How To Do A Shop Website

Like this.

(Don't click on anything, just give it a moment.)

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Shit.

The Tories (Euro RSCG) have just come up with this brilliant idea: make the leader and chancellor of the opposing party look like Jedward out of X-factor:



It's brilliant because they waited a good couple of weeks after the Labour party (Saatchi and Saatchi) made the leader and chancellor of the opposing party look like Jedward out of X-Factor.

I don't know if they're going to say that theirs is a response to the Labour version (no one mentions it), but if it is then it's very weak indeed. They don't recognise the other one, they just copy it. This poster is not making a comparison between the posters, it's making a fucking hilarious reference to Jedward being kicked out and yet we're still left with DEADWOOD (which sounds a bit like Jedward. It does. Go on - try saying them one after the other. See? Genius).

It makes the Tories look like a bunch of rip-off merchant muppets, it makes Euros look uncreative and extremely lazy and it makes Labour look like such brilliant thinkers and trendsetters that their ads are worth copying almost exactly.

Was that really the result they were looking for?

Why I Don't Read The Newspapers For The News

I read The Sun and The Guardian. The first one I read backwards because I'm only really interested in the sport, the second I don't even read, at least not the main paper - I just read the sport (again) and the features section, G2.

To be honest, I don't see the point in finding out what's going on in the world via the daily press. It's just one long round of scaremongering after another. To be interesting, news has to have some drama, and drama only comes from negative situations, so that side of every story is scaled up and made out to be much more significant than it really is.

Papers will also print a tonne of pointless conjecture about these stories. As The Black Swan explained, not only are most important occurrences literally unpredictable, the many attempts at prediction are wrong. As a basic example, check out Martin Sorrell's constant predictions about the recession: L-shaped, bath-shaped, W-shaped, V-shaped, LUV-shaped. He's pretty much covered all the bases there. My cat might as well have predicted that, and yet Martin's word is taken as significant wisdom by most of the papers (and their less skeptical readers). But newspapers have space to fill, so they need supposed experts to blather on about which direction the house prices are heading in, whether global warming is real or not and who's going to win the league.

Talking of winning the league, have you noticed the language they use when it comes to reporting about football? Steven Gerrard will give a 'war-cry', Alex Ferguson will 'taunt' Rafa Benitez and Cesc Fabregas will 'vow' to take revenge on Man City. Then you read the stories and find out that Gerrard said 'I think we've got a good chance against Croatia if we all do our best'; Alex says that he thinks Liverpool might not be as strong without Torres and Cesc will talk about how he hopes to get a better result against Man City than in the corresponding fixture last season. In other words, the papers are trying to make everything seem much more significant than it really is (do you see a pattern forming here? Up the drama, sell the papers. Never mind how much bullshit it all is).

So if the papers are basically presenting everything through a filter of crap, why read them? Well, there's always that nagging doubt that something is happening in the world that might be making a difference to your own life. But how often does that happen? How has the war in Afghanistan impacted on your everyday existence (assuming you're not related to a soldier who's out there, and in that case you'll hardly need a paper telling you what's going on)? What about every single aspect of global warming? Barack Obama's attempts to push universal healthcare through the US government? And let's not even start with Jordan/Amy/Lily etc. Last week there was a huge story because Kate Moss said 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'. She was vilified for the bad influence that might have on teenage girls, but the phrase originated at Weightwatchers, and no one took them to task for it. More paper-selling crapola.

Anything else? How about hypocrisy? People tend not to say this aloud, but if you're a kid that goes missing, you'd better hope you're a pretty white girl. The sad fact is that pictures of Madeleine McCann, Holly, Jessica and Sarah Payne sold papers. Is that because their stories were more tragic than anyone else's? Have no boys gone missing in the same period? No children from ethnic minorities? I think that might be a bit too much of a coincidence. The sad truth is that these stories made the front pages for days on end because the kids involved were pretty and white (what this says about us as a nation is equally disquieting). But then the very same papers happily published pictures of the girl who played Hermione in Harry Potter as being pretty/attractive from a time when she was about thirteen. 'Yay!' they are tacitly saying, 'We all like underage girls, don't we?' When you think about that for more than a second it makes you feel pretty queasy.

So I like to read the sport if I can filter out the hyperbole and I like the features because they're not about some hysterical angle on some insignificant event (well, some of them are, but you learn to pick and choose). If you take the papers as entertainment, they can work quite well as a way to pass the time, but the extent to which they are taken seriously is really quite disturbing. Let's not forget that most of them have an agenda that sees them promoting what's most helpful to Rupert Murdoch, or whichever political party they support.

Despite all this, I don't feel uninformed or unconnected with the ebb and flow of modern life. This may be because I read Private Eye and watch The Daily Show. Their presentation of the news filtered through the skepticism of comedy seems to me to be far more honest and truthful than that of the other outlets.

Something not quite right there...

Poll

So the opportunity to be a D&AD juror is less popular than that of being a sex tourist (what even is that?), policeman (I forgot to mention it's in the pornography-watching squad of Scotland Yard. Does that make it more or less popular?) and, by a long distance, cowboy.

I don't know if that really means anything. If your full-time job was being a D&AD juror you would probably want to kill yourself by the end of the first week (it is rather dull, although fine for a short burst when you know it'll be over in a couple of days). Good luck to all who are doing so next year.

New poll. Vote away...

UPDATE: some agency Christmas cards from Ben and James.

Something For The Weekend

A very funny, very well written blog by Dave Knockles, 'client'.

Here's an excerpt:

I use my mother as my sole focus group. She's nearly target audience, and she's a shrewd old bird, so she lets me know whether the agency boys have landed a hole-in-one or shanked the ball into the face of the club chairman's wife, then attempted to play the next shot off her blood-spattered chin where the ball had come to rest, misjudged the grip on the driver, smashed the club right into the old dear's windpipe, broken the club and called her a cunt for getting in the way in the first place. (This didn't happen to me, by the way. It didn't.)

(Thanks, anon.)

PS: for reasons I don't fully understand this has been far and away the most viewed week on my blog. Thanks for dropping by. More dismal cackbabble next week.

A Few Things That Puzzle Me (And Not In A Good Way)

I don't see the point of this poster:



1. Who gives a fuck if Stella Is made from four ingredients? I've spent most of my life having no clue what goes into beer and it hasn't bothered me one bit. If I was told Stella also contained peat or woodpecker turds, I'd cope. And what about the others that don't make this boast? Kronenbourg is lovely, as are Grolsch, Hoegaarden, Corona, Cobra etc...

2. Talking of others, this is exactly the fact that Becks based their advertising on for years. Did anyone care then?

3. What about the target market? I can see how they might have enjoyed those Jean De Florette-type ads (at a push), but why they'd care about this fact, I have no idea. They call it Wifebeater. If you call something Wifebeater, you may not be that precious about what goes into it.

4. The art direction makes it a real arse to read and take in. It's a bit of a mess and looks like the kind of thing that might appeal to people who drink mineral water or Pinot Grigio.

Next:



I don't know if it's big enough to read, but this is a full-page ad that appeared in Tuesday's Evening Standard. It was placed by a company called Rapier and has the perplexing headline 'marketing people want', which never seems to make much sense, then it dribbles on VERY indulgently for about 1000 words that feel more like a million.

Dear reader, I tried to get through all of it just so I could convey its brilliance (or lack thereof) accurately, but I got so darn bored after about a third that I simply could not do it. It just made me think that Rapier are up their own arse, dull and misguided as to what they think people would find interesting.

AND it appeared in the Evening Standard, which has a circulation of hundreds of thousands. How many of those could possibly care about choosing a marketing agency (if that's what Rapier is)? 100? 200? That's what's technically known as a Waste Of Money, and I don't want to give my money to people who have no idea what to do with it.

Last: Squeezy Marmite. It costs more than the stuff in glass jars despite the fact that it's much lighter, and therefore cheaper to transport. I'd also imagine that a plastic Marmite jar is cheaper to produce. I know Squeezy is better and you usually have to pay more for better, but why not just reflect the cost of the goods? Actually, that's a really dumb question, and the answer is capitalism.

There's A Lot Right With This

Rewatchable and almost certainly an accurate reflection of what goes on in a chip factory.

(Thanks, Borat.)

DDB London Is 'Officially' The Best Agency In The World

Read all about it.

I know several creatives at that hallowed shop, and I think it's worth saying that it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys (were any girls involved?).

In Defence Of Dan Brown

Good Lord, Dan Brown gets a lot of stick.

To hear people talking about him you'd think he wrote books like The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons by scrawling them in crayon on a big sheet of orange paper.

But I'm betting that he didn't.

The Da Vinci Code (I haven't read any of his others) is an incredibly pacey thriller that has sold over eighty million copies and counting. Writing a book that is enjoyed by that many people is not just difficult, it's about as close as you can get to impossible. Only six works of fiction have sold more copies, and they've all had decades-long head starts on TDVC.

Cervantes, he ain't, though. As the book's Wikipedia entry states:
"The novel has also attracted criticism in literary circles for its alleged lack of artistic or literary merit and its allegedly stereotyped portrayal of British and French characters.
Salman Rushdie claimed during a lecture, "Do not start me on 'The Da Vinci Code,' A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."
Stephen Fry has referred to Brown's writings as "complete loose stool-water" and "arse gravy of the worst kind."
In his 2005 University of Maine Commencement Address, best-selling author Stephen King put Dan Brown's work and "Jokes for the John" on the same level, calling such literature the "intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese."

I'd suggest that this opprobrium is only considered reasonable because the book has been so successful. People feel they can take pot-shots at Dan and his 'crappy' effort because he can hide behind all his royalties, deflecting criticism with piles of gold coins. But I'm not sure that makes it all fair.

It is not easy to point 100,000 words in the same direction. Producing a coherent plot that lasts the length of a novel takes a lot of effort, and it's just possible that you might achieve that aim without managing to to make all your sentences as elegant as the petal of a snowdrop swooping and diving on a spring breeze. You might neglect (or be unable) to make all your characters resonate with the depth of Magwitch or Atticus Finch. You might sacrifice brilliance of metaphor for coherence of plot.

In the end, most authors seem to be missing some part of the full arsenal. I know of one recent Booker nominee who told me that he'd love Michael Crichton's sales. Well, to get them, you need to produce work that is as widely appealing as Crichton's. He's not necessarily as successful as he is because he's less 'good', but he's chosen to write the kind of book that millions wish to read, and that is rarely the kind of thing that gets a Booker nomination.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Not entirely, but the exceptions seem to be limited to Ian MacEwan. Otherwise, Terry Pratchett won't be winning the Nobel anytime soon, and VS Naipaul is unlikely to knock John Grisham off the top of the bestsellers chart.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that the popular books take any less effort.

Writing a book is, in my experience both difficult and hard work. I may like some more than others, but that doesn't mean the ones I dislike should be kicked to death.

(This is the point where I would normally point this post in the direction of advertising, but look at the sentence under the blog's title at the top of the page. I don't have to do shit.)

I Like The New Toshiba Ad

It's well shot and really quite compelling.

Having something so everyday all exposed as it enters space is an intriguing thing to be shown.

The payoff was fair enough.

I'd watch it agin if it came on the telly.

Only question: will people think 'Toshiba' afterwards?

The Idea That There Is A Legendary LSD No-No...Only In America. And The Worst Of The Worst Christmas Ads.

(Thanks, Vinny, via Twitter)

Oh, and yesterday someone suggested I blog about how bad the Christmas ads are this year. No need when Charlie Brooker's about.

This is his worst of the lot.

By the way, I did social psychology at university.

One day I was in a lecture about some kind of psychological thing or other and the lecturer started telling us about animals and facial recognition. The gist of his talk was that most animals don't really recognise themselves when they look in the mirror.

The exceptions (as far as I recall) are higher primates, such as chimpanzees. They can recognise themselves when they look normal, so to see how far this ability went, the experimenters tried adding clothes to make the chimps look a little bit different. The lecturer explained that one chimp was given a big pink hat to wear and when he looked in the mirror, he failed to recognise himself.

So the guy behind me puts up his hand.

'Yes?' says the lecturer.

'Are you sure he didn't recognise himself?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well maybe he just looked at himself in the mirror wearing a big pink hat and said, 'It's not really me, is it?''

Two Plugs, Both Involving Hives

The peerless Social Media Guru and All-Round Good Egg Alan Wolk has brought us The Hive Awards:

'The Hive Awards started as a pipe dream, about a year ago, when I was looking at web award shows and realized that none of them rewarded things like user experience, content strategy or even coding. At least not on any significant level. What’s more, the awards that were being given out seemed to go to big, high profile sites in glamor industries. Which is not to say that those sites weren’t deserving, just that they didn’t seem to reward all the people working in the trenches, what I called the unsung heroes of the internet.'

God, something that encourages people to make the Web better in ways that might actually make a real, practical difference. Thank you. At effing last.

We all spend hours on the interweb, so l think a bit of support for anything that improves that experience has to be A GOOD THING. Enter today if your work's eligible.

The second plug is for my Facebook group that I'm going to use to expand my novel online (join today!). There you can see the cover art along with the strapline, which is wrong, but they had to put something on for now. For some reason my publisher thinks I ought to be able to come up with a better strapline. So far he's wrong.

I'm kind of feeling my way in the dark at the mo, so any suggestions for any improvements will be most welcome.

Vote For The Commercial Of The Decade

Here.

I'm voting for Starburst 'Bus Station' because I'm a little lad who loves berries and cream:



UPDATE: a few people have mentioned this:



I absolutely fucking love that ad. When it was on telly I used to rush in from the kitchen to watch it. I heard from a Cannes Grand Prix-winner that it didn't win as many awards as it should have because it has no humour in it, nothing to puncture the portentous tone. Fuck it. I think it's up there with the best.

Funny

Good writing and art direction too. Hats off Christian and Andy@DDB:

Le Crispy, Le Tasty, Le Crunch.

I was thinking about my first-ever ad the other day, then I realised that it's just possible that some of you might recall it.

It was for Le Crunch apples and featured some schoolkids wittering on about the fruit in a faux-sophisticated way ('They tempt the senses like a concerto of sunbeams'. How the fuck did I ever get that past a client? Or my CD for that matter). The last lines were, 'Ah, no rest for the wicked. What have you got?' 'Colouring in.'

Although I wouldn't say it was that memorable per se (no one's put it up on YouTube and for obvious reasons I didn't keep a copy), it ran for three years, usually in the mornings from about 1997-1999.

Do you remember it? If so, would you like to tell me how shit you thought it was and how it nearly put you off going into 'the business' altogether?

And on that subject, would you like to confess to making any shitty ads in your past, perhaps providing YouTube links by which we can judge you?

Go on...it'll be cathartic.

I promise.

This Ad's A Bit Odd...

'How do I get rid of people at the end of the night?'


Give them some low quality chocolate?

That's not an ad, that's a...what's the opposite of an ad?

The Labour Poster Has Disappeared Because It Was The Wrong Colour

When I get a correct one I'll stick it up

UPDATE: here's a link to it.

And here's the original post:

Here's a new poster for Labour that perfectly does the first essential thing any political ad must do: be newsworthy (although they might well be ignored by all of Murdoch's papers):

Beyond that I have mixed feelings because I can't help thinking that all of today's visible politicians appear to be craven, opportunistic little shitwipes.

And don't get me started on the oily heap of unpleasantness that is Peter Mandelson. How many chances does a man get to be a corrupt little cunt before he's not allowed back into high office? The man's such an unprincipled bloody wanker that he'd work for the Tories if Labour lost the next election.

Anyway, that aside, George Osborne is just as bad. Didn't he hang around with Mandelson and that Russian oligarch on that yacht?

And the fucking expenses scandal....Fuck off the lot of you. Really, just fuck off.

Can someone make up a version of this poster that features every expense-fiddling politician in the country?

OK...OK... Count to ten...and breathe...Think calm thoughts...

Something For The Weekend

If this is real (and I hope to God it is), it's the funniest thing I've read in ages.

Oh, and the 'where would you like to work' poll is being won by obvious favourites New York and London, although a hell of a lot of you would like to work at 180 or Wiedens Amsterdam (unless I've got the wrong end of the stick and it's Ogilvy Amsterdam you're after).

Have a good weekend. I know I will. x

Kids Get Some Good Stuff On Their TV Shows

My Novel

For various reasons I've been putting off writing this post. Actually, on reflection, I'm not really sure exactly what I've been waiting for, but today feels like the day to put it out there (it's my ninth wedding anniversary. I wonder if that's got anything to do with it).

I've written a novel called Instinct. It's a technothriller in the style of Michael Crichton and it's scheduled to be published next July by Penguin (you can Google my name and the book's title for bits of background info). It's also been sold to Germany for 2011 and Russia are also due to publish it.

There are two reasons for me to blog about it:

1. I'm looking for any help/suggestions/tips on the best way to spread the word and market the darn thing over the next eight months. I have a bunch of leads and offers of assistance so far but I believe that too much advice is far better than not enough. If you fancy doing something with a really lovely client (me) and little-to-no money, email me at bwmkay@gmail.com and I'll try to make sense of any suggestions.

2. I'm aware that there are more than a few people out there with their own novels in the pipeline. If you are one of those people and would like me to relate my experiences to you, again feel free to get in touch. I'm not suggesting for a minute that I know how to get your book published, but I've managed to progress mine to a degree, so if you'd like to know how that happened, drop me a line.

Over the coming months I may blog a little more in the direction of books and publishing, especially about the process of getting me/the book 'out there' (that's the main reason I've just joined Twitter).

Who knows, it might even be more interesting than guffing on about advertising.