A splash of mischief, a few pinches of salt, some soupcons of absurdity and you have a recipe for capturing attention, a mystical mixture that will poke us out of our platitudinous plodding along the straight and narrow.
The ad agency Mischief @No Fixed Address has skyrocketed to the top of the wildly hip, heraldic heap with its bold concepts and razor-sharp strategy, also with, unlike my blog, an ego-free M.O.
Unlike Mischief, my Madden Mischief often casts me in a starring, albeit sometimes mischievous role.
Either I’m interviewing Putin casting myself as his befuddled crisis manager asking him why he’s so blatantly cruel and absurdly ruthless, or I’m castigating fellow condo dwellers for electing friends and nice people to command aged armies in the battle for their lives against corrosion from salt air eating away at the steel rebar holding together their atrophied buildings.
I’ll explain how along Florida’s shores condos once in a while collapse due to neglect or incompetence with sorrowfully fatal consequences as happens when condo residents elect those to serve on their boards of directors based mostly on how friendly and cheerful they are. One of my books is a satiric, whodunit called King of the Condo where condo commandoes are trying to assassinate the president for daring to assess them to pay for building improvements.
Today the Mischief story is music to my ears for according to one of my favorite publications, Ad Age, when laid off as chief creative officer of BBDO in New York in April 2020, Greg Hahn was the ad industries “poster child of pandemic casualties.”
Less than two months later, Hahn reemerged as Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Mischief with a new purpose and M.O., partnering with indie Canadian agency No Fixed Address. Together they opened first U.S. outpost of the ad agency he named after my favorite word, Mischief.
“Fearlessness,” said Ad Age, characterized the agency’s brow-raising, occasionally controversial ideas. In its first few months, Mischief was pranking kids with Capri Sun packs full of water (for a good cause).
More notoriously, it asked consumers to “Send Noods” on behalf of Kraft Mac & Cheese, a campaign that riled certain moms and QAnon groups, yet ultimately was a banquet-size business success.
In 2021, the ideas got even bigger and bolder: a shaving cream line for Eos with the NSFW name “Bless Your F#@%ing Cooch;” a seltzer launch for Molson Coors’ miller Genuine Draft—all the way into outer space.
Then came the campaign for Jay-Z’s cannabis brand Monogram that challenged local weed legislation by juxtaposing it with more “lax” restrictions around bestiality, incest and cannibalism.
Mischief topped Ad Age’s 2022 A-list and Ad Age proclaimed Mischief Ad Agency of the Year.
Good for mischief.
Here’s what I wrote when I started my blog MaddenMischief a half dozen years ago.
Madden is hoppin’ mad these days. If he’s not chortling over current events, poking fun and satirizing them, he’s plain mad about the dissention dividing America and the unceasing log jam between Democrats and Republicans in Congress blocking such elemental progress as fixing and replacing America decaying infrastructure.
Madden is the modern Howard Beale, the fictional character from the film Network (1976) who billed himself as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves.” Beale exhorted his TV Network viewers to stick their heads out of their windows and yell at top of their lungs one of the most iconic lines in film history:
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Now Madden who was irritated and sick to his stomach over the insurrection at the capitol, he is fuming over the paralyzing politics that’s preventing even an investigation on one of the gravest attacks on our democracy.
So here cometh the Mad Prophet of the Blogwaves: Madden Mischief.
Dare read what Madden has to yell at the top of his lungs out his Internet window about unrelentingly senseless and raucous political seasons.
Besides an inveterate blogger, Tom Madden is an author of countless published articles and five books, including his latest, WORDSHINE MAN, available in April on Amazon. He is the founder and CEO of TransMedia Group, an award-winning public relations firm serving clients worldwide since 1981 and has conducted remarkably successful media campaigns and crisis management for America’s largest companies and organizations.