So #BeatPhil. This came up on twitter last night, but it’s been annoying me for a while.
Alternatively, #BeatPhil by rejecting the implied link between income and human worth pic.twitter.com/8bV7GNuKK3
— Nathan Midgley (@nathanmesq) May 9, 2014
“Phil” is a character the London School of Business & Finance’s ad agency has come up. We are told that he earns more money than we do, and we ought to “beat” him. As a character, he is granted a few characteristics – apparently he uses slightly annoying corporatespeak jargon, and he has a mildly eccentric sense of fashion.
But a business school can hardly object to corporatespeak. So the only way Phil is identified is by the few traces of individuality, however pathetic, he has retained, which we are invited to mock.
Clearly, we are going to beat Phil by eliminating anything similar in our own personalities, and cultivating a niceness as blank as, say, Nick Clegg’s. As any good resistance-to-interrogation instructor would say, we are called on to be the grey man.
It has been intelligently pointed out that #BeatPhil is a hashtag that leads only to itself, not to the LSBF’s website or something similar, and is therefore a poor call-to-action. But this makes perfect sense if we understand the ad as being directed to the wider public, a call to beat your inner Phil. It’s your invitation to join the pod people.
I’m seeing a fairly prominent url (BeatPhil.com) on the poster too. At a guess that is the main call-to-action, I think the hashtag is just an attempt to get people tweeting about it.
I thought the point about Phil was that he was younger than you. It’s going for the resentful passed-over young-middle-aged demographic.
In which case, the visual language is badly off target – Phil is a caricature 1980s advertising exec, basically inspired by someone like Rory Sutherland.
Exactly! Phil is the image that a mid-forties man with a stalled career sees when he thinks “irritating trendy young man who has taken the promotion that would rightfully be mine”.