Advertising is a mad, mad, mad world and for a reason that you, and possibly only you as a group, will understand, Ennis Ćehić chose to be a part of it. He was a creative director at R/GA and creative lead of content strategy at CHE Proximity in Australia. As he lives and works between Melbourne and Sarajevo, Ćehić is clearly quite at home in a mad, mad, mad world.  

Ćehić is about to have a book on advertising published – in March, in fact. It’s a book about advertising called Sadvertising, which publisher, Penguin Random House describes as “a collection of short stories set in the world of advertising and ‘black collar’ knowledge workers. Think Gruen meets Black Mirror meets George Saunders”.

“In the mind-bendingly upside-down world of Sadvertising, you will meet a group of copywriters who dream of being poets; a disillusioned sales executive who overthinks his think piece; Kendall Jenner and her publicist responding to the fallout from her infamous Pepsi commercial: and many other unforgettable characters,” Penguin Random House continues, (who may or may not be a bit like you).

Ćehić sees advertising from a migrant’s perspective. He was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1984 and came to Australia in 1997 from Germany, where he and his family lived as refugees following their exile from the Bosnian War.

Sadvertising is not Ćehić’s first book. He is also the author of new Metonyms, a literary photography book about his homeland released with photographer, Shantanu Starick, last year. In 2018, he was selected as an inaugural recipient of the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Writers Scheme, which pairs budding authors with a mentor to help them develop and refine their work. He was mentored by Nam Le.

“Filled with absurdity, late-capitalist critiques and existential angst, Ćehić’s slyly subversive fables use pitch-black humour, satire and surrealism to address the worlds of advertising, consumerism, technology and the absurdity of the modern condition,” Penguin Random House adds.

Keep an eye out for The Stable’s interview with Ćehić early next year ahead of the book’s release (and wait, perhaps with bated breath, to read about the madness you work in).