I’ve always been scared of advertising folk. I’ve met them at parties and I’ve been to their offices and I’ve always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited, they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place, a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

Davis contrasts two professional cultures: the BBC’s institutional, standardized workplace (“glass box”) and the advertising world’s cultivated aura of effortless style and novelty. His “scared” tone is partly comic self-deprecation, but it also signals a real sense of outsiderhood—advertising people appear socially fluent, image-conscious, and confident in ways that can unsettle someone from a more formal, public-service broadcasting environment. The caravan meeting space functions as a symbol of advertising’s performative creativity: even the setting is designed to project originality and coolness. The quote suggests that intimidation can come less from power than from cultural codes—taste, informality, and the ability to curate an atmosphere.