which asked for an ad telling Australians they can now fly non-stop to one of the world’s most vibrant cities – and this was the best it could do. I could have given ChatGPT the same brief and gotten half a dozen more engaging, memorable headlines back in ten minutes. But I had time on my hands, and my blood was up, so I knocked out a few myself:

Qantas’s Paris service starts in July; that’ll make the Australian winter Less Miserable.

Flying Qantas has always been a sensible choice; now it’s also a Seine option.

Bastille Day in France; best deal day in Australia.

And then I emailed them to a senior member of Qantas’s marketing department, with a note waiving any fee should they decide to use any of them in subsequent ads in their campaign. And when that email was not answered, and the next ad in the campaign proved to be even more boring and even more ignorable than the first one, I sent a copy of the same email to a member of the Qantas board who once worked for an agency which was famous for creating highly memorable, engaging and effective ads for its clients. A man who, moreover, is now a panellist on a TV show which assesses the memorability and effectiveness of Australian advertising. But that email, too, was ignored as completely as, I fear, those Qantas ads were. Go, as they say, figure.

As a shareholder, I hope my assessment of the effectiveness of Qantas’s current advertising has proved wrong. As a copywriter, I will certainly refrain from offering them unsolicited creative assistance. But as a frequent traveller to Europe, like so many other Australians who used to love Qantas, I will continue to choose airlines that I can at least like.