Peter York on Ads: How to drop the trousers and get hip

Crazy Frog

My new little business is going fantastically well. Community Coaches helps unordinary people to relate to ordinary ones through the medium of popular culture. It's not only politicians who have to sound human on TV, even though they haven't been further than the Cinnamon Club for years. It's people who lead in industry and commerce.

My new little business is going fantastically well. Community Coaches helps unordinary people to relate to ordinary ones through the medium of popular culture. It's not only politicians who have to sound human on TV, even though they haven't been further than the Cinnamon Club for years. It's people who lead in industry and commerce.

In they come from Woking and Maidenhead in the corporate Jaguar, constantly on the telephone, doing the numbers. When do they have the time to listen to BBC Radio London, talking to cabbies and plumbers about TV trivia and 90s music, the sort of references you can make to a room of middle-aged employees as you ask them for voluntary redundancies?

We were pioneers in Mockney for all (we've been working like made on nice young Mr Cameron and his friend Mr Osborne, the baronets' boys, taking the edge off slowly - nothing too sudden, too insincere).

For the past couple of months we've been doing workshops on Crazy Frog at the Anglo-French University of South Kensington as part of our Deconstructing the Language of New Media course. It's always good for a laugh if you're running a big meeting and a phone goes off.

The new Crazy Frog commercial from the people who bring you the Crazy Frog ringtones, Jamster, doubles as a wonderful New Age business case study too. How a 17-year-old Swede made a funny two-stroke sound, somebody else, also young and Swedish, added an animated frog drawn with a new software package and the whole thing took over the world, including that No 1 single which outsold Coldplay by a mile. Many of our clients, men in their late forties with teenagers in private education, thought they'd got the hang of the modern world with Coldplay. We use Crazy Frog, who doesn't wear any trousers so you can see his willy, to explain just how deeply out of touch they'd been.

Peter@sru.co.uk