If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

This Blog has moved to...

2010-07-21T12:04:00.001+01:00

Here.

Sorry, RSS people. I didn't realise how your feeds actually worked.

Hope you like the new gaff.

My blog is going through some changes

2010-07-12T17:09:00.000+01:00

Your patience is appreciated.

In Praise Of Rolling Stone

2010-07-11T22:41:00.004+01:00

I subscribe to Rolling Stone Magazine.

I used to read it about 20 years ago but gave it up when movies and music, and consequently the articles about them, started getting really terrible.

Anyway, it's really darn good again and here are a few reasons why;

Matt Taibi's analysis/expose of the working practices of Goldman Sachs should be required reading for every sentient being on planet earth.

Here is the opening, much quoted, paragraph:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Since then, Taibi's follow ups and his work on other subjects have given us the most pungent, forthright, rock-and-roll current affairs writing of the day. And if it's not him contributing, the other writers and the issues they raise and report on are uniformly brilliant.

Another reason would be the current issue. Not only does it give us articles about Dennis Hopper, BP's possible drilling in the Arctic and (if you are so inclined) Lady Gaga, it also contains a report on Timothy McChrystal, the US General in charge of Afghanistan. Well, he was in charge of Afghanistan, but then this article appeared and was thought to be so incendiary, he was relieved of his duties. Has any magazine article you've read lately done that?

They also have great music, TV and film reviews as well as a little bit on US sport, if it happens to be interesting to a wider audience.

The downsides are a love of U2 and a tendency to put vapid teen idols (Taylor Lautner?) on the cover, but you can ignore these minor blips.

Check it out if you get a chance (or have a nose around on their website – it's also full of great stuff).

Weekend Etc.

2010-07-09T07:42:00.001+01:00

Food around the world.

Cronenberg on Letterman:

Blu go further:

BIG BAG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Some wanky film project from Ridley Scott.

Follow Raoul Moat on the run.

(Thanks, W.)

Will the fucking vuvuzela blend?

Fine client presentation:

(Thanks, W.)

Bogusky Leaves

2010-07-08T16:09:00.004+01:00

I read about this (when was it? A week or two ago?) and kept meaning to post on it.

Anyway, someone commented on it again, reminding me that it's worth a mention.

I think it's interesting for Alex to stand by his principles and disrupt what must be a fairly cushy life (no client contact for the last two years) to shoot his employment position in the foot.

On one side, he's now easily rich enough to screw up his job, but on the other, he is kissing a salary of 2m a year goodbye.

So he slagged off, directly and indirectly, the shitty principles of some of his biggest clients (he doesn't like selling to kids or promoting things that cause obesity, something BK and Kraft happily and regularly do) until MDC, CP&B's holding company, thought it might be a good idea for him to fuck off and stop jeopardising their client relationships.

Well, good for him. And fuck those clients for the shitty things they do. Instead of changing their immoral behaviour they grumbled that Alex should shut up and leave. Twats.

I'm with Barney from Singapore, who comments in the above link:

Anyone in advertising that has a modicum of moral fibre lays awake at night wrestling with the consequences of selling a slow, painful death to the masses. Consciousness used to be that annoying time between sleeps. Then I woke up.

Whether Alex found it easier to voice his true concerns when he became fucking loaded, or his conscience finally got the better of him, or he got fed up with the job that he had conquered so completely, I think it's great that he's got his out (the article mentions other top creatives who are doing the same).

Yet another Bogusky lesson for us all: if the business is working for you and your principles, fine. If not, get the fuck out and don't look back.

UPDATE: according to info in the comments this principled stand occurred just after he got $38m from his earnout. Kind of takes the shine off things somewhat. Great ads though. Maybe the Bogusky lesson is that a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money. Although that does sound kind of familiar...

Twitter, Wheaties, Escape Pod Etc. (And Dive)

2010-07-07T16:25:00.004+01:00

I don't normally reference stuff that's been on The Escape Pod Blog because it feels like I'm just lazily thieving another blog's good, good shit.

But in this instance, I thought I'd point out their new campaign, just in case any of you don't pop over there regularly.

All the info is in this post, but to sum up, they've gone through all the Tweets that mention Wheaties (a much-loved US snack) and responded to them in funny/pranky ways:

It's a fantastic new way of using social media to create a brilliant online campaign for a massive brand.

Sorry if you are already aware of it, but if you're not, I'm sure you're silently mouthing the words, 'thank you Ben' at your screen.

But your gratitude would be misplaced: it's Vinny who deserves your thanks.

UPDATE: if you're looking for something to do tonight, don't miss Dive at 9pm on BBC2 (although I assume it'll be on iPlayer for a while afterwards).

I saw a preview and it is absolutely brilliant. Great acting, direction, script etc. Another excellent piece of drama from Dominic Savage.

Lots Of Things Wrong With This One

2010-07-07T07:50:00.002+01:00

(Thanks, BB.)

It's a long way out of date.
It's industry navel gazing.
The Tango spoof, along similar lines, was years ago.
You can see the end coming a mile off.
The track is rubbish.
The direction is poor.
I find the senseless destruction for such a shit ad somewhat depressing.

The Next Generation?

2010-07-05T21:35:00.002+01:00

Today (Monday) I gave a talk at my old school about advertising.

It was their careers advice day thingie and they were lacking people who worked in the meeja, so I kindly volunteered to spew forth the kind of poison you find on this blog right into the ears of the young.

The oddest part of doing it was wrapping my head around when they were born – 1993ish – and remembering that Cotton Eye Joe and the best work of Ice T happened long before they were sentient.

Anyhoo, I think it would have been remiss of me to do anything other than warn them about what's happening to the industry and suggest that they might find more fulfilling lives elsewhere.

It was pretty hard explaining the giant pustulating boil that is the Myth of Digital and the way an entire industry has fallen for a bullshit sandwich big enough to choke the monster they hid the Millennium Falcon in at the start of the Empire Strikes Back. When I remembered all that guff people were regurgitating in 2007 about how if you didn't have plenty of digital in your book by 2010 you'd be a dead, smelly brontosaurus, I sighed so hard I broke my clavicle.

I then tried to decipher shit-but-effective versus award-winning-but-ineffective and explain how the latter still gets you the promotions and raises, and that no one has yet managed to think of a better system than that. I felt embarrassed as I did so. Lots of supposedly intelligent people work in advertising, but we seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time suggesting the opposite is true.

They also asked about how we really know about the people to whom we are advertising. I said that, in general, we were a bunch of wankers whose idea of getting into the mind of people who work outside the Circle Line is to read The Sun.

I'm not sure they left keener on the industry than when they arrived, but you never know.

The Grey Zone

2010-07-04T19:51:00.008+01:00

Like a snowflake that has drifted unwisely into the pucker of John Prescott's anus, advertising is somewhat ephemeral.

People dismiss news as 'tomorrow's fish and chip paper'. Well, if that's the case, most advertising can only dream of such longevity.

Although I can't recall anyone mentioning this, I think that state of affairs explains some of the appeal of awards: if successful, your ad will live, in advertising terms, forever. In particular, the ones that result in some kind of annual (D&AD, The One Show etc.) will last as long as the book, which will be kept for all time in the offices of all right-thinking creatives. Of added benefit is the fact that we are taught from a very early age to respect books, particularly those which are big and hard.

However, the ads that feature in such publications are the world's best 0.000000000000000038445206%. That means that the other 99.etc% of the industry's product might as well not have existed.

Yes, I am aware that there are many perfectly valid ads that do not get into award books, but the chances of them being remembered for longer than a couple of weeks are minuscule.

So almost all of what we do exists in what I am about to name The Grey Zone.

Whether 3/10 or 8.5/10 your work will resound through the ages like the whisper of an asthmatic newt, and that might make you wonder whether or not it matters which of those marks it achieves.

The answer, I'm afraid, is: not really.

There are many reasons why the arguments and late nights that gets your ad from 5/10 to 6/10 (a 20% improvement) could cause more harm than good: you could piss off the kind of people who might want to sack you; you might neglect your home life to the extent that it causes irreparable damage; your work might not improve the response level of the ad, so you might miss the award books and the chance to say 'I know it's shit but it increased sales by 8.6%', and at the end of the day 6/10 is also shit anyway.

So there's not a lot of difference between ads in the Grey Zone, not matter where in the Zone they reside. And where they reside, without the benefit of an award jury's perfect, indisputable verdict, is an entirely subjective evaluation.

I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to do the best ads one can, but it might be a good idea to choose your battles and wait for the ones that really matter, otherwise you might just annoy people and use up valuable favours for no good reason.

Write The (Disappointing) Future

2010-07-02T12:29:00.000+01:00

(Thanks, W.)

Weekend Etc.

2010-07-01T23:24:00.003+01:00

Amazing real-time live train map of the London Underground.

The 100 greatest movie insults of all time:

Patrick Collister asks: Does digital need art directors?

This Is The Ad Your Follow Up To Your Cannes Grand Prix-Winning Ad Should Smell Like:

2010-06-30T16:34:00.004+01:00

No ball dropped here:

(Thanks, I'm On A Horse.)

Living The Brand

2010-06-29T22:53:00.005+01:00

In December I was working at 180 in Amsterdam. On my way to the loo someone looked at me queerly, so I stopped.

'What the fuck are those?' he asked.
'What?' I replied.
'Those shoes.'

Reader, I was wearing a rather fetching pair of the reissued Jordan 4s (I couldn't afford them when they first came out), made by Nike. I learned that day that it is strictly verboten to wear Nikes in 180. Adidas is their founding client, the company without which the agency would not have been able to exist, and the people of 180 feel they owe them the courtesy of not wearing the products of their greatest competitor.

Now, I'm not a sneaker brand loyalist, so I went back to London for Christmas and came back in January with a rather fetching pair of Adidas Nizzas with a comic book design.

They were met with delighted approval by at least some of my 180 colleagues.

Fast forward to earlier this month and I am freelancing at Wieden and Kennedy in London. Without thinking I wore my Nizzas, which were thankfully obscured by my long jeans. I told a W&K colleague the 180 story and showed her my shoes. Like the 180 fellow of December, she was shocked. It is equally verboten to wear Adidas at W&K for the same reason. There you may wear Nike, Umbro, Converse and (I'd guess) anything without obvious branding. It's even in the welcome handbook (I wasn't given this) and is kindly enforced with a healthy discount for W&K employees at Niketown.

Reader, I did not wear Adidas to W&K again.

This is, I suppose, living the brand, and it makes perfect sense, especially when the clients come round.

But there are more extreme examples. I heard tell of a USA BBDO employee who insisted his hotel minibar was emptied of Coca-Cola and filled with Pepsi, one of their biggest accounts. And then there was the Ballantines whisky client who would not be seen drinking anything else in public – even water (I bet she was fun to be around).

If you can convince a client that you believe in their brand, the next logical step must be your everyday use of it.

I just pity the poor bastard with the Coloplast colostomy bag account.

Why Do You Want To Work In Advertising?

2010-06-29T12:32:00.001+01:00

When giving a book crit I would often finish with the above question.

I wasn't trying to catch anyone out or check the extent of their sad devotion to this ancient religion. I was genuinely interested, and I still am.

I sometimes try to remember why I wanted to work in this industry and how the coupling eventually came about.

Well, like someone who has blacked out the initial moments of a car crash, I really don't know how this came about, but one day I found myself in the office of John Banks, the Banks of now-defunct Banks Hoggins O'Shea, ex-MD of Y&R. His offices were on Brook Street, almost opposite the old Commes Des Garcons shop and I was duly impressed by this Mayfair address.

Like I said, I have no idea how I got there, but I do remember Mr. Banks asking me which job in advertising I was seeking. I aslo remember having little idea of what he was talking about. He gently explained the basics of the account management and creative departments and suggested I head off to the IPA to find out more. I went there immediately and found out that I did not want to work in account management.

Around Christmas I sent out a spoof Absolut ad (Absolut Despair. It had a picture of me drowning my sorrows above a series of dismal puns about being 'neat' and 'a good mixer') that asked for work experience the following Easter. The agency that took me on was the now-defunct Reay Keating Hamer, who got me to catalogue Yellow Fats in their account management, where I found out that I did not want to work in account management.

While I was there I hung around in the creative department as much as possible. There a nice chap called Mark pointed me in the direction of Watford and the rest was a very minor footnote in advertising history.

So, although I'm not clear about what set me off in the direction of advertising, even when I learned about the industry from the inside it still took me quite a while to work out what a creative was and indeed that I wanted to be one.

If any of you can be bothered to explain it, I'd love to hear how and why you got into advertising.

Lowe Buys DLKW: Cash Vs Creativity And What It Says About The Future Of The Industry

2010-06-28T11:06:00.007+01:00

Interesting (article here).

I first heard this rumour while I was working at Lowe last summer, so it's taken quite a while to push through.

Anyway, Michael Roth, chairman and chief executive of Interpublic Group, said: "The progress we have seen at Lowe in recent years continues to be an important part of the larger IPG story. The agency is a global creative powerhouse, it has been growing with key multinationals and it has a great leadership team in Tony and Michael.

"When they told us of the opportunity to bring an agency of DLKW’s caliber into the Lowe network, it was clearly something that we had to pursue. The strength of the new management team and the combined agency in the key London market will accelerate the positive trajectory that Lowe is on."

Sorry, but 'the progress we have seen at Lowe in recent years'?

To put it mildly, Lowe have had a tough time in recent years. Frank took lots of their best staff and accounts when he set up TRBR and the agency is without a Stella, Tesco or Heineken to provide the amazing, award-winning work for which it became famous. But, oddly enough, the same applies to DLKW, an agency whose creative reputation still involves the words 'jingles' and 'Halifax'.

But hang on, what do I know of Lowe's financial performance? Fuck-all – but that is precisely and entirely what this deal is all about.

Have a read of the Guardian article and see how many times words like 'finance', 'performance' and 'shareholders' appear.

Loads.

From my POV as a creative who saw Lowe as one of the best agencies of the last thirty years, this seems to me like a sleeping giant which has decided to improve itself by buying an agency whose work has been most often described as 'shite', 'awful' and 'fucking annoying'. So that makes no sense.

Creatively.

But it makes £3.1m a year profit on income of £19m, so that makes perfect sense.

Financially.

Years ago, Lowe merged with Lintas to (I believe) get the foothold it required to expand internationally. Lintas was not a great place (although they started the 'bit of an animal' Peperami campaign) but its lack of creativity never even caused a blip in the brilliance of Lowe. They got the network, the money AND the fantastic work. Nice.

Now Lowe has the network but it would like some more money along with the non-creative parts of the DLKW management team. So that's what is now important.

You might have noticed the glaring omission of any creatives in the article. There is no mention of the management's plans for the creative output, any intent to produce brilliant work or even who will CD the new place. Why not? I'd imagine it's because none of the people making the decisions really give a flying fuck. If they did, they'd have bought Mother.

As a creative, I might think that to be a shame, but I've written far too many posts over the last few years on this very subject to be surprised by such a turn of events. There is little primacy for creativity anymore and a move like this is just another depressing nail in a coffin already stuffed with rancid, foetid, pus-ridden shit.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future of advertising under the name of Lowe:

It's never too late to kill yourself.

Why Is This Ad So Good?

2010-06-27T20:13:00.004+01:00

This won the Cannes Grand Prix for film:

I've written about it a few times this year, but I think it's interesting how it's actually got better with age.

Now with eleven million YouTube views and a fascinating 'Making of', this is a properly big, no-scam event commercial.

And what's truly astounding in this day and age is that no one has unearthed the YouTube clip from which it was stolen.

Other great things about it:

It's revitalised a brand we all thought was a joke. I had a haircut a few months ago in a very old-fashioned Turkish barber. Without asking, the guy splashed some Old Spice on and I was quite happy for him to do so. I think a year ago I might have been a bit put out.

It's by far the best execution in a campaign that was very good, but never reached this level. Executions such as Hungry Like The Wolf were enjoyable, but a little too self-conscious and retro cheesy to be properly good.

It sells. The bloke hold the bottle up and wangs on about it and yet the ad is amazing. Now none of us can complain when we have to do a producty-demo-ey ad.

It's for PROCTOR AND FUCKING GAMBLE. Supposedly the worst client with the most annoying set of rules has commissioned the best ad of the year. Again, we can have no excuses (This follows a couple of Grands Prix for Dove a few years back).

It's a new screen: Helmut Krone used to speak of good art direction as creating a 'new page' – a layout nobody had ever seen before to make sure it was fresh and therefore intriguing enough to stop you. This is like nothing I have ever seen. It treads a precarious line between irony and bang-on, straightforward sell, but pulls it off brilliantly.

In short, it attempts a triple pike with double-quadruple half twist into a glass of water and succeeds with excellence to spare.

Hats all the way off to everyone involved.

UPDATE: Sorry, while you're here, is it just me or is the winner of the Titanium Lion pretty woeful?

Weekend Etc.

2010-06-25T09:58:00.003+01:00

I love bookshelves. I think they are art in themselves, so imagine my delight when I found this website.

Scorsese vs Kubrick:

Kubrick vs Scorsese from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo.

And someone has done a brilliant mashup of the pulled Flake ad and Surfer.

Enjoy the weekend.

I shall be supporting Brazil, North Korea, Chile, Switzerland, England, Mexico and, of course, the Old Spice ad.

The Pulled Flake Ad

2010-06-24T11:57:00.004+01:00

(Thanks, Damo.)

I have to say this is a really interesting story.

An agency wanted to make an amazing ad, so they got Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer to come up with this giant, balls-out grenade of a spot – for a chocolate bar – and it lost them the account.

I think it's insane, incendiary and incredible.

Have you ever seen an ad like that?

Hats off to Saatchis for getting it made.

Hats on to Cadbury's for replacing it with this load of shit:

Here's Why Cannes Is A Giant Pile Of Cuntcrack

2010-06-24T10:43:00.003+01:00

What a load of fanny.

As Damon Collins Tweeted: 'Something that probably never ran got entered twice.'

Ads for Scrabble, I ask you...

Every last one of them is complete and utter bullshit.

Who the fuck has to advertise Scrabble?

Who would see such an ad and say, 'Fuck me, look at all those words which contain the letter A. I really need to go and buy a Scrabble set'?

It's the epitome of wankheap tossbucket shitebubble crapola.

"This is a complete shock, it took my breath away as the campaign [for Scrabble] was just so beautiful it took my breath away," said one juror, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk. "Someone needs to look beyond the decision to strip it and realise that for whatever reason it failed in 2008 it shows the true longevity of the idea that it managed to win in 2010."

Juror, whoever you are, you need to get out a fuck of a lot more.

The Buck Stops With Them

2010-06-24T10:08:00.002+01:00

A while back I wrote about the fact that most of us are clients.

When you hire the next person along in the production line (director, photographer, illustrator etc.) you do all the things that you despair of in your own client (I'm talking to/about creatives here).

You might second-guess the person above you, you might impose strictures that may not result in the very best work and you could well get them to go back and do it again.

In return, they behave like you do: going off and making the thing they want to make instead of listening to you, having frustrated arguments with you through a third party and generally using someone else's money to create something they like even if it doesn't coincide absolutely with the agreed brief.

Then you see a client behaving in the same way as you and you simply cannot believe how immovable/ungrateful/implacable they are.

Of course, this happens to greater or lesser degrees, but show me a creative who says he has never behaved in the annoying way that his client does and I'll show you a fibbing cunt.

Anyway, rather than just repeat an old post, I did have a new point to add which struck me this morning: the chain of production stops with the client. That may sound obvious, but it's actually a bit odd. Although some of them might have to suffer for a real dog's dinner of a campaign that results in their company's factory being firebombed, most of them can just chuck something out there without having to point to an actual upswing in sales. There are so many other factors involved (distribution, pricing, retail space etc.) that advertising cannot being expected fully to succeed (or fail). You can always blame crap results on something else, which is why clients like to make the safe MOR campaign: there is barely any risk of the 1/100 chance of making a true stinker. Tick the boxes and cross the Ts and no one will fire you; spunk a million on a Facebook page celebrating dog poo that gets 14 fans and someone might well hand you your P45.

So whatever decision a client makes, unless it's pretty darn crazy, it's going to be right. They even get to research what they put out so that if something does go wrong they can point to what that roomful of mouthbreathing plebs said and plead due diligence.

So they never really have to answer to anyone, which is why we are their bitches, all day long and twice on Thursdays.

Enjoy!

Search Engine Patronisation

2010-06-23T22:07:00.006+01:00

Hang on, don't switch to Redtube just yet. This is going to be immensely fucking interesting.

I just read in Private Eye (and other places) that BP have bought certain search words and phrases on Google so that when you type them in you get BP's version of how well the clean up operation in the Gulf of Mexico is going.

You've got 'oil spill'.

'Gulf of Mexico'.

And 'BP are cunts'.

Oh. They haven't bought that one. How odd.

This is (as you know) called 'Search Engine Optimisation' or SEO. I guess it's another way rich people/corporations can control the flow of information. Thank god they can have more power. I was getting worried there for a moment.

But it kind of makes the whole thing bullshit (by 'kind of' I mean 'completely and utterly). If you are the number one search result, great; if you are an ad, fine. But why put the two together? It would be like sticking a massive ad that looked like a news article above the headline in your daily paper and hoping people would think it was the actual story.

This has now extended to the trending topics on Twitter, which yesterday had the 'sponsored trending' topic of Toy Story 3. To me that translates as: nobody's really talking about TS3 so we bought our way onto this list hoping that you are so retarded you'll think an ad is a 'real thing'.

Well, why not? It works for product placement, advertorials and all the mentions of Sky TV in The Sun.

Funny how no one really seems to mind being treated like a complete effing idiot.

Or do we?

I Can't Wait Till The Weekend To Post Something As Cool As This

2010-06-22T23:03:00.002+01:00

My First Creative Department

2010-06-22T19:50:00.006+01:00

I was reading this post by 'Hey Whipple' author, Luke Sullivan, when it occurred to me that my first creative department was also quite good (not as good as 90s Fallon, but good in its own way).

When I started at Y&R in 1996 my boss was Mike Cozens. He was a very good CD, turning boring old Y&R into the agency that produced this (by Ewan Patterson and Graeme Norways):

He had two D&AD golds from his time at CDP and TBWA, then did a lot of BBH's best ads of the 80s. He also had a great phrase: 'Stick it on the wall and see if you can beat it.' The nicest way of saying 'that's shit' I've ever heard.

Also in the department was Paul Catmur. He did the wonderful Dime Bar ads with Harry Enfield, but has since moved down under to CD Pencil-winning work in a variety of agencies:

Another team who got together there was Richard Denney and Dave Henderson, who went on to make the odd decent ad at Saatchi and Saatchi:

And then there was Lee Goulding and Leighton Ballet, who did this ad which was big and awarded and well-loved (I have since reconnected with Lee during a stint at Lowe last year. A thoroughly good bloke):

And Ben Carey, who went on to become half of the huge-selling, D&AD-nominated Benrik team.

Also, Richard and Andy who have been doing some of the better work at BBH in recent years:

That wasn't all, but that's all I have clips and links for, so sorry, Anita, Rob, Majella, Sam, Martin, Andy and others.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I wasn't as good as them, so I deserved the sack for playing ping pong on my desk (among other things).

C*****

2010-06-21T22:25:00.002+01:00

I forgot there was an advertising thing going on in the South of France.

Then someone sent me an email that mentioned it and I felt this thing explode inside me, like the fart of an arthiritic, palsied, neophyte fairyfly.*

Um... So there's some nominations for some UK agencies for some ads.

I'm sorry, I can't be arsed to write any more.

(I wonder if there's a twelve step 'recovery from advertising' course. Step six: realise that there is nothing less important in the world than the C***** *********** ******.)

*The smallest animal on earth.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

2010-06-20T19:56:00.004+01:00

Well, as the saying goes, you can't.

That is, of course, complete and utter bollocks.

It's quite easy to tell what's inside a pink book with an illustration of a pair of high heels and glass of champagne on the cover, especially if the title is 'shopping and tediously unsuccessful attempts at relationships.' Or a white book with a a faded black and white image of a sad little boy under the title 'But Uncle Clarence, that's my winkie'.

I don't recall many things I 'learned' during my degree, but one of them was the fact that around 95% of our communication is non-verbal. Clothes, accent, demeanour, lardiness, expressions etc. all tell you much more than the mendacious shite most of us spew on a daily basis. I learned this around the time political correctness was actually going mad. One of the girls in my seminar then whined about the fact that this simply leads to prejudice, or the assessment of people before you really get to know them. Well, I had news for her: prejudice is practiced all day, every day by every single one of us. Can you imagine what life would be like if you assumed nothing about anyone you ever met? It'd be a fucking nightmare and you'd never get anything done.

Anyway, that relates to a conversation I had recently with the MD of an ad agency. I told him that I thought his agency's appearance was consistent with his agency's work. Just like my son is turning into a small version of me (tough shit), an agency and its ads will take on the characteristics of those who run it.

Look at your own place. Is it middle of the road and dull in appearance? What are your ads like? It it a bit groovier? Does that translate to the work?

Most people think Wiedens and Mother are amongst the most creative agencies in town. Well, they look that way too. That's because they are creatively led and independent, so if someone wants the staff seated around a giant table or a reception that looks like an endearing art installation-cum-bike rack, then that's fine.

This also helps to select the clients. Some would run a mile at such an unconventional approach to interior design, but then they'd probably run a mile at the correspondingly unconventional approach to advertising.

It's the all-important first impression; a great big speech bubble saying 'this is the kind of place we are. If you like it, come on in. If not, maybe you should fuck off to Euros'.

See? Judging books by their covers is a common and useful process.

And it's one of the reasons I can't stand Tony Parsons. The other is the aching shiteness of absolutely everything he writes.

Weekend Etc.

2010-06-17T21:22:00.001+01:00

View any website like you're at a World Cup game. Or in a giant bottle being chased by a giant wasp.

(Thanks, L.)

I love the fact that there is a new Video Band. Duran Duran were a great Video Band. Radiohead, Jamiroquai, The Chemical Brothers... All great Video Bands. Now OK Go seem intent on joining them:

Guardian Roulette.

HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER
By Ian Fleming (1962)

People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have." I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that.

We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one con-tained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn't enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.

The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.

But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.

I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody's fault except the author's, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author's vanity to realise how quickly the reader's eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.

There's No Such Thing As Destiny. Good.

2010-06-17T12:04:00.004+01:00

As an Arsenal fan, I've read Fever Pitch far too many times. It contains many fine lessons, but the one I always remember is that there is no such thing as destiny.

The passage that mentions this talks about an Arsenal defender called Gus Caesar. He was basically a figure of fun (and target of boos) for Arsenal fans and was recently voted number three in a poll of the 50 worst players ever to grace the top flight. But, as Hornby points out, he was almost certainly the best player in his school by a long way, then one of the best in his district and county, then got in at Arsenal, making a bright enough start to be selected for England U21s. Unfortunately, though, he was prone to errors, including one which cost Arsenal the 1987 League Cup. He barely played for the Gunners after that, leaving on a free transfer a few years later, ending his career playing for teams like Colchester.

Here's the passage from the book:

"To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation... and it still wasn't quite enough. [...] Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin... and it doesn't mean anything at all."

The reason I mention this is because there is also a flipside to that.

Even if you appear unlikely to set the world alight as a youth, there's no reason why you can't do it later in life. Plenty of people have had their most productive periods when they found the time and place that was right for them to flourish.

Nothing's been decided yet. Just because you've failed, doesn't mean you can't or won't succeed.

In fact, I believe the above passage illustrates the career trajectory of Mr. Hornby himself. I don't suppose that in his most depressed days of the late eighties that he thought he'd be an Oscar-nominated, multi-million-selling author.

Tim's Academy

2010-06-16T20:21:00.009+01:00

Much of the best talent in UK advertising over the past fifteen years has emanated from one agency's creative department during one throbbing great purple patch. The department in question may not have produced their best work at this time and place, but they did pretty well and mostly went on to real greatness.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mid-Nineties Leagas Delaney:

Dave Dye
Sean Doyle
Paul Belford
Nigel Roberts
Tony Barry
Tony Davidson
Kim Papworth
Rob Burleigh
Dave Beverley
Steve Paskin
Tom Hudson
Will Awdry
And, of course, Tim Delaney.

I have heard tell from some of the above that Tim would often dash off a Pencil-winning corker then tell you to go and make it.

That would be a hell of an environment to learn from.

And they had brilliant clients, such as Adidas, The Guardian and Pepe Jeans.

The ad I really wanted to show from this era was the Pepe Jeans 'How To Talk To Teenagers' ad, which was shot by the Douglas Brothers. I seem to remember a car being dropped from a crane. Alas, I can't find it on the Net.

I guess the sad post-script to this is that many of the people above went on to greater things, yet Leagas Delaney itself seems to have shuffled off that grey corner of Adland where once-great agencies go to die (the corpse of Simons Palmer has a gravestone next to CDP). Maybe things have moved on and there is no place for a 'strong' opinion that puts the work first.

I heard that Tim once had a commercial edited but was rather disappointed (fucking furious) to see the somewhat crappy result.
'What's that?' he asked.
'Well,' said the editor, 'I just cut your script.'
'But I don't want you to cut my script. I want you to cut me something brilliant.'
The ad was supposed to be a 30", but the editor returned with a 60".
'Fantastic,' said Tim. 'We'll tell the client they're running 60s.'

Do I even need to write, 'Could you imagine that happening today?'?

Dan Wieden

2010-06-15T19:25:00.003+01:00

I'm currently freelancing at Wieden and Kennedy in London.

I'll write a more complete post about what an enjoyable experience that is at some point in the future, but for now I thought it might be good to tell you about this morning when Dan Wieden came to give a talk to the agency (surreptitiously taken photo above).

He has an air, that I have only seen once before, in David Abbott, of a very successful, very contented man. This might be due to the fact that he is very successful and very contented. And loaded.

The talk consisted of plans for the future and praise for the London branch of the network, which he said came up often as the most creative office in W&K.

I'm not sure I'm supposed to give any of the details, but I think I can say that he's not looking at the future. He's looking at the future beyond the future.

Whatever his plans are, and those of his worldwide MDs and ECDs (John Jay, Worldwide ECD, was also there), I left with the impression that he knew it would take a great deal of effort to get to where his next vision wants to go, but that he will definitely get there.

It's a very creative place.

This Is Poor

2010-06-14T12:24:00.005+01:00

'What? You found a job and you didn't tell me?'

'Sorry, mum. I waggle my fish supper in the faces of drooling, emotionally repressed twatcakes for €5 notes. Happy now?'

I dunno. It's just that the craft is particularly poor: The direction, the dialogue, the bit where you supposedly think the mum is pissed off, but no; we live in modern times, so she couldn't care less that her daughter works in the sex trade...

Am I supposed to buy a car because of that?

Here's A Good Reason To Work In Advertising

2010-06-13T22:49:00.003+01:00

People often think I've got some kind of a downer on the advertising industry.

Those people are right, however, there is one area in which advertising excels: finding your other half.

If you don't already know, I met my wife after casting her in a commercial that we then shot on the revolting island of Cozumel. We were engaged five days after we met (absolutely true) then got married in Las Vegas six months after that. November will see our tenth anniversary.

So we are living proof that meeting your husband/wife/gay version of husband/wife is something this industry can certainly facilitate.

I have no idea whether or not advertising is particularly adept at this, but I do know of many, many other couples who have met on the job (so to speak).

No offence to the guys in these situations but the one thing I have spotted as a consistent factor is that the ladies tend to outshine the men in the looks department (definitely true in my case). This may be due to the type of lady the industry attracts (pretty and bright), but it might also be due to the type of bloke who finds himself in working advertising. Perhaps the combination of cynicism, a creative outlook (I don't really know enough about account person or planner congress to speak of it) and decent wages is something that proves irresistible to a lady. Also, many creatives I know are funny, and ladies love that, don't they?

So if you're a student or junior wondering if this is the industry for you, just hang on in there, meet your husband/wife/etc, then make a decision.

And a word of advice to the gents: TV departments and production companies are where the best ass resides.

If you have any tips for long term agency-based union, feel free to let us know.

After all, it can be a cold world out there without a little love.

PS: I literally could not give the first or last fuck what any of you think of the new look. I just did it because I was bored and the option popped up on Blogger. I only wish I knew how to make the poll bars legible.

Actually, fuck it: let's put it to the poll.

Weekend Etc.

2010-06-10T21:50:00.005+01:00

Short one today. I'm busy.

This is a short chunk of film that has been made to persuade a studio to back the entire thing:

(Thanks, K.)

Interesting way to go about things, but I have to say that looks absolutely fucking brilliant.

If the studios in question are reading this (quite likely), then my £9 is guaranteed. £13 if you make it in 3-D.

UPDATE: here's Ice Cube and Roots doing Straight Outta Compton last month at a rehearsal for Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel.

(Thanks, N.)

Actually, if you have something good you want to share with 1500 people, leave it as a comment and I'll put the most interesting ones on the blog. If I get time.

Here's one:

ACDC Vs Iron Man 2 - Architectural Projection Mapping on Rochester Castle from seeper on Vimeo.

The War Against The War Against Cliche

2010-06-09T23:03:00.001+01:00

Cliches get a bad press, don't they?

Boring as batshit.
Dull as ditchwater.
Familiarity breeds contempt (by the way, when I was younger, I always thought that was actually 'familiarity breeds content'. Makes sense, doesn't it? Your favourite paper, a cup of tea, a good old Jaffa Cake...that's content in my book).

But the sad thing is that many of them are absolutely brilliant bits of imagery that could teach us a thing or two about verbal expression.

I just finished reading this article about the good points of cliches. It mentions fit as a fiddle. Now, when would you ever come up with that as a metaphor? Never. It's too odd.

What about cool as a cucumber? Whoever invented that one must have gone round on a cloud of delight for years afterwards. It's perfect. It makes no sense while simultaneously making all the sense in the world.

Easy as pie. How is pie easy? It's not that easy to cook. It's no easier to eat than, say, cake, or toast. When you remember there's the other kind of 'pi', it's not even easy to spell. And yet it works perfectly.

I guess these sayings are so familiar they're just there without being there, kind of like oxygen.

All hell breaks loose? Brilliant.
Make a mountain out of a molehill? Fantastic.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel? Excellent.

When I wrote Economist lines I used to use cliche websites to start the thoughts off, and that's where 'What exactly is the benefit of the doubt?' came from.

Making the familiar appear unfamiliar can be as useful as the other way round.

The New Flake Ad

2010-06-08T19:24:00.002+01:00

There's been a few comments on the post below concerning this ad:

I think it's worth a post of its own for a few reasons, all of which will become gracelessly clear in the near future.

The first thing to make clear is that it's a remake of this Alexander McQueen ad. That's not me being controversial – they've used the same director and the two pieces of film are virtually identical.

Other points of interest:

1. It's one of those ads where I have no idea what the script said. Um... 'We open on that YouTube clip we just showed you, then stick your logo on the end'. Thanks for the cash, SUCKAZZZ!!1!1!1!

2. Knowing the odd recent history of this brand's advertising, I'm somewhat surprised they shelved the Jonathan Glazer/Walter Campbell spot to shift the account and make this. It's pretty dull, forgettable and meaningless. The other ad at least lived up to the Bernbach maxim: 'If nobody notices your ad, everything else is immaterial'. It was a rip-roaring french tickler of a spot, all dirty looks and thinly-disguised innuendo. The one they've chosen to run instead is a vanilla blancmange that you don't even know is a vanilla blancmange. You eat it then wonder if it was a particularly mild slice of Battenburg instead. If you get my drift.

3. I'm surprised Fallon have gone down the YT-clip-plus-logo route. It ill behooves their creative credentials, particularly at a time when they have lost so much business. All they have to fall back on is their creativity. It's what built that agency in the first place. Chuck it away and what's left?

4. Will it sell a bar of Flake? I really don't think so. Obviously it's aimed at lay-deez, so I may not be best placed to judge, but do any of the female readers of this blog really want a Flake after watching that? If I was a chick I might want that dress, though. It's all frilly and expensive-looking.

McDonalds Gay-ranian Ad

2010-06-07T15:15:00.003+01:00

OK, OK...it's a joke.

That was a pisstake based on this French McDonald's ad with a gay bloke in it.

I think it's fairly dull, and the twist is poorly handled, but the most amazing thing is that it's 2010 and it's still news to have a 'gay' ad.

So I think it's news that this is news.

Anyone want to find it news that I think it's news that that ad is news?

How To Win Advertising Awards The Easy Way (This Really Works).

2010-06-06T19:35:00.003+01:00

Do you want to do excellent, award-winning advertising?

Well, I have the secret.

About ten years ago, Cliff Freeman and Partners started winning everything going by doing ads for (among others) Fox Sports:

Those two campaigns came out in the same year. One got the Cannes Grand Prix, the other got Best Of Show at the One Show.

There were loads more, then TBWA continued the run with Beware Of Things Made In October and those ones where people didn't feel pain because watching ice hockey made them tough.

I've just realised I could go on and on with this for so long I'd type my fingers to bloody stumps.

The point I'm trying to make is that TV STATIONS ARE AWARDS MAGNETS.

BBC and Channel 4 have won tons over the years. Even ITV got in last year's book. Canal+ got a pencil this year, etc. etc. etc.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL.

NOW ART GALLERIES ARE ALSO AWARDS MAGNETS.

The National Gallery got D&AD Gold last year, while Tate Britain and Modern work got a Cannes Grand Prix, Best of Show at the One Show and many others.

HANG ON, I'M NEARLY AT MY POINT.

HERE IT IS...

DOING ADS THAT USE OTHER PEOPLE'S GOOD SHIT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO DO ADS THAT LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE.

It's like doing charity ads but without having to enter the category that makes everyone think, 'Of course it won. Who doesn't agree that slavery and torture are bad?' TV channel and art gallery ads allow you to use other people's good, good, shit to make your stuff look even better. Classic art, sports, the BBC...what's not to love?

I guess this is an extension of using sports stars and celebrities to sell things: you already like Michael Jordan/Peter Kay/Martin Scorsese, so you're already halfway to liking this ad.

But TV channels give you something better than that: they allow you to circumvent the BACC because their ads are considered to be part of the programming. You can get away with all sorts of stuff other ads cannot. AND if you do an ad for the BBC you can use virtually any track you want FOR FREE.

Surely I can now rest my case and go back to watching Daily Show repeats on 4OD.

Go crazy. Work for a TV channel.

But remember: keep this top, top tip under your hat.

Interesting Adidas Star Wars WC Ad

2010-06-04T21:36:00.001+01:00

It seems to run out of steam at the end and some scenes work better than others, but it's pretty cool.

Good to get George Lucas to loosen his nipple clamps for once.

Les Grossman MTV Movie Awards Thing And A Nice WC Ad

2010-06-04T19:44:00.001+01:00

Have a delightful weekend.

D&AD: The Winners

2010-06-03T13:55:00.005+01:00

Here are some of the winners of D&AD 2010.

Your opinions are, as always, as welcome as a cat at Crufts:

Two Golds (to go with its multiple Cannes Grands Prix):

TV:

Animation & Use Of Music:

Writing for Advertising and TV (well done, Cam):

Direction:

TV:

Direction (my favourite):

Sound Design:

UPDATE:

Inexcusably I forgot the wonderful promo for Coldplay's Strawberry Swing that was done by the peerless Shynola. Not sure why it didn't get a Gold for animation.

Early Weekend

2010-06-03T11:12:00.002+01:00

I'm sticking the weekend stuff up today because I'll probably do D&AD tomorrow. If you're going tonight I may see you there.

The top eleven movies about writing.

iPad/StarWars (Thanks, N.):

And the new Dangermouse video with Joan from Mad Men.

(Thanks, P.)

While I'm here, I might as well mention the fact that according to last week's poll most of you love the new Nike ad. It seems the rest of the world agrees, as it has now broken the viewing record on YouTube. I think, on reflection, that I'm a little ambivalent: fairly positive but still confused about the lack of a future for Didier and the inclusion of a bloke who hasn't played for Brazil in over a year. AND if you can't make a big ad with $12m then you should probably go and do something else for a living.

New poll when I can think of one...

UPDATE: Ed Morris has joined Rapier. I only mention this so I can say that I would never call an ad agency 'Rapier'. I know what they mean but why not choose a type of sword that doesn't sound like the kind of thing an unlicensed minicab driver with a fistful of Rohypnol would do?

Blur Ad

2010-06-02T16:22:00.002+01:00

Here's a new ad from Droga 5 for some racing game (thanks, L.):

The odd thing about this ad, and I think this is the case for about one in a million commercials, is that it's too short.

I wanted to see what else was going to happen to this cutesy-poo fellow who's had his head turned by the dark side.

So if you're reading this Droga 5, is there any chance of seeing his descent into crack pipe oblivion as he sells himself on street corners for the chance of a bit of proper racing?

Pretty please?

Reprieve Gig

2010-06-01T22:53:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago I plugged the comedy night in aid of Reprieve.

Well, bollocks: I've only gone and effed up the babysitting arrangements.

So I can't go.

Would you like go instead?

They're good seats (row H of the stalls).

And it's next Monday (June 7th).

Drop me an email if you're interested (benkaywriter@gmail.com).

All I'd ask is that you make a donation to Reprieve (the best charity in the world).

Money: I'm Confused

2010-06-01T15:09:00.005+01:00

Every now and then I get a bit narked at how every little thing comes down to money. It seems that no displeasure is too great to be exchanged for a bit of hard cash, and what a shame that is.

You get people being sacked left right and centre because it might make a penny saving in the dividend for some faceless pension fund.

You get people being overworked so hard the owners of their factory have to put suicide nets, yes suicide nets, outside their windows to stop people jumping out and killing themselves.

You get people missing holidays and time with their families just so some bloke at the 'top' can make a bigger effort at winning an account that will make his profits higher and his staff's morale lower.

You get enormous supermarket chains selling food at such ridiculously low prices that farmers can barely live. And people who can't see that their cheap milk and apples might have the odd consequence.

All for the almighty dollar.

Well, I guess that's what you get in a free market, capitalist society where people have to climb over each other just to get the next shekel.

So that disappoints me.

But it doesn't confuse me.

What confuses me is that we seem simultaneously to live in that society and a society where millions of people are willing to work every hour under the sun for absolutely no financial reward.

Look at what you're reading. I have no idea how many hours I've put into this ridiculous outpouring of ill-conceived and poorly-justified cackbabble, and it has no direct financial reward (or even an indirect one), and yet here I am, typing away for yet another minute when I could be down the bookies or buying cheap milk.

Whenever I see one of those hilarious mashups (one tiny example) on YouTube I marvel at the time someone has taken for what appears to be the sheer satisfaction of producing something other people will like. There are billions of (wo)man hours going into blogs, websites and Tweets for no discernible financial gain and it's bloomin' marvelous.

Obviously there are also non-digital examples of everything from volunteer work to flashmobs, demonstrating that many people will work very hard in very many ways for nowt.

And yet, I'll bet that some of those money-grabbers are also free-workers. In one part of their life they'll chase down the last penny even if it kills them, and on the other side they'll chuck their billable hours out of the window all for the transient love of a bunch of anonymous intermongs.

But why? I would guess that it's one of three reasons:

1. It's an antidote to all that working for the man. Your day job is so geared towards cash that you like to balance it out with a bit of free stuff, kind of like giving a percentage of your time income to charity.

2. It's seen as a means to an end. Maybe you can monetise your spare-time noodlings. Maybe one day someone will see your Lego version of Jesus Christ Superstar (will someone please do a Lego version of Jesus Christ Superstar?) and ask you to do something for them that they will pay for. I should just point out that if any of you harbour such dreams, the chances of it happening are unlikely.

3. It's fun. People have always had hobbies, it's just that in 2010 they can often be found on a public forum on the Worldwide Web. You like seedlings? Create www.seedlingking.com to share your interest and get in touch with like-minded chaps. You enjoy putting little movies together? Why not shove 'em on YouTube when you're done and get some love/feedback. if you're a shitty piano enthusiast you can upload your rubbish to MySpace and see if everyone else thinks you're tone deaf.

I suppose most people don't see it as 'I am a money grubbing arsehole'/'I am an altruistic hippy', but I still find the balance of attitudes odd. Perhaps the real breadheads don't indulge in the internet contributions while the hardest working webfolk may not work for Goldman Sachs.

But if we look at it that way, I suppose we might have to live under the evil jackboot of capitalism, but we don't have to let money rule every part of our lives.

Update: I completely forgot that I wrote a post on Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose last year. I can't be arsed to find it but there's no need: commenter Damo has kindly left a link to this excellent piece of animation–

(BY THE WAY; I accidentally put my Damon Collins post under the 'Bitty Weekend Shit' one below. This sometimes happens when you start a post one day then finish it a few days later. Anyway, it's too late to change it now, so have a read if you're that way inclined.)

Lots Of Bitty Weekend Shit

2010-05-28T07:49:00.000+01:00

Delightful whimsy.

(Thanks, J.)

Amusing inadvertent penile visuals.

(Thanks, W.)

Funny Twitter pisstake of BP

(Thanks, A.)

Fun odd ad for some cable website thingie:

(Thanks, other A.)

Stephen Fry on everything (including commenting on blogs):

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

This was YouTube's video of the week, but just in case you didn't see it, this is sublime, majestic, wonderful and all that's right with the world:

(If you like that, you'll love this, which I put on the blog earlier this year.)

Interesting advertising use for Chatroulette:

The greatest TV show ever made will soon be on DVD.

And if you'd like to mess around with an iPad (good lord they are pleasant) you can do so in M&C Saatchi's reception. I'm not sure they let you just walk in and sit there, so I'd suggest asking to see Charles and during the receptionist's ten minute puzzled search of the building just have a quick play around (it's also kept precariously close to the open door, so you could just nick it. Don't nick it. Really).

Damon Collins

2010-05-27T23:05:00.002+01:00

I think it's about time I wrote a post on just how darn good Damon Collins is (interest declared: I am Facebook friends with Damon, I used to work in the same dept as him at AMV and we once judged D&AD together. That's about it).

If you are on Facebook with Damon you will have seen several posts recently where he has mentioned some of the awards RKCR/Y&R have won this year. If my memory serves me correctly (a rare occurrence), they have included seven Clios, eleven D&AD nominations and a BAFTA. Yes, a BAFTA.

That's quite impressive. OK, that's very impressive, but even more so when you consider the track record of the agency. RKCR has never been crap – they have too many good creatives and clients for that – but they have never been this good.

A few years ago, the tiny agency I worked at, Lunar BBDO, matched RKCR in D&AD entries, so (in all modesty) I have to say that it can't have been firing on all cylinders.

Then Damon arrived and the awards just exploded.

Coincidence?

Possibly, but then it's not the first time he's managed this trick. Before he joined Mother their advertising for Boots was pretty shit. I seem to remember some bollocks involving Harry Hill and a desk.

Then they hired Damon to CD the account and...

And that wasn't the only one. We also had the excellent ad where the woman changes into a bikini on a crowded beach and the one where everyone in the country went mad because the sun came out for ten seconds. Big, good, true crowd pleasers for a massive client. Not easy.

He was also an excellent CD at Lowe, with plenty of top work appearing under his leadership.

And going further back, he also managed (with the excellent Mary Wear) to do the odd decent ad as a creative :

So let's give him his due. He's undeniably a very, very good CD.

Something I think even Sooty would have to agree with.

Um...Sorry...Back To The Depressing News...

2010-05-27T10:24:00.002+01:00

Here's some screenplay advice from a screenwriter friend of a friend of a friend (I think he wrote Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown) who read my post on the subject:

As for your post about screenplays… I don’t really have anything to add, really. Bear in mind that just as many copywriters would like to be writing screenplays, so I write screenplays and would like to write novels. Some people are never fucking happy. And for ages I wanted to be a copywriter.

Anyway. What I would say, for what it’s worth, particularly in response to the comments of John W, is this: first, registering a script with the WGA is probably not really worth it. Ideas don’t tend to be stolen in that way, and even if a script is registered there can be rival projects, such as the other Robin Hood movie that came out at the same time as Prince of Thieves.

Second, about this notion that if you have an idea you should be given a shot to write it with no track record. Yes, and I should have seven classic performance cars parked outside and the bathroom from Scarface. But I don’t. And I’m afraid nobody gives a fuck about your idea unless you can prove you’ve got the goods to execute it. There was a time, probably back in the 80s when both ad-land AND movies were more fun, when yes, you could waltz in with some high concept pitch (it’s Die Hard in a mobile library!) and some bloated exec, chiselled off his tits on A-grade Bolivian and getting blown under his desk by some sweet platinum twat, would write you a cheque. That time is gone. It’s virtually impossible for even established film-makers to get things off the ground at the moment unless they involve vampires or zombies or some franchisable comicbook. People are fearful of buying off a pitch even from writers they already know, and even if you have a completed script to tout, the spec market is barren.

Basically I’m trying to offer some consolation. Film is just as wretched as advertising at the moment. The grass might look greener from over there, but I’m standing in it, and from over here it looks like a camp of fucking gypsies have emptied their caravan toilets all over the place and moved on.

And just in case you weren't quite ready to top yourself, here's Garrison Keillor on the demise of the fun of publishing:

I ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.

I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And the New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, will vanish (POOF) whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times). And editors will vanish.

The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.

Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn’t work anymore, alas.

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

Tribune Media Services/New York Times

Happy Thursday everyone!

Why advertising is so wonderful

2010-05-26T21:09:00.008+01:00

I wasn't expecting quite such a reaction to the 'you need an out' post of the other day (by the way, if you found it interesting, do have a look at some of the later comments. There is some excellent insight in there, particularly from the Toadstool's Alan Wolk).

So in the interests of balance I'm going to see if I can suggest why people might wish to work in advertising.

The comment of the self-confessed 'middleweight' creative made me realise how much of a difference there is between the young and the older in this industry.

Youth in general, as well as in advertising, is about invincibility and anticipation. You're giving things a go and there's no reason why you will not ultimately be the best at what you have chosen to do. Despite the odds, the possibility that you will be a multiple-pencil-winning Hegarty or Abbott is all too real. Yes, it is you who will buck those odds and fuck the poor saps who think otherwise. And in anticipation all is perfect. Nothing has had a chance to go wrong. The final great victory is always around the corner. Why should it not be? No reason!

Youth is also about novelty. I remember when I made my first ads and saw them on TV and on poster sites. Anyone who has had this happen (most of you) will know what a wonderful thrill such an experience can be. You ring your mum, you take a photo of the poster site, you tape the TV show etc. But like all thrills, the more times you experience it, the more it abates. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that Chris Palmer does not do any of the above. He loves advertising and does it brilliantly, but on occasion he won't even feel inclined to collect some of the awards he has won. He's been there, done that and bought the rather expensive limited edition T-shirt off Ebay.

So all the pluses of the above two paragraphs are what makes you want to get into the business. Added to this is the fact that you go from being a toast-munching student to a person with a job. Advertising offers the free booze of the agency meeting and party, the free food of the post-house, the free travel and accommodation of the foreign shoot. Your lifestyle gets better than it has a right to be and the feeling is intoxicating. People older than you are offering praise, taxi drivers are interested in what you do, the bloke off The Fast Show will do your bidding in the voiceover studio. That little fuzzy bit inside you that goes all warm and glowy when something nice happens spends a lot of time in its warm and glowy state.

Then you have awards, which in this industry are plentiful, boozy and, for almost all of us, free. You get pats on the back and the kinds of trophies that you normally see in the hands of Martin Scorsese and The Kings Of Leon. It's a piece of metal in a nice shape that you can also show your mum (mums have a lot to answer for) and some important, clever people voted for you to receive it. Another mighty thrill.

Then add in the little buzz you get when you're on a call with a director and he explains how he's going to get the lighting rigger from Alien to set up your Andrex shot and it's going to look like the opening of Touch of Evil; the wonder of even the tiniest mention in Campaign; the brief visit from the MD who may not quite know which of you is Dave and which of you is Mike, but he wants to say well done for the new Kenco poster that made his client so happy; your own Mac; a free mobile phone; choosing music from your favourite obscure shoegazing band (even if it ends up getting rerecorded) for your ad; the crew, the lorries and the closed street for your shoot that only happened because you wrote something down on a piece of paper last month...

I could go on. Yes, these are the wonderful elations that await even the most average of creatives in this business (and quite a few people in the other departments). These are why the business feels so extraordinary in your twenties. There is much pleasure to be had. Don't let that tedious old (I'm not old, by the way) blogger put you off.

But just be ready to discover that much of the above is so surface and temporary that it cannot hold its value for long. The reasons why it disappears like the sandcastles you were once so proud of are inevitable. They are life.

Of course there is pleasure and enjoyment to be taken from advertising as your years advance, but for the reasons I described, they become tempered with downsides and riven with the disappointments that are also impossible to avoid. You will search for greater meaning in your life and I really hope you find it outside an advertising agency.

Having said all that, I still enjoy a great deal of what I do. But I wouldn't be human if I enjoyed it as much as I did at the end of the last century. I have a new set of values that come with living longer on planet earth. They don't mean I try any less or do my job to a lower standard, but they simply mean that I, and virtually everyone else who has ever lived, need to find that level of stimulation elsewhere.

I'm delighted to say that I've found it, mostly (and you cannot fully understand this until it happens to you) in my kids.

Find your own, wherever it may lie.

The School Of Communication Arts

2010-05-26T16:59:00.002+01:00

I recently received an email from a guy called Marc Lewis.

He's reopening the School Of Communication Arts this September.

It's going to be run like an agency, with students being taught by visiting mentors.

These mentors can be online, in person or contribute to a Wiki, and he'd like to involve as many brilliant people as possible.

Actually, I could witter on pretending I'm some expert but instead it might be better to get the info from the horse's mouth. Here's how Marc introduced it to me.

I am reopening School of Communication Arts this September. The school closed in 1995 when John Gillard was no longer able to run it.
I was one of John's last scholarship students, and after a rewarding career I wanted to focus on doing something in my community. This piece in The Guardian explains my motivations.

The videos hosted on Knowledge Peers provide a decent overview of the school's vision.

Our school is unique for several reasons, which has helped us win the support of the IPA and D&AD as well as nearly a dozen agencies and scores of mentors.

- 50 students and 300+ teachers (mentors)
- 15 scholarships in 2010, rising to 25 scholarships by 2015
- Curriculum written by the advertising industry, not by academics. (see attached, The Wiki Initiative)
- Delivered as a 'creative apprenticeship'. 12-months in the school followed by 6-months work placements
- Nationally accredited qualification, developed with University of the Arts London Awarding Body
- 3 pathways; Copywriter, Art Director and Ideapreneur
- Ideapreneurs receiving funding to start a business whilst at the school, in return for equity that is shared with partner agencies

We deliver an androgogic style of learning and to make this as rewarding as possible for our cohort, we aspire to bring six mentors a day into the school.

We want those mentors to come from all across the marketing services industry. There is a short presentation about mentoring at the school here.

So sign up at the link above and, y'know, give something back.

And if you want to be a student, all the information is also on the site.

E Squared

2010-05-25T16:07:00.006+01:00

May I direct those of you of a literary bent to this incredible news.

For the rest of you who like funny books that won't ever win the Booker, E Squared (the sequel to E) is now out in paperback.

It updates all the E characters to a thrusting new agency called Meerkat360. Here is its website.

I laughed, I cried (I didn't cry). It is very funny, more so if you reside in the land we call 'ad' but it's still a good laugh if you don't (how do I know that?).

Today I was fortunate enough to have a very pleasant cup of tea with its author Matt Beaumont where he explained some stuff, so I'm going to try to remember it:

1. He waited a while to do the sequel because it gave the characters, and indeed the agency landscape, a chance to change.

2. He was made redundant from McCann's and used the time and money to finish E. It sold pretty quickly, getting a positive response from one of the first six agents he sent it to. Then it came out (that bit was immensely satisfying) and continues to sell around the world, with sales probably topping half a million by now.

3. He read my 'you need an out' post from a few days ago and agreed with it. His take is that when creatives get into their forties they can often be bored of the process. The novelty of seeing your stuff on billboards or TV will have worn off and because creatives require stimulation, they might find that they want to do something else. The other problem is that if you are removed from your job in your forties it's quite difficult to get back in to anything decent. He said that he was fortunate to have E to keep him going but it then led to enough other things (eg: more books) but he's now back at M&C Saatchi where he's happily doing a bit of advertising.

4. He was once invited to meet the crew of the most recent space shuttle expedition. He had no idea why, but these crews often do PR tours to spread the good word of NASA, and one of them wanted to meet him. It transpired that this spaceman was English but had gained an American passport purely to become an astronaut. When he was on his way to training, his brother gave him E to read. He loved it and passed it around the other astronauts who also loved it. He wanted to take it into space as a personal possession but it wouldn't fit (you get very little space, ironically enough), so he took a photocopy of the page with Matt's face on it and then photographed himself holding this page in front of the window to outer space. Then he took it to the International Space Station and got it stamped (they have a passport thingie there). Back on Earth he met Matt and presented him with this piece of paper (Roger Daltrey was at the same ceremony; another astronaut had taken a CD of Who's Best with him). Cool, huh?

We talked about a bunch of other things but my fingers are tired now.

So Matt's made a million or so people very happy and continues to do so.

Have a read of both books. They're funny (rare) and Matt's a really good bloke.

Fucking Brilliant New Ad From Glazer/Sony/Anomaly

2010-05-25T11:23:00.004+01:00

It's got humour and irreverence, you can tell it was directed by a master and the idea is spot on.

My favourite of the year so far (along with Old Spice).

(Thanks A.)

UPDATE: I think it's interesting that some people don't get it. I can be quite bad at 'getting' ads but this one seems obvious to me: this looks cool, but it's pretty clear that it would look 100 times cooler in 3-D (ie: on a Sony 3-D TV). So buy one. It's a brilliant negative product demo.

By the way, Balls sold a lot of TVs. Just not Sony Bravias. As an ad it didn't work for Sony. I think this one will have them flying off the shelves.

Steve Rogers

2010-05-25T07:34:00.002+01:00

If you're looking for a top new director, you need cast your net no further than Steve Rogers.

(Interest declared: he's just joined Sonny, where my wife works.)

This puppy has won Best of Book in the Creative Review Annual and has been nominated for best ad, best direction and best special effects at this year's D&AD awards:

And here's the rest of his reel.

LISTEN UP! YOU NEED AN OUT!

2010-05-23T19:58:00.008+01:00

I had a friend a while back who would always bend my ear about whether or not he should split up with his girlfriends.

I'd make it easy for him: was he going to marry them? No. So at some point he was going to split up with them. Why not make it as soon as possible and start looking for someone he preferred?

Which leads me to advertising.

You are my friend and the ad industry is his imperfect girlfriend. You will split up eventually.

Even if the industry does not change one iota from now (it will get much worse, believe me) the statistics are blindingly obvious: there are loads of creatives but very few CDs. This means that as you make progress there will be fewer of you left. Some will fail to make the grade, others will dislike the business, others will get married, move abroad, bum the agency cat and spend seven years in Pentonville etc.

Coupled to this is the ageism: advertising regards the over-forties as geriatric and the over fifties like people who should be wetting themselves in a wipe clean plastic chair while a truculent 'carer' cleans Jaffa Cake sludge from the front of their sta-prest pajamas.

Troupled (it's like coupled but involves a third element. I just invented it) to this is the current fashion for ad agencies to cut costs by employing cheap youngsters to do jobs that used to require a senior. To put it bluntly, few people in advertising give the first, second or third toss about whether an ad is 6/10 or 9/10 anymore, so they're hardly going to shell out another hundred grand to get the latter, not when the holding company wants its kilo of flesh. Most ads are shit so why does it matter if they're cheap shit? To the people in charge it doesn't. IT DOESN'T. You wish it did. You came into the industry thinking it did, BUT IT DOESN'T.

Quapled (see above; four elements) to this is the fact that the pay now stinks. If you're a junior or middleweight now you are like the bloke who has turned up to the party at 5am, when everyone else has got pissed, laid or the nightbus home. There you stand, explaining how you got lost and had to ask for directions at a service station run by retarded mongs but no one cares. Yes, this party had plentiful beauties from the opposite sex, copious amounts of pure-yet-unaddictive drugs, gallons of vintage Salon and millions of Almas caviar canapes but IT'S ALL FUCKING GONE. The seventies and eighties boys and girls boned, hoovered, quaffed and munched the lot, leaving a little for the nineties guests and not much for the noughties. The well is now drier than the Queen Mother's punani. This means that whatever you earn from here on in will not be enough for you to retire on at the age of 50ish.

So do the maths: to retire with a decent sum you have to work till you're 65 in an industry that will almost certainly kick you out in your forties.

You see? You need an out. You need something else to do; an alternative money-making scheme. Yes, the very few will CD themselves to untold riches or create a start-up that will allow them to do the same but this will be around 1% of the total, if that.

YOU NEED AN OUT.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Weekend

2010-05-20T10:07:00.010+01:00

New Nike ad:

Following MIA's slaughter of the gingers, we have another promo that won't be shown on Saturday Superstore (is that still on?), this time for Unkle:

And I'm really starting to go off George Lucas (Parts 1-3 of Star Wars + Indy 4):

(Thanks, K for both those two.)

Another nice ad for Nike:

NIKE SPORTSWEAR: NSW+FBGT from fla on Vimeo.

Interesting ad for Child Hope:

The excellent Not Voodoo is blogging again.

Why not visit the amusing Yellow Part of The Red Brick Road's website? Brand Mogic indeed.

And according to last week's poll, 3-4 hours is the most common amount of actual work you do in a day. I guess I have readers in a range of jobs but I'd say that most creatives would fit into that sector. And don't we moan about it?

Also, is there anything more intriguing to a creative than seeing your CD in another team's office with the door shut? (No.)

AND, I came across this by accident a month ago, but if you're an iPhone user, it may change your life: when your iPhone is off, two presses of the 'home' key (the circular button at the bottom) will give you immediate access to your basic music controls. No more having to key in 5467, or whatever your pass number is.

Scamp's Book

2010-05-19T21:58:00.005+01:00

Three reasons why you should buy it:

It's full of brilliant advice from proper people who are really, really good at what they do:

It's well-designed:

It's got lots of great insights from someone who has a Cannes Grand Prix, D&AD Pencils and a bunch of other stuff that makes him worth reading:

I'd also like to add that it's a great bog read. By that I mean it's all laid out in digestible, bite-sized chunks that you can get through in the time it takes to read Campaign. Or take a dump. You might like to read the interview with Jeremy Craigen over a regular poo. Then again, you could add in Dave Droga's Foreword and the Paul Silburn interview if you've got the runs.

And just in case you missed that Amazon link, IT'S HERE.

(Interest declared: I am friends with Simon. In fact we had lunch today. Yesterday if you're reading this on Thursday.)

Famous Agencies Or The Lack Thereof

2010-05-19T10:12:00.003+01:00

Sitting here in Saatchi and Saatchi London I often get told, although not by the people who work here, that I'm in the only agency my mum has heard of.

That's not quite true. My mum used to be an above the line copywriter in London, so she's heard of quite a few agencies.

But that aside, the fame of S&S does get mentioned quite a lot. I recall being at college and having an account person from there showing us a vox pop she had made asking people to name an ad agency. They only named S&S, even if they happened to be standing outside JWT or BBH (a bit of mendacious editing was used there, I'm sure).

Then there's that truism that it's ironic that agencies are unable to create big famous brands out of themselves. After all, if S&S could do it, why can't anyone else?

I have no idea, but it does seem odd, because when you think about it, there are great benefits to be had from such fame:

1) People want to work for you. They've heard of you, therefore you must be the best and then they can tell their mums and dads, who will think they do something significant for a living. I once had a team resign because they wanted to go and work on more brands their mum had heard of. Understandable. This is a way of attracting better staff than you would otherwise and probably being able to pay them less.

2) Clients want to give you their business. Similarly, I once lost a client because apparently the uber boss of the company wanted to tell his mates he was with Charles and Maurice's place (he had moved to M&C, which, I suppose, is sort of the second most famous agency in the country. I bet most of the bovine mouth-breathers in the general population don't even know the difference, the fucking idiots). So the same effect of basking in a reflective glow occurs and that translates into cash and accounts.

3) Fame begets fame. If people want to interview an industry figure or do an article about advertising then it makes sense for them to choose so-and-so from Saatchi and Saatchi because it's easier than asking so-and-so from Wieden and Kennedy, you know, that agency that did the Honda ad where it all went round a room like Mousetrap.

So why, in all the years of advertising, particularly the last thirty, has no other agency managed to do this?

We're supposed to be the experts. Surely it's like a doctor treating his own sprained ankle, or a vet sorting out his manky salamander? And yet 99% of agencies do it like a decorator who who gets his own wallpaper overlapping and his tiles skew-whiff. Or a prostitute who can't manage a wank. Or something.

Can anyone think of a reason why an agency would not want to be famous? I can't really see a downside, or at least a downside that outweighs the massive upside.

And, if so, why isn't your agency trying to do it?

Adland Loves The 1980s

2010-05-17T23:57:00.003+01:00

There's something funny going on.

If it's not Mr T selling Snickers or Bonnie Tyler flogging Mastercard, we appear to be in the midst of a full-on eighties revival.

I even saw this on TV last weekend:

Not sure why. I thought the whole eighties revival thing had been and gone by 2008. Should we be into a nineties revival about now?

Just think: Cotton Eye Joe, Chaka Demus and Pliers, Steps, Achy Breaky Heart, Right Said Fred.

Oooohhh... makes you want to gently commit suicide just thinking about it.

The One Show

2010-05-17T10:17:00.003+01:00

Results Here.

Now, maybe you're a more eagle-eyed person than me, but I looked at the list of winners in the proper One Show (not the design or digital bits, which, frankly, I couldn't give a fuck about) and could only find a single winner from a UK agency.

Four possible reasons:

1. We're shit (let's face it, it's not been a good couple of years, so that might well be the case).
2. And we know we are, so we didn't bother entering (less likely. Several agencies and production companies enter every year and there is something from Leo Burnett in the Design section, so they almost certainly entered the proper one too).
3. Lack of entry cash (Sure, but the best agencies would still have punted a few grand entering their best stuff).
4. We don't give a shit about The One Show (well, we seem to give a shit about Creative Circle and (no offence, CC) that's not nearly as prestigious).

But then, odd as you like is the fact that our only winner (I use the widest definition of 'our' here) has only gone and taken Best of Show:

Is that good? I have to confess I've never watched it all the way through, or even a minute through (I find myself getting distracted waiting for the cameraman to fall over so I don't really pay enough attention to the story to find it engaging. And that's Begbie, isn't it? Why's he gone all civilised? I much preferred it when he was glassing tourists for sport).

Anyway, congratulations to the people behind it and congrats to all the nerds in the nerdy agencies that won lots of 'Interactive' (meaningless) pencils.

UPDATE: Check that shit out! I embedded like a motherfucker. (Thanks, Guy and Sarah.)

Weekendy Shit Including A Darn Good Ad For Orange

2010-05-13T15:52:00.010+01:00

Orange have heeded the wise advice of this blog and changed their dry old pre-movie campaign.

It's now funnier, smarter and A-list instead of D-list.

Thank fuck for that.

I love it.

Get yourself a job with $6 and a little ingenuity.

(Thanks, F.)

The best World Cup ad so far:

(Thanks, A. Via Twitter.)

Total Recall: The Musical.

Last week's poll was kind of like a hung parliament of things people liked best in advertising.

New Poll up now.

And finally, I have unearthed the YouTube clip that Juan Cabral stole to make his drumming gorilla ad:

New Skittles Ad

2010-05-13T11:36:00.004+01:00

Oddly enough, I think it makes too much sense.

It's actually an ad which gives a specific benefit to the product.

I don't think Pinata, Touch or Beard, for example, did that. I know they kind of suggested the sweets are in some way irresistible, but that's not specific, so the ads could be more random in their fun-ness.

Screenwriting/Ads Etc.

2010-05-12T15:10:00.002+01:00

I went to Watford (the college, not the place, although if you go to the former, you do end up spending time in the latter. Horrible fucking shithole). We were taught a bunch of very useful things but we never had a single lesson on how to write a script.

Which is odd because, thinking back, I've never had a formal, deliberate lesson on advertising scriptwriting. I've had the odd bit of advice here and there, but no one seems to mind that you're just shoved in at the deep end, producing (supposedly) professional scripts that clients will see and directors will work to.

Anyway, a few years back my boss sent me (after a bit of nagging) on Robert McKee's Story Seminar, which is like this:

But here's a free hour of his more recent thoughts.

It was a really good course, although geared towards feature film script writing rather than ads.

For further brilliant advice, this is a website set up by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the writing team behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and other big hits (the link is sometimes a little dodgy but it's worth persevering). They explain why the names of your characters are so important and offer little gems such as the fact that M. Night Shyamalan didn't realise Bruce Willis was dead until the fifth draft of The Sixth Sense (lesson: draft, draft and draft again). It's all still films rather than ads, but many of the principles hold true for both.

Other advice: if you're thinking of writing a movie script, get Final Draft – formatting is key. Also, read Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It's really enjoyable as well as really informative.

What else? There's this interesting comment that was left on the blog yesterday by an ad person who has sold a script to Hollywood:

The joy of writing a screenplay is that you can do whatever you want in it. It's sort of helped me stay sane in advertising. I say 'sort of'. I am not entirely sane but let's not go there. I never thought about what would sell, just developed ideas that grabbed me. There’s a feature film in every one of these ‘high concept’ ideas so if you have anything like that I’d encourage you to keep turning it over in your brain until it gains momentum. I suppose you could compare one of these ideas to a really good advertising idea. You’ve got the print ad but what’s the ambient execution and the iphone app. etc. If it's rich enough you'll find it has many dimensions. If you work on all of these you'll find you've got enough ideas to flesh out into a screenplay. Before I started writing I found the whole idea of attempting something so big really intimidating but the more you time you spend on it, the more you break it down, the more it starts to feel like writing one ad after another after another – I believe Ben made a similar point a few months ago – which makes it much more manageable and very suited to our skill set. It’s also much easier than writing a novel because there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do it and we’re all pretty familiar with what makes a good movie.

It’s also closer to copywriting in so far as you can spend ages tinkering with a few lines. I’m guessing you can’t really afford to do that when you write a book.

Next to getting it read in the first place, the hardest thing to deal with is development. By the time you are asked to re-write something you are likely to be bored to death of it, not to mention impatient to see it made, but actually the development process can be very positive. It has been in my case. Entire threads were ripped out of the story and although I didn’t like it at the time I can now see that it was the right thing to do. In other words there’s a lot to be said for not being precious. Easier said than done obviously and I did lose a few things that I wanted to keep.

Now that I have sold the rights to it, I no longer own it which means they can do whatever they want with it. Another writer is on board now, working off the producer’s notes and that marks the end of my involvement. Pretty unceremonious. If he likes what they do, it’ll get made. If he doesn’t, it won’t and I’ll go back to freaking out about the horrible state of my career.

Anything else? Um... Dunno really. If you're thinking of writing a script, do give it a go. As the above person says, it's fun. I have my own screenplay Fuck Me Backwards almost finished. It'd be nice if someone was insane enough to want to make it, but I don't really care because I've really enjoyed writing it and the process has been an education.

Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments section. I know at least one other professional screenwriter drops by here occasionally. If he would like to give us some insights, I'm sure they'd be greatly appreciated.

Adidas Kicks Off (Geddit???!!!) Its World Cup Campaign

2010-05-12T13:31:00.007+01:00

This year Adidas will be bringing us a reactive moving graphic novel, where stories of its players and their achievements at the WC will be changed as they happen.

They are launching it with this.

(From 180 Amsterdam and Jonny Green. Interest declared: I did some work on this campaign in December, but I'm not sure how much of my contribution has survived – I didn't do any of the above. It was really fun, though. If you get the chance to work at 180 I'd recommend it, although it helps if you wear a woolly hat indoors and grow a beard.)

Aside from anything else, I like the fact that they have gone somewhere different, both in style and content. After all, the usual thing here, post Good vs Evil, is to set up a weird football match of some sort. This, instead, gives us the players as heroes in a separate world of their own.

Have A Laugh And Help The Best Charity On Earth

2010-05-11T17:18:00.003+01:00

(Poster by Paul Belford at This Is Real Art).

Do come along. I'll be sitting in H4. If you say hello I'll buy you an ice cream at the interval.

What We Can Learn From Movies

2010-05-10T21:30:00.012+01:00

I often cast envious glances in the direction of Hollywood.

Not just because movies are bloody great, but also because the people involved in them seem to be so much better at what we do than we are.

We often try to create advertising campaigns that are viral, multi-media, 360-degree experiences, yet that's what movies have been doing since before the terms were even invented. Star Wars toys, Happy Meal tie-ins, posters, radio ads, trailers that people go out of their way to spread and download, personal appearances by the people involved, premieres, reviews in the editorial sections of media... The list goes on and on.

You could just take the poster, a medium in which movies beat advertising hands down. They too have to communicate several things in one simple image, possibly with the backup of a line, but they do it so much better than we do:

I think a great lesson to learn here is that economy of elements can be boosted enormously by tone of voice. People rarely seem to mention this in advertising, but the TOV of an ad can communicate as much as, if not more than, the words and pictures. You can tell what those three movies are going to be like just be taking a glance at their representative images. And those images (I mean the whole poster, by the way, not just the picture) are better than anything I've seen in advertising in the last year.

And they all have it: brilliantly crafted image making that distills even a shit two-hour experience into one great picture:

Some of you might wish to argue that their 'products' are better/cooler/more interesting than ours. Well, that's just one more thing that movies get right.

A studio never makes a picture that doesn't 'work'. It may not be of great quality or to your taste, but they almost always take 120 pieces of paper, filter them through a crew of 200 and come out with something at the other end that is a coherent whole that will appeal to a minimum of a million, but probably more like hundreds of millions of completely different people across the world.

Whereas we sift through some dismal shite from one car company/detergent/snack that is much like another.

Sorry, I've just realised this post is going to go on and on and on, so I'm going to break it down and do it in separate chunks.

I Can't Tell If This iHobo Thing Is A Joke Or Not

2010-05-10T15:55:00.007+01:00

Publicis have just launched an app that allows users to feed and help a virtual homeless person.

It's called...

Wait for it...

iHobo!

Yes! iHobo

You are supposed to help your own little homeless fella live, like he's some kind of 2010 Tamagotchi.

The reason why I ask if it's real is that someone's already done it as a spoof (a cursory check on t'internet would have found that out pretty quickly).

And the name: iHobo.

We don't call homeless people 'hobos'. That's what they did in depression-era America.

Besides, even if we did, it's a pejorative term, making this kind of like creating an iSpazz app where you can help a mentally handicapped person dribble his soup a bit less, then donate to Mencap.

Odd.

(Thanks for the spot, A.)

UPDATE: it's real, all right...

And it's in the 'entertainment' category of the iTunes App store, not 'education'.

Tee Hee

2010-05-10T11:06:00.002+01:00

(Thanks, P.)

Worst Metaphor Of All Time

2010-05-10T09:29:00.001+01:00

Maybe it's more of a visual pun.

I don't know.

All I know is that is sucks the shit off a dead cow's arse.

If I need to explain further, it smacks in the worst possible way of the utter desperation of the creative team/agency/account man at the 11th hour when everyone else refused to touch it.

'Give them (like a gift) the chance to own the road (an actual chunk of road)'. And these recipients actually seem delighted at these chunks of asphalt. How odd. And they don't seem all that heavy. How much odder.

It even won an award for being shit.

Congrats, all involved.

This Is Going To Be Big

2010-05-09T18:54:00.002+01:00

I like an ad that wears its bollocks on its sleeve.

This one has taken a big chance and I think it's come off a treat.

Rewatchability, stop-you-in-the-pub-ability, talkability.

What more do you need?

Advertising Perfection And How To Be Free

2010-05-06T21:31:00.005+01:00

I know Sell! Sell! put this up yesterday, but just in case some of you don't venture to that corner of cyberspace (you should), here's advertising at its very, very best; perfect in both concept and execution:

And here is the making of:

Changing the subject with no finesse whatsoever, I'm currently reading a book called How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson.

It's an enjoyable potted philosophy on how to opt out of the demands of what I can only describe as The Man, and getting back to reclaiming your life for yourself.

The main principles are freedom, merriment and responsibility, 'otherwise known as having a laugh and doing what you want' (the responsibility bit refers to taking charge of your own life instead of numbly sleepwalking through a life that is most convenient for those in charge).

The reason I mention it is that I sense from some past comments on this blog that there is a degree of dissatisfaction from some of you. You bought your ticket but the movie turned out to be shit, and now you're itching to leave but you can't quite bring yourself to waste the money you've spent.

Well, I used to walk out of movies on a regular basis (I still do, but as I've got older I tend to choose more wisely). My friend would stay in the cinema and we'd meet up later whereupon he would ask me how I could bring myself to walk out of something I'd paid a fiver for. The simple answer was that I thought the idea of paying not to enjoy yourself was absurd and it was much better to stop the boredom ASAP and go and do something else.

Of course, my tortuous analogy is much easier than the reality of changing your career, but I urge any of you are who are unhappy to take a baby step in another direction and see where it leads. Perhaps reading the book will be that baby step.

I'm going to have another G&T and check out as many of The best movie endings of all time I can lay my hands on.

2010-05-06T09:55:00.000+01:00

The Election

2010-05-05T13:14:00.005+01:00

If you're still undecided about who to vote for, you might want to check out this very even-handed and balanced piece by Stephen Fry.

I would seriously urge any of you to read the whole thing, but if you don't have the time (it is quite long), it boils down to this:

Do not let the Conservatives in (or BNP, but that kind of goes without saying).

Here's how to do it.

For further info, this is quite enlightening.

As is this.

And a great Guardian Q&A here.

I wouldn't point you in any direction (other than away from David Cameron's party) but there is only one policy that I'd like to address specifically, mainly because it seems to have been the victim of a lot of wank-ridden conjecture that doesn't stand up to gnat's fart of logic:

The Lib Dems want to bring in an amnesty for illegal immigrants. HOWEVER, this is for those illegals who have been here over ten years, speak English and have no criminal record. Both of the other two parties slag this policy off as if it means we will just open the gates to all illegals or at least 'let them off', but it's very easy to forget that it is those two parties that let them in in the first place.

The idea that this policy will mean wave after wave of illegals will now see us as an easy touch is fucking ludicrous:

'Hey, Fritski, lets go to Britain! All we have to do to get those saps to let us stay is learn English, commit no crimes and remain in the country undetected for a decade! Piece of piss!'

If you want to come to this country illegally, it'll be as easy/difficult under the Lib Dem's policy as it is now.

And besides, there's no evidence to show that countries who have imposed amnesties before end up with such an influx as a result of this.

AND it would cost a cunting fortune to find, detain and get rid of them all (I'll say again that they were all let into the country by previous governments) instead of letting them work legally and contribute to the tax income. And that's ignoring the fact that if they've been here ten years, some of them are probably contributing to society in a positive manner already.

The alternative seems insanely expensive and unworkable.

Also, the Conservatives say they will cap immigration, but they have yet to put a number on this cap because they can't fucking do it. 80% of immigration comes from the EU, and we're not allowed to cap it. By all means, cap the other 20%, but your (eg) 20,000 non-EU cap can then be supplemented by 400,000 from the EU and there's not a damn thing David Cameron or anyone else can do about it. So his policy is bullshit. You can't stop the vast majority of immigration to this country. Sorry. But at least there's a party that has a policy for dealing with the immigration we've already got.

So I'm not saying vote Lib Dem. I'm just saying don't let the illegal immigrant amnesty thing stop you doing so.

And, as always, feel free to disagree with me and vote Conservative. Or BNP.

But if you still can't quite work out who is for you, this should help.

Creative Advertising And YouTube: Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud.

2010-05-04T14:08:00.006+01:00

Let me start this post by saying that I fucking love YouTube. It's full of the most amazing shit that I would never otherwise have seen.

And it's free!

Shit my leg off.

It's great recreationally, but we also know the impact YouTube has had on the creative side of advertising in the last few years: a non-stop torrent of clips from which to take inspiration that must have widened tenfold the frame of reference of the average creative.

And that would be great if the issue ended there.

Alas there are a couple of downsides, where this wondrous tool has hindered as much as it has helped:

1. YouTube as judge, jury and executioner.
The weekend's discovery of an ad that's similar to the new John Lewis commercial brings this issue into focus. I mentioned that the team involved were too good to have consciously remade an ad that already existed and I'm certain that is the case, but the similarity is out there for all to see and for all to judge. In the absence of a signed affidavit from the people concerned, ANY ad that is now released will also be subject to the same scrutiny. Is that fair? Well, the problem is that all too often the presumption of guilt is the first port of call. This may be due to the ingrained reflex of the ad creative to call 'Unoriginal!' on anything with any obvious precedent. Now the 'source' material you may not even have been aware of can be plucked from obscurity and blogged (sorry, guilty as charged) and commented on.

However, the big problem is that pretty much everything has a precedent of some kind, as this site shows. In the past, people didn't mind that you nicked/were inspired by a scene from a movie:

But now, if you happen to use a single frame or photograph to inspire your work, people will cry foul.

It blows up out of all proportion the issue of how creative a creative is, and there's nowhere to hide.

2. Youtube as diluter of the creative department's status.
I firmly believe that people admire what other people do for two reasons: one is the inherent quality of the achievement and the other is the degree of difficulty involved in achieving it. The latter is what's under the microscope here.

For the last twenty years the Apple Mac has made this job far easier than it used to be. I wrote about this a while back, but this actually meant that the clients gradually realised that a colour/logo size could be changed at a touch of a button, one hundred times if need be, right up to one minute before the supply deadline. So that's what they now do: changes are many, late and much less expensive (chargeable) than they were before.

Now, the proliferation of ads that use YouTube clips as reference has meant that the TV part of our job also looks much easier to a client. If you show a client a clip then ask him for £350,000 to remake it, that just seems to the client that creative departments are stuffed with people who (very expensively) search YouTube all day. Now why would they respect that? Why would they think that wasn't something they could do with a spare afternoon? Of course, the creative process is much, much more than the initial reference clip, but I can understand why an uneducated client might think that he's not getting value for money, and that creatives do very little that he couldn't do himself. In addition, they see a director getting £50k for remaking the clip, and wonder exactly what creatives do that is worth what he pays.

You may have noticed that the rise of YouTube has coincided with a fall in the standards of creative work. Is that because we are less impressed with YouTube clips that have new logos on the end, or is this just one part of a general slide towards oblivion for advertising creativity? Either way, it means we will get less respect and less pay and it will be very difficult to turn that situation around.

3. YouTube as reference.
We're all aware that you can no longer simply show a scamp or a script and hope that is enough to convince someone to let you make it. Reference is where it's at. You may or may not use reference to clarify an idea to your partner or CD, but when it comes to client meetings you'd better have a clip that lays it all on a plate. YouTube is a massive repository of these pieces of film which help lead the client by the hand into waters that are familiar, that he can see working. If you jump straight into the unknown, the client may well be too scared to follow, after all, he might need to persuade his boss, and without that clip from an old episode of Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds, how can he possibly hope to do that?

That might seem like an upside – making the persuasion of clients easier – but it also means that you end up having to make ads that are very similar to the source material, and that reduces originality, further depleting the perceived contribution of the creative.

Overall, it can take the client behind the curtain and show him really clearly how we do what we do. In the old days (you know, the days when people thought the ads were better than the TV programs), the making of ads was an interesting mystery which was given the time, money and respect it needed to become as good as it did. The guy who wrote Heineken Refreshes... (Terry Lovelock) did so after a month of failure was followed by Frank Lowe packing him of to Marrakesh for one last chance. Indulgent? Maybe. But that was one hell of a piece of work, and if it came about via a month of nothing and a Moroccan holiday, who are we to argue?

Nowadays, the other people in your agency want to keep the creative down. The funny thing is, we're colluding wholeheartedly in that process. We're turkeys voting for Christmas; we're Tiger Woods leaving messages on hookers' voicemails; we're the fresh meat on D-wing and we're dropping the soap on purpose.

The above downsides to YouTube may not be readily apparent, but I believe they are helping to finish us off (and not in the good way that masseuses finish you off).

Please feel very free to tell me I'm wrong.

I'd love to be.

Best Topical Election Ads By A Mile

2010-05-04T09:52:00.005+01:00

A kind person (Thanks, O) pointed these out to me last week.

I think they've been well crafted and sit just on the right side of fun-poking rather than slipping into the murky realms of mean and nasty. And it's nice to see that lots of thought and effort went into them. The usual ad in these cases is a shit pun and a hastily cobbled together stock image, so a proper illustration and an arseload of good copy is a pleasure to see.

Massive Coincidence Or Massive Rip?

2010-05-02T12:54:00.002+01:00

An anonymous commenter has just pointed out this News of the World suggestion that the recent John Lewis ad (that, by the way, got big chunky mentions in the newspaper sections of both the Guardian and Observer on the weekend) is a rip-off of this Italian lingerie ad:

Now, this is an interesting question.

If you look through the comments on the original post, you'll see that the technique was done 23 years ago for a John Lennon video:

Imagine (J.Lennon) - Zbigniew Rybczynski (1987) from Thomas Mantero on Vimeo.

And we now have an ad with the same 'plot', but which also uses the same track.

Hmmm...

Technique, plot and song all used before in very similar ways.

Ah, I'm torn between thinking it doesn't matter and worrying that this post I put up on Friday has just come true in the most glaring way.

Time for a pint, I think.

New Peter Kay John Smiths Ad

2010-05-01T19:32:00.002+01:00

Can be found here.

The article I read about it said the conversation in the new ad was excruciatingly embarrassing.

It is.

But not for the reason the makers believe.

(ie: it's just embarrassingly unfunny.)

It kind of reminded me of how Indiana Jones 4 compared to the other three.

Or how having your fingers cut off compares to having a nice G&T at the end of a long day.

Sack Your Creative Department.

2010-04-30T15:55:00.002+01:00

Thanks to this excellent idea from Hyper, you don't really need one.

And while I'm here, the poll says most of you are happy, but there are enough sad ones for me to feel a little bit sad myself.

I shall attempt to cheer myself up with another poll.

Have a good weekend.

I Don't Like To Blow My Own Trumpet

2010-04-30T10:52:00.001+01:00

But the orange film pitch fuckers are DEAD!

And there is no way they would have done that without reading this.

Or this.

And the lesson?

Whinging about shit actually works.

Confess!

2010-04-29T16:33:00.004+01:00

I was going to join the priesthood, but then I remembered God is a fictional character made up to oppress people who didn't know any better hundreds and thousands of years ago.

But I did rather like the idea of sitting in a wooden box while my friends and neighbours told me what they'd been up to that week.

With that in mind, for one day only (or a bit longer if people are enjoying it), Father Kay is taking your confessions.

Tell me (anonymously of course) about all the bad and naughty shit you have done.

I'll dispense the Hail Marys and Our Fathers and we'll all get to hear about that time you shat in your boss's desk or tupped your AD's daughter at his third wedding.

My box is yours.

Welcome.

(By the way, if no one's interested in doing this I'll just stick up some weekend shit, so keep them coming and make them good. Your candour will inspire that of others.)

Toy Story 3 Has Created Fake Ads For The Toys That Feature In The Movie. And They're Great.

2010-04-29T07:33:00.002+01:00

Priceless...

2010-04-28T15:07:00.001+01:00

(Thanks, J.)

Oh, and anyone else heard the rumour of many redundancies and resignations at Campaign? I've heard they're down to eight permanent staff, although I have to admit that I was surprised it took that many people to copy and paste press releases.

Amusing Ad-Based Ad

2010-04-28T11:59:00.000+01:00

(Thanks, G.)

What Can 'Moneyball' Teach Advertising?

2010-04-27T22:07:00.000+01:00

I'm reading a book called Moneyball.

It explains how baseball started using statistics to recruit players instead of just relying on a scout's instincts. Apparently, these instincts were completely unreliable and gave very little real insight into which players a team should draft. Then, around the late seventies, nerdy types started accumulating proper observations to create statistics that were a much more accurate reflection of a player's worth. But it wasn't until the turn of the century that a poor team (the Oakland As) started to use this information to tilt the talent pool in their favour and compete with the super-rich New York Yankees. I haven't reached the end of the book yet, but I assume that now the cat is out of the bag, all teams recruit on this policy.

It sounds fucking dull, but it's actually really interesting and very well written.

But could its lessons be applied to advertising?

Could an agency recruit far better creatives for a much lower budget just by analysing what they were really good at rather than going on reputation?

For example, a creative might have their name on a few pieces of highly-awarded work, but then a bit of digging might reveal that he or she had little to do with the actual creativity. Then again, they might have managed to schmooze the edgy cut past the client, thus saving all the good work of his or her partner.

Then again, maybe there are some really good creatives languishing in agencies that don't make the most of them.

Of course, it's virtually impossible to analyse the parts of a creative's 'game' in the same way one can for a baseball player, but something similar has been done twice in recent ad history: 1980s GGT and 1990s Simons Palmer both used an incredible talent pool of raw youngsters to complement a couple of seniors, and with the guidance of great CDs the work was brilliant on a smaller budget. Creatives such as such as Henry, Chaldecott, Grubb, Waters, Damon Collins and Mary Wear (GGT), and Paul Silburn, Dave Dye, Gary Martin and Tim Riley (Simons Palmer) maximised their bosses' cash outlay because they were 'drafted' and shaped by some of the keenest eyes in the business.

Nowadays, however, I think this is less relevant. Agencies don't seem to care about great creativity to the same degree and a creative's ability to be 'client-facing' can be as valuable to an MD as his ability to win a Pencil. Also, the relegation of creative quality to the back of the list of priorities means that a good young creative may never get the chance to display his or her best stuff on a regular basis.

For what it's worth, when Daryl and I hired junior teams, we looked for hunger (inclination to work hard) and an auto-didactic interest in great creativity (trans: given half a chance they inhaled award annuals). That meant that when we tried to point them in the right direction they knew what we meant and were happy to put the work in. D&AD entries and nominations followed and now all are doing well elsewhere.

Now, whether they're all good with clients or not is another matter. But we thought they'd learn that later. After all, if you're shit at ads but good with clients then you're not a creative, you're an account manager.

GOLDMAN SACHS ARE THE BIGGEST BUNCH OF CUNTS ON GOD'S CLEAN EARTH.

2010-04-27T21:36:00.000+01:00

Spike Jonze, He's A Larf, Innee?

2010-04-27T13:33:00.001+01:00

(Thanks, P.)

Impossible Dream 2010: The Director's Cut/Sequel/Redux Etc.

2010-04-26T21:30:00.005+01:00

I don't think anyone's done this with an ad before: taken a brilliant commercial and extended it by adding scenes both during and at the end. So now we know where the moustachioed Andy Williams fan was heading:

Something For The Weekend

2010-04-26T16:20:00.019+01:00

I know it's only Monday, but the vernal equinox meant that I didn't do a SFTW last week, and I have a bunch of shit in my inbox that needs curling out onto the blogosphere.

First is this excellent promo from MIA. If you are of the ginger persuasion it might strike a chord deep in your heart (thanks, D).

Then there are a couple of blogs you might want to check out:

Steve Paskin's art-directionally based round up of interesting visual stuff.

And then Diccon and Al's snogdogfrog. Wider subject matter but with no less depth.

Last, I should point out that Kate Moss, the one who ruined many an ad blog with her foul musings, is now on Twitter. Don't Follow – you'll only encourage her.

Here's A Smashing Ad

2010-04-25T19:24:00.002+01:00

Why is this good?

Well, I might be at the appropriate time of life, and I absolutely love the brand and company of John Lewis, so I can't help but get a warm fuzzy feeling about this.

But that kind of reaction is rare for me, and I think it has a lot to do with the craft. The direction is perfect (as Andy Gray would say, take a bow Dougal Wilson) and the track is a thing of beauty. The casting is great and the scenarios are compelling and recognisable without feeling cliched.

The technique feels somewhat familiar (I think that one-take thingie has been done a few times, but I can't think of specific examples right now. Thank you Mr Gin and Mrs Tonic) but I don't really care. I think originality can be overrated, and I'd definitely rather have something excellent and mildly familiar than something shite and ragingly original.

Well done, people involved.

Like I Said, I'm Not Voting Cameron

2010-04-23T11:51:00.003+01:00

Have a lovely weekend x

(Thanks, K.)

Early Nineties Hip-Hop

2010-04-22T19:25:00.001+01:00

This week's death of Guru (do you know that near the end things were so bad he required a Daily Operation?) made me think about the incredible concentration of quality that hip-hop gave us in the early nineties.

Before that time I wasn't much of a rap fan, although living with a brother who was meant that I experienced the best of what the eighties had to offer (Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Run DMC, NWA, Erik B and Rakim etc. I remember loving 'White Lines' at the age of ten and my mum asking me if I knew what it was about. I had no idea, so she told me. I've been addicted to cocaine ever since). But whatever happened around the turn of the decade, there did seem to be a non-stop surge of new and brilliant work that has yet to be matched.

First, I could mention the great artists who produced their best work at that time: Dr Dre's The Chronic; Nas's Illmatic; Snoop's Doggystyle; Death Certificate and Amerikkka's Most Wanted by Ice Cube; Paul's Boutique by The Beastie Boys; Don't Sweat The Technique by Eric B and Rakim; The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest; Daily Operation and Step In The Arena by Gang Starr

Then there's the 80s MCs who brought out excellent new tracks that matched the best of what they had done before: New Jack Hustler by Ice T; What's It All About and Down With The King by Run DMC; Juice (Know The Ledge) by Eric B and Rakim; Always Into Something by NWA; Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J; Summertime by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince; Headbanger by EPMD; Duck Down and Sound Of Da Police by KRS 1 and So What 'Cha Want by The Beastie Boys

We also had the breakthroughs of such artists as Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Redman, The Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, Digital Underground, 3rd Bass, Main Source, 2Pac, OutKast, Common, The Pharcyde, The Geto Boys, Cypress Hill, Naughty By Nature and Notorious BIG.

And the One-Hit Wonders: Slam by Onyx; Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat) by Digable Planets; Let It All Hang Out by A.D.O.R; Fuck Compton by Tim Dogg; I Gotta Man by Positive K; Gangsta Bitch by Apache; Jump Around by House of Pain; Chief Rocka by Lords of the Underground; 93 Til Infinity by Souls of Mischief; Regulate by Warren G; One To Grow On by UMC's; Flavor Of The Month by Black Sheep; Mistadobalina by Del The Funkee Homosapien, Sometimes I Rhyme Slow by Nice And Smooth etc.

Obviously there are many others that I haven't mentioned, but for me this era was to hip-hop as the late sixties/early seventies were to rock.

And I don't think I'm the only one who believes this. When I went to see Fish Tank last year, the main character was a sixteen-year-old girl who practices dancing in an empty council flat. Oddly enough, the only music she dances to is early nineties hip-hop.

I hope you enjoy some of the above tracks.

I know I did.

The Greatest Ad Campaign Ever

2010-04-21T22:00:00.002+01:00

(Thanks, S.)

It's funny because it's true. Integrated campaign films are so often packed with bullshit that I've stopped caring.

In other 'news', hats off to D&AD for popping their 2010 pre-pencil results online here.

Also, you've probably noticed that the vast majority of people think the Orange Cinema ads should now die. Please let it be so.

Perhaps by the time you've read this I will have thought of another poll.

I'm Not Voting Conservative

2010-04-21T13:42:00.003+01:00

Never mind David Cameron, I just think it's about time the British public shoved a rolled up copy of The Sun back into the ageing, puckered anus of Rupert Sodding Murdoch.

With that in mind...

New Samsung TV Ad

2010-04-20T20:20:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Naughty Creative for pointing this out (oddly, I got the Twitter alert from Media Guardian and, despite a general propensity to watch any old crap to kill a minute or two, I just thought, 'Oh, that sounds like rubbish,' and ignored it).

It can be seen here.

I think my instinct was right. It's one of those boring old ads where a city of people becomes amazed at something. They start smiling and snapping it with their camera phones – you know the drill. This time they're watching really large banks of Samsung 3D TVs that show some 3D stuff that's is, quite frankly, dull. This time, however, it also has the indeterminate gloss of pan-Euro nothingness that makes its (apparently) genuine 'thrills' look fake.

NC also pointed out that the credit for ad goes not to any creatives from the agency (CHI), but the Marketing Director:

'Samsung's campaign has been masterminded by the electronics manufacturer's marketing director, Mikah Martin-Cruz, the executive behind the famous "Paint" and "Play-Doh" commercials for Sony's Bravia TV.

"The campaign really captures the spirit of 3D TV and brings to life the amazing experience the technology can deliver," said Martin-Cruz.'

I wonder what he did to mastermind it. Perhaps he wrote this piece of shit. Congrats, Mr. Martin-Cruz, you've made a vanilla blancmange of an ad. You may be 'the executive behind the famous "Paint" and "Play-Doh" commercials for Sony's Bravia TV,' but that smacks of those movie trailers that say, 'From the Executive Producer of Bridget Jones's Diary'. Why would this connection cause you to give a shit? And anyway, weren't there other clients behind 'Paint' and Play-Doh'? And didn't Juan Cabral chip in with a few suggestions?

To be honest, all this article does is make Mr. Martin-Cruz look like a bit of a desperate twat, a little toddler jumping around with his hands in the air because he's done a really smashing poo.

Well, congrats, Mr. M-C, a poo has been done and now we all know who's responsible.

You All Look Like Giant Cocks. Every Single One Of You.

2010-04-20T09:33:00.002+01:00

(Via The Grumpy Brit.)

Why do people make these things? Really? I have no idea why people would willingly, enthusiastically want to look like giant, grade-A, 24-carat, nailed on fuckwits. Isn't life hard enough without going out of your way to make people across the word look at you and think, 'What a humongous bell-end. I'd sooner eat a crack baby than spend a millisecond in the company of that utter prat'?

If any of you are gearing up to make one of these for the summer, or perhaps you're thinking ahead to Christmas, just remember that you are exactly what Bill Hicks had in mind:

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.

Good, Topical, Funny.

2010-04-19T14:12:00.000+01:00

Such rare qualities these days...

Want A Good Reason To Vote Lib Dem?

2010-04-19T07:32:00.001+01:00

Here's one.

But whoever you are going to vote for, today is the last day to register.

Go on. Emmeline Pankhurst didn't chain herself to that horse (or whatever she did) just so that you could play GTA 4 instead of deciding who's going to run the country.

Or maybe she did.

She was, after all, a very strange girl.

My Weekend Outdoor Private View

2010-04-18T20:40:00.009+01:00

Here is a selection of the posters I saw on a journey from Belsize Park to South Kensington on Saturday:

Questions: have the agency concerned seen the incredibly, incredibly, incredibly fucking famous campaign known as 'Got Milk?', that has been pumping out of Goodby's for years? If so, why have they so blatantly stolen such a well known campaign? If not, do they not check out any advertising from around the world? Did they perhaps do it in conjunction with 'Got Milk?'? If so, why not use the endline and art direction? And is there nothing Ramsay won't plug? Tampax? Paedophilia websites? AIDS blood in a can?

Next:

By that they mean, 'Go and see something with your grandkids BEFORE YOU DIE, YOU OLD FUCKER.'

Last, but not least:

'The new busy'? What the fuck is that? To me it looks like the new busy is a colossal ringpiece. By the way, these ads are everywhere on the tube, but I have very little idea what they are on about. And as for how they relate to Microsoft/Hotmail – dear reader, I am stumped. However, I could not give the first shit. To me, Microsoft is not a company I choose to make part of my life. They make Word, don't they? Or do they? Who cares? Fuck off you boring bunch of dweebs.

What I Learned From Enron

2010-04-15T21:44:00.003+01:00

Last Saturday I went to see the play Enron, which, surprisingly enough, was about the Enron scandal.

It was good, but some parts were great.

The section that impressed me most was at the end where the disgraced Enron CEO, who got 24 years in jail for being a giant shitwhistle, tried to justify his actions.

He showed a graph that demonstrated how the bubbles, ie, the foolish overreachings of the human race had ultimately paved the way for its greatest successes. One example was the first dotcom boom, where we all rushed headlong into an explosion of interest and investment that couldn't possibly be sustained. After the inevitable crash we got web 2.0, a much safer and more sensible development of t'internet which Enron's author argues would not have been possible without the first, overly aggressive kick up the jacksie.

Of course, this is just another iteration of the concept of groundbreakers; men and women who show us the way by pushing the envelope too far. They didn't know how far to push it because the parameters had yet to be set, but without the pioneers there can be no progress.

Which brings me, with a weary sense of inevitability, to advertising.

To progress in any way, the industry must be prepared for failure. It must be ready for things to go wrong so that we might learn by them and move forward with the knowledge we have gained.

But in more straitened times no fucker wants to do that. For the sake of the fee everyone wants to stay tucked very nicely within the envelope thank you very much. The aversion to risk, which leads to the truncation of progress, is currently all-pervasive, and it would be interesting to see where the next boom of anything will occur.

I find it interesting that this fallow period has followed directly the all-conquering Gorilla.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that all over the world clients are currently asking for their own Gorilla, yet would never approve one in a million years (legend has it that a client didn't really approve Gorilla. They had to wait for Fallon to make it off their own backs and get a positive response from YouTube to be convinced that it would work).

And there's the problem: we all need to be complicit in moving things forward or the best intentions of one part of the process will be met with a brick wall from another.

Will we see another 'boom' that forces progress anytime soon? Well, since Martin Sorrell is so fond of making absolutely fucking cock-eyed predictions that never come within a barge pole of reality, I might as well do the same: the next truly great ad will happen in 2012, and it will be for Brain's Faggots.

Mark my words.

Weekend etc.

2010-04-15T19:48:00.000+01:00

Properly laugh-out-loud funny 5 second films:

Best promo since Windowlicker:

LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films: Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK from LOOSEWORLD on Vimeo.

3-D fun (thanks, P).

Will iPads be really cool? Of course they will.

And my favourite Tiger Woods spoof (thanks, L).

What's In A Name Order?

2010-04-14T17:20:00.003+01:00

A sound engineer once told me that he was working on an ad with Fred&Farid® when he said something along the lines of, 'What do think of this mix, Farid and Fred?'

Before giving their opinion, the premier grenouilles de publicite replied, 'Uh, (name of engineer, who will remain anonymous), not Farid and Fred. Never Farid and Fred. Always Fred and Farid.'

Leaving aside the – ahem – continentality of this assertion, it does throw up (deliberate turn of phrase there) the issue of name order, how it happens and what it means.

I've given this an entire crap's-worth of thought and have come to the conclusion that it is a bit random, but maybe if we look at some examples we can see if there's any method behind the madness:

Tom and Walt: London's original team-as-brand. Would 'Walt and Tom' have worked as well? Yep, but running 'Walt' into 'and' is a little bit trickier for the tongue than running 'Tom' into it.

Richard (Flintham) and Andy (McLeod): This one makes no sense at all. It gives you 'and And' to say. Andy and Richard would be much better. Too late now (unless Richard and Andy at BBH want to try reversing their names).

Nigel and Paul: To be honest, I can't remember if they were Paul and Nigel or Nigel and Paul. When I worked with Daryl the order often swapped and I think that happened with N&P too.

Shit.

I think, against some pretty stiff competition, this is the most pointless post I've ever written.

I should really have just deleted it and let you all speculate as to the wisdom of hiring Jonathan Burley at CHI and who's going to replace him at Leo Burnett.

But I thought you'd prefer something, however shit, to read.

And people love a Fred&Farid-are-ponces story, don't they?

How To Fill That Moment

2010-04-13T21:04:00.002+01:00

If any of you have ever shown a script to a creative director, or a portfolio to a critting team, then you'll be familiar with that chunk of time when the work is perused and all conversation stops.

It's an odd moment that I don't think I've encountered anywhere else, but it never seems to get less awkward.

So here, for your more joyful life are some things you can do to occupy yourself during the wait:

1. Whenever Daryl and I did a crit we'd swap the portfolio for an awards annual and suggest the team flick through it for a few minutes. They seemed glad of the distraction and we preferred not to have them trying to decipher every cough and mumble for positive or negative signs.

2. Be like Hannibal Lecter: create a palace in your mind that you can walk round when things get too much for you or you'd simply like to visit somewhere nice. He did it when children were misbehaving near him on a plane; you can do it in a CD's office. And it needn't be a palace. Why not recreate your favourite brothel or maximum security prison for violent sex offenders?

3. Count awards. CDs tend to have awards; invariably, that's part of the reason they've become CDs. Have a look and see if they're the kind that are worth winning, or simply a couple of dozen Mobiuses or Regional Addys. This is very handy information because it allows you to to work out whether to take his opinions seriously or simply laugh in his face.

4. Pretend you've received an important email on your iPhone then play Angry Birds or Bejewelled 2. If you don't have an iPhone just excuse yourself to the toilet and read The Sun for a few minutes. Don't worry – they'll wait for you to return.

5. Stare out of the window. There should be at least one in every CD's office so take a look through it, plan your route home and see if the traffic looks like a bit of an arse.

6. Talk to your partner just loud enough to be heard by the CD then make sure you say something complimentary about something in his office ('Wow! He's got a box-set of The Wire! What impeccable taste!). The CD will then like you a little bit more. Possibly enough to give you a placement or pass your script.

7. Scratch yourself, but make it subtle.

Hope that helped.

Other suggestions welcome.

However, really sweary ones about people you hate at CHI will be rejected, just like the fifteen I received yesterday.

I've Just Discovered This Blog Post I Wrote In 1983:

2010-04-12T22:31:00.005+01:00

Hey everyone.

Wow, there's was a fair bit of disagreement about that Paul Arden Alexon stuff, eh? What's the idea? Who knows? Does it Matter?

I suppose we'll never really resolve it, so let's move on.

There's a new one I quite like from GGT for Holsten Pils:

I know it's a little like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, but it seems pretty cool to me (might be Griff's 814th ad of this year, though!).

COMMENTS

Anonymous said...

Fuck me! What a bloody rip. They should hang their heads in shame.

Anonymous said...

This is so lazy. Is this what people are going to do for ads now? Just trawl about in the cinema looking for scenes to pinch?

Derek Hass said...

I like it.

Anonymous said...

Do they think we haven't seen DMDWP? Just shows how uncreative Henry and Chaldecott are. I bet this is the last ad they ever make, the talentless bastards.

Mr. M. Denton Esq said...

Very funny. Hats off to 'em all. Guffaw, chortle, snigger.

Anonymous said...

Who's the blonde with the big tits?

Anonymous said...

Yawn. Lazy.

Anonymous said...

I guess the stupid public will love it. It won't win anything though.

Charles Saatchi said...

Vote Tory!

Anonymous said...

How can these guys call themselves creative? What's creative about nicking a scene from a movie?

Anonymous said...

This is the kind of thing that makes the public think we're a bunch of lazy, thieving cunts.

Ben said...

But it's an homage, isn't it? They took the original and added something to it. Anyway Steve Martin's about as funny as missing the plug hole and pouring a gallon of drain cleaner down your jap's eye. This makes the whole conceit much better, doesn't it?And what are we saying now, that we can't be influenced by anything else? Where's that going to end? If someone does an ad in, say, 24 years time with a drumming gorilla, I bet someone else will dig up a bit of film that it's a tiny bit similar to and start whinging about it. Anyway, fuck this. I'm off to watch Jim Davidson. He does a really funny black man character called Chalky White.