The road to Gruen

Sell The Gruen Transfer to us. It's on after Spicks and Specks and if you're lazy you don't have to turn your TV over.

Where did the idea for the show come from? I believe it was inside a Christmas bonbon. No, Andrew Denton originally came up with the idea to do a show that gave people the tools to understand advertisements in the same way that Frontline gave people the tools to understand current affairs.

And now the format has been sold to other countries, right? Yes, which means that like Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum, I will get to see international versions of me.

Were you surprised by the success of the first series? Totally, because I have a general theory that anything that's popular is complete and utter fucking rubbish, and anything that's good nobody ever knows about.

Is there a serious point behind the show? I was a little sceptical about advertising infiltrating every aspect of our society. You can't look anywhere without it being an ad these days. I read the other day that they're putting ads on airbags now. Surely, when you've been in an automobile crash and the airbag's gone off, the last thing you really want to do is go "Oh, I feel like a Coke!"

Maybe an ad for Specsavers instead?
We've never critically engaged with advertising as consumers, and I think this show give you the tools to critically engage with it. Now, hopefully the more educated people are about the ways that things are being sold to them, the higher the impetus will be on the advertisers to make sure that they make better ads.

Did you learn anything from the first series that you could exploit for personal gain? I often joke to Andrew and producer Jon Casimir that at the end of the show we should take everything that we've learned and start our own boutique ad agency and make a shitload of money. I've learned a lot about the way things like fear and hope can be used in ads. I can't watch, say, a toilet cleaner ad without thinking "OK, they're playing up to the fear of this woman being a bad mother." It's a lot harder for ads to manipulate you once you're aware what they're trying to do.

Is this a show that only the ABC could do because they don't carry advertising? Well, someone from Channel Nine did say to me recently – and this is an exact quote – "Fuck you: not only does your show out-rate the shows on Channel Nine at the same time, but you can show more ads in a half hour than we could ever get away with." You can't talk about why Colgate has 26 types of toothpaste on the shelf, and then go to a Colgate ad. For that reason, I think it only works on the ABC.

Tell us some of The Pitch subjects the ad agencies will have to try and sell in the new series. In the first episode, they have to convince people that plastic bags are a good idea. In the second episode we try to convince Australians to hate Don Bradman. Another one is compulsory euthanasia for people over 80. All the really dark ones come to me at 2 o'clock in the morning, and poor producer gets these emails from me where I say we should try to encourage people to binge drink.

What are you favourite ads of all time? Paul Hogan's "G'day LA" ad is up there. And there used to be a great XXXX ad where these guys in the middle of the desert were loading up the back of their ute with XXXX and it was stacked sky high, and one of them says "we should get something for the ladies" and they grab a couple of bottles of sherry and whack them on and the ute collapses. This dry Australian bloke then says: "I think we overdid it with the sherry." More recently I liked the Great Wall of China/Rabbits Telstra ad. It stuck a chord with people because it was genuinely funny.

What about your least favourite? At the moment it's the Chrysler ad selling Jeeps with the Barack Obama soundalike. I find that so fucking insensitive. That's like: can we take one of the most poetic, world-changing moments in history and completely bastardise it in the name of advertising? Yes we can! I just imagine some ad agency sitting around thinking what else can we use? Martin Luther King: "I have a dream... of free air conditioning with every Jeep you buy in the next six weeks". Not every single moment of our society needs to be appropriated in the name of marketing...

What do you think is the most effective ad you have ever seen? One great ad from last year was the Cadbury Gorilla ad – and the other Cadbury one, the one with the kids doing the crazy shit with their eyebrows. I like those ads, but they don't necessarily sell heaps of product, and at the end of the day that's what ads are meant to do. One ad that I find fascinating at the moment, with the way that the recession has changed advertising, is the Foxtel ad. In a recession cable TV isn't a product that you think people are going to spend money on, but Foxtel have twisted it around in their ads and made it seem like you'll be saving money. You know, you won't have to go out to the movies, you won't have to go out and see sport, so cable TV is a saving device in these times, and Foxtel subscriptions have gone through the roof since the recession started. And that's where I think the difference is. Cadbury Gorilla won the top award at Cannes and it's a beautiful ad, but sales of Cadbury only went up six or seven per cent. Foxtel have made an ad encouraging you to stay at home and watch Foxtel, and they've had a 100 per cent increase in sales in the past few months. So that's the difference between clever advertising and effective advertising.

Given what happened when your show The Glasshouse was unceremoniously axed, did you have any qualms about working with the ABC again? Look, they ABC have been my family for 10 years and I'm assuming that the end of The Glasshouse is like one of those boozy Christmases where everyone drinks too much and says bad things about each other, and then next Christmas you pretend it never happened and everyone goes back to being family again.

The Gruen Transfer returns to ABC1 from Wed 18 Mar, 9pm.

Wil Anderson talks about his new live show Wilosophy.

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