Beating the billboredom

Once you’re a jaded 37 year old like me, it takes a lot for a bit of commercial writing to stop you in your tracks. But that happened to me on my walk to work last week.

I was sauntering round the Elephant & Castle roundabout (oh, the glamour!) and saw a billboard for HSBC. It featured a man with a little girl on his shoulders, but that wasn’t what got me. It was this line:

Raising a business.

The second hardest job in the world.

That’s it exactly, I thought to myself. As we’ve taken The Writer from three people in a chaotic serviced office to the slick multinational it is today (ho, ho), it’s been by turns exhilarating, frustrating, fascinating. So yes, like raising a child. It’s a simple idea, but one that I’d never really thought of, or put so succinctly. And even though I know how the ad writing game works, it really does make me think someone somewhere at HSBC knows what it’s like.

So well done to that copywriter. You gave an old hand a pause for thought.