How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)
Bruce Robinson's film in which an advertising executive, unable to write a campaign for a spot cream, has a breakdown and grows a talking boil on his neck that argues for the industry he has come to hate. It is the only genuinely angry comedy about advertising, and it is about what the work does to the person doing it.
Trailer: Original theatrical trailer, Arrow Video.
What it is
Richard E. Grant as Dennis Bagley, from the director of Withnail and I. The boil develops a face and a voice, expresses everything Bagley has suppressed about selling, and eventually takes over.
What it gets right about the trade
The moral injury is the subject. Not whether advertising is good or bad for society, but what it costs the individual to spend years arguing for things they do not believe. That is a real occupational hazard and this is the only film that treats it as the main event.
The language is exact. Bagley’s monologues are a precise parody of agency speech, the rhetorical escalation, the self-importance, the way a trivial brief gets discussed as though it were a moral question. Anyone who has sat in those meetings recognises the register immediately.
The split is the right metaphor. The part of him that can sell anything does not go away when he rejects it. It becomes a separate voice and it is more confident than he is.
What it gets wrong
It is a rant, and it does not distinguish between advertising that is harmful and advertising that is merely commerce. Selling a spot cream is treated with the same horror as selling a war, which weakens rather than sharpens the argument.
It is also wildly uneven in tone and the second half loses control. That is arguably the point and it is still hard to watch.
The one part worth showing a team
Bagley’s monologue about the function of advertising, delivered at speed and with total conviction.
It is a better articulation of the cynical case against the trade than anyone hostile to it has managed, and it comes from inside. Useful to show precisely because it is not a straw man.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
This one is about retention and it is not usually read that way.
The condition the film describes, being required to argue daily for things you do not believe, is a real cause of good people leaving commercial roles. It rarely appears in an exit interview, because it sounds self-indulgent and because nobody wants to say it to the person who set the brief.
The practical question for you: do the people writing your marketing believe the claims in it? If they do not, you will lose them, and before you lose them the work will get worse in a way that is hard to diagnose, because unconvinced copy is technically fine and does nothing.
The cheap test is to ask a writer to defend a claim without using the words from the brief. If they cannot, either the claim is not true or they have not been told why it is.
Sources
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, 1989. Richard E. Grant as Dennis Bagley.