A stroke of genius at Marketing Week! They get rid of the only thing worth reading

For over ten years, at varying intervals, I wrote a column for Marketing magazine.

Such are the vagaries of human memory that some people still think I do – even though I haven’t for nearly ten years.

Eventually I wrote something so rude about a friend of the proprietor’s that they fired me, and I was replaced by a business school professor.

It was not a bad move, as besides being younger than me, with good looks and lots of hair, he is – unlike all most all his confreres - an excellent writer, and more subtle in his insults than I ever was. .

But during the period when I wrote my column, there were only two writers on marketing whom I admired and envied.

One was Jeremy Bullmore, former chairman of J. Walter Thompson, whose sharp intelligence and feline wit never fail to delight and amuse.

The other was Iain Murray, who, week after week, hilariously exposed the follies of the marketing industry, treating it with the contempt so many practitioners so richly deserve.

Compared to the tedious literary ullage that composed the rest of the magazine he shone out like a good deed in a naughty world. He was, by far, the only thing worth reading in its pages.

I never held a candle to him. Week after week In would read his stuff and chortle happily.

Now, I hear, they have fired him. Lunatics.

You do not save a publication (or product) by degrading it; a fact which many firms should bear in mnd in these tricky times