CLOSE-UP: ON THE CAMPAIGN COUCH...WITH JB.

Q: Do you think that taking media salespeople out to foreign climes on grand piss-ups is a legitimate use of a training budget? I only ask because I'm not sure whether to organise one or spend the cash sending everyone on PowerPoint courses.

A: The invention of PowerPoint was expected to raise the finished appearance of presentations to professional level. And so it has. It has also set terrifying new standards of opacity, indiscipline and mind-numbing tedium. This is not the fault of PowerPoint. This is the fault of people who have learnt how to make PowerPoint presentations without having learnt how to make presentations.

Consider the phrase Visual Aid. These words are meant to remind us that non-verbal images have a complementary value to words in assisting the swift exchange of information and ideas. Because everyone has learnt how to write PowerPoint slides on their laptops, PowerPoint slides are not only exclusively verbal but also contain ten times as many words as the recommended maximum. (Five.)

PowerPoint presenters then very slowly read out the 50 words that shouldn't have been there in the first place - but seldom in the same order. Furthermore, the freedom to rewrite your presentation in the taxi guarantees last- minute cock-ups.

Take them on a piss-up.

Q: Reg Starkey writes: I'm the creative director in the London office of Millennium, a Yorkshire-based communications group. Campaign sees me as just a veteran copywriter and it just as a direct marketing agency. I'm over 50. It specialises in the over-50s. Will 2003 be the year the world wakes up to the mature market opportunity?

A: Dear Reg, many thanks for your kind enquiry. What a stripling you are, to be sure; too young, perhaps, to understand the full implications of your own question. It's not that the world is unaware of the mature market opportunity. It's simply that the world is utterly baffled as to how to exploit that opportunity.