NMA is the trade magazine of the UK new media industry. 'Hayward on Advertising', a monthly polemic on the excesses of traditional advertising, has been running since 2002.

Fever Pitch
More than anything else, clients desperately want consumers to care about their product or even, frankly, to give a toss. The logic seems to be that, by co-opting the public's genuine passion for sport they can help us to understand how truly, viscerally, orgasmically exciting their new fixed rate mortgage really is.

Getting on my Wiki
Ad agencies have a unique hubris about their ideas and intellects. Account men who consider themselves sharper negotiators than diamond dealers, creatives who genuinely believe they have the artistic chops to leave Hollywood in the dust and planners whose huge brains would dwarf a mere Hawking.

Soho interlude
The venue is one of the private members' clubs or, if it's lunch, one of the industry favoured Soho troughs where women with prominent tendons and a Botox rictus push salads around plates in the company of richer and uglier men.

Schroedinger's cat
In the room, at the time, was a spectacularly dim airtime sales bloke. He was in his fifties, deeply conservative, faintly malodorous and had only kept his job through his ability to match the client drink for drink without forgetting to get the order signed. He wore a grey suit of abiding ghastliness in some revolting manmade fibre and a Teflon tie redolent of vomit. Let’s call him Reg.

Ten things you don't want to hear in a brainstorm
In 1948, Alex Faickney Osborn, the 'O' in BBDO, published a book called 'Your Creative Power' in which he first laid out the principles of a new method for generating ideas. It is, perhaps, fortunate that Osborn passed away in the 60's so he never had to witness what agencies have since done to his original concept of 'Brainstorming'.