Whopper Freakout was one of the best ads/multimedia whatchacallits this year. Here’s the version with swearing and references to being a junkie:

Now and again the advertising ‘community’ wrings its hands over the paucity of racial minorities that work within it. Then we go back to our lattes and wring our hands over the lack of women or homosexuals or, more likely, most of us couldn’t care less.

I posted about this on the ‘other’ blog about a year ago and DHM’s blog has mentioned it recently, but I think I might have found a subconscious reason why:

There aren’t many racial minorities in our ads, at least not in the good ads that might make you want to get into advertising. Chack out the UK nominees at D&AD this year:

Skoda Cake? Zero. Here Come The Girls? Two quick shots in 100 seconds. Carling Space/Out has a black guy but he’s not given a line in 60 seconds of Space (in fact you can barely tell he’s black) but he’s upgraded to a line in Out. Time Theft? Zero. Dangerous Liaisons? Zero. In Orange ‘belonging’ the star has about 50 friends, one of whom (barely featured) is black. Brylcreem Effortless? None.

Interestingly, the main character in the best ad of last year is black, but then Americans seem to have either a much more enlightened attitude to featuring racial minorities or a legal paranoia about positive discrimination. I remember a few years back where every ‘youth’ ad in the US had to have a young black guy who was often the cool counterpoint to a white idiot. Hey! Reverse racism! (Or something)

I’m not for a second suggesting that this is all about racism, but there may be some reasons for this that come from somewhere other than a desire to burn crosses on lawns:

1. Pan-Euro ads. Aside from the fact that most of Europe is caucasian, the vast majority of the spenders in Europe are definitely so. Add to that the very real racism of countries like Italy and Spain and you have territories where the inclusion of racial minorities is very unlikely to happen. And now that more and more of the UK’s ads are for other markets, this is only going to increase.

2. The Scandinavian influence (I say Scandinavian because they have made the biggest impact on UK advertising over the last ten years, but the same could be said of other nations). There aren’t as many racial minorities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, so for those directors and creatives, it’s unlikely that the the first person they think of casting for a commercial will be a racial minority, and the absence of such may not even occur to them.

3. A few years ago I went to see Miuccia Prada give a talk. One of the audience asked her why she didn’t feature black girls in her catwalk shows. She replied that her shows represented her visions and dreams, and if those didn’t feature black people then nor would the shows. She didn’t think it was her responsibility to dishonestly represent her ‘art’ to tokenly include racial minorities. I guess there may also be an element of that in advertising. Should we have a black person in an ad just because there are a lot in the country?

4. Racism. I worked on a telecoms account (not BT) a while back and we suggested having a black guy as one of the characters in our animated commercial. I can’t remember why we wanted to do that, but it was probably to differentiate his vignette from the several others we featured. Anyway, we didn’t see it as a problem. We then got an email back from the client that said we were being ‘controversial enough’ by using animation and that we didn’t want to ‘fan any flames’ by featuring a black character. It was written with the kind of illiteracy one might expect from an unhinged BNP member and left us, in the year 2000, quite shocked, particularly as the account guy was a racial minority.

There are some interesting exceptions: Halifax has given us black, asian and fat as a house, as if they’re trying to cast anyone but a good-looking white guy, and of course, many of Nike and Adidas’s finest spots have featured black people, but it’s not many. Check out the Hovis ad: one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it view of a black guy from behind followed by a quick shot of an asian couple.

Is this the reason few black people want to get into advertising? Maybe. Or is it the case, as I mentioned on the DHM post, that black people don’t actually like the overall image of advertising as an industry and don’t find the idea of joining a hotbed of white, middle class smugness very appealing?

Thanks to L for this festive clip:

and here’s my favourite Christmas song:

I may post over the next two weeks, but I hope to be too drunk to work a keyboard.

Happy Christmas.

xxx

This delightful festive message was brought to you by (among others) Mark Denton of Coy! Communications.

Interesting place, Coy. Slightly different (in a good way) to your average production company.

For example, they have an in-house typographer, the great Andy Dymock, who works on Coy! and Mark Denton Design jobs, but is also available for commissions, should you require the skills of a highly awarded type guru.

They also have photographers, a photographic studio and a frankly rather lovely bunch of production peeps who make it all go by whilst literally singing Morning Has Broken, if the opportunity presents itself.

As a fine example of their output, they’ve spent the last few weeks producing the Creative Circle Plea For Entries. If you receive one you might like to take a second or two to appreciate that they are all hand-made and have required many hours use of a typographer, a scalpel, thousands of rolls of Sellotape and duct tape, millions of paperclips and hundreds of miles of string. And that’s the kind of attention to detail you simply do not find these days (see yesterday’s post). Mark estimated the cost of each one at a frankly eye-watering number of pounds, but nothing’s too pricey as long as it’s right.

So here’s to you, one of the few bastions of extended creativity. In the interest of puns, I might suggest that you could also be mad about the Coy! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ahahahhahahahhahahh!!!11!111 Oh dear.

Merry Christmas.

By the way, what do you call a Welsh bloke with the runs?

Dai O’Rhea.

When I was a nipper, the route to success in the creative side of advertising was clear: win awards.

There were occasional anomalies, such as Jaspar Shelbourne, CD of JWT, who didn’t appear to have won much at all, but everywhere else the creative credentials of those in charge were impeccable.

However, over the last few years, something seems to have changed. Of course, most of those in the top jobs are highly awarded, but it doesn’t seem to matter quite so much any more. Now you need to get on with the chief of a network or holding company who might not give a toss whether your pencil count is one or seven, or whether your awards were won last year or ten years ago.

I once went to a talk about how CHI started. Johnny Hornby said that he and Simon Clemmow chose Charles Inge by leafing through the last few D&ADs and choosing the person whose work featured the most (I’m sure it was slightly more scientific then that; they probably had a pint with him too). Somehow, I can’t see that happening today.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are no longer lots of famous teams as there were when I started. It almost seems as if something is happening to squash the potential stardom of creatives, to prevent them growing too powerful. This might be because their inclination to kick up a fuss is in inverse proportion to their suitability for the top jobs. Perhaps those who are choosing would rather have a slightly less good CD/ECD who won’t scare the horses, than a thrower of pot plants through windows who will show horses Dawn of the Dead and The Omen on a regular basis.

Then, in turn, slightly less good creatives get chosen to populate the departments. The non-horse-scaring ECDs aren’t going to be keen on hiring horse-scarers, so the process filters through. Of course, propensity to kick up a fuss doesn’t correlate exactly with creative ability, but if those rows that push ads to be 8% better disappear, then so do the ads that are 8% better.

So is this the revenge of the suits? Are some of them turning CDs/ECDs into puppets that will step into line rather than risk losing an account to lah-di-dah creative standards? Is this a coincidence, or is the economic climate making creative indulgence seem like too much of a…well…an indulgence?

On one side that makes complete pragmatic financial sense.

On the other, it’s so depressing it kind of makes you want to scrape your eyeballs out with a rusty nail.

I was reading the Guardian a few weeks ago when I came across this article.

It’s all about a phenomenon called Clubland, which tours the UK but rarely ventures south of Birmingham.

Here’s an example of its content that is interesting for two reasons:

First off, it’s so awful it makes me want to lean my face into a hedge trimmer.

Second, it’s had 3.3million YT hits, so we can probably double that in total.

I’m assuming you agree with my assessment, after all you probably like Bon Iver, Television on the Radio and MGMT. But 6-7 million people seem to think its great. Before I read the Guardian article, I hadn’t even heard of any of this shit, but it’s out there, making me feel like I’m swimming above the Mariana Trench while zillions of creatures go about their business unbeknownst to me, and I to them.

So how many of these huge, unknown movements are there? What else is of interest to a tenth of the population that we don’t know about? And how do we find out?

I guess it’s all down to visiting places you’ve never been before, and not just for the sole purpose of finding something to stick in your next ad. Because for every one of these, there’s one of these:
First Openly Gay Racehorse To Compete Sunday

I’ve finally got round to having a proper read of the Campaign Annual 2008

As usual it seems to be broadly accurate but with several entries of slightly questionable merit that might have hinged more on the hospitality provided by the companies in question than the quality of their advertising.

Three lunches for Journalist X? Three spots higher on the top photographer’s chart.

Four hour lunch for Journailst Y? Four ads in the top ten regional print list.

There obviously a fair bit of room for interpretation, and this year that was most visible in the list of top directors:

Number 2, Danny Kleinman: ‘This year’s output is just as prestigious as last, with big budget numbers on Specsavers and Orange…’ Eh? Last year Danny did the brilliant Smirnoff ‘Sea’, PG Tips ‘The Return’, and ‘Neon Girl’. I have no idea what this Specsavers ad is, but it wasn’t in Campaign’s top ten TV ads, and Orange was, um, not in that list either. As long as Danny’s working he’ll always be one of the top directors but that paragraph was just a smidge too bullshitty for comfort.

Number 6, Noam Murro: he may be the sixth best director, but Campaign still has to mention that his Orange ‘I Am’ ad was ‘one of his less impressive efforts’. And VW Dog is ‘easily one of the top ten ads of the year’. Agreed, so why does it squeak into the list at number 10?

Number 7, Nicolai Fugslig: the seventh best director of UK ads in the world has been ‘a little less busy in the UK’ this year. So much so that we can only name Ford ‘Blank Canvas’ to his credit. And it was crap. Congratulations to the hospitality team at MJZ.

Number 9, Shane Meadows: an odd choice of position. One ‘pay the bills’ ad for Asda’s back to school kids range and a slightly odd campaign for acting on CO2 are apparently the results of demand of ‘epic proportions’ and justifies his number 9 ranking. I’d have put him in the top three for Somers Town alone.

I know it’s not been a vintage year, but what about (my friend) Jeff Labbe? Barnados campaign (Campaign’s number 4 ad of the year), Levi’s ‘Secrets and Lies’, BBC HD ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and the VW ‘Driving Test’ ad. And I’d have given a nod to Guy Ritchie for ‘Take It To The Next Level’, the closest to a dead cert for a 2009 pencil that I can think of.

Dear Campaign, you don’t have to do a list of the ten best directors if there aren’t ten who had a good year. Do a list of something else. An obvious gap was scandals: CHI’s salaries email, the dothetest theft row, the Ipint theft row, the Cannes bullshit entries and then six others that involved media companies or planners or some other things that might have annoyed some people who took you to lunch.

Hang on, who am I kidding? We’re not exactly talking about the NY Times. A few trips to the Wolsley for a place on one of these somewhat arbitrary lists?

Job done, apparently.

One Sunday back when I was at school The Untouchables was on TV.

I had seen it several times, I had it on video and yet for some reason I still watched it.

When I went into school the next day, I asked my friend, who also had it on video, if he had seen it. He had, so we chatted about the best scenes and agreed that it still held up really well.

Then I said how odd it was that although we could both watch this movie anytime we felt like it, we ignored it, yet when it happened to be on TV we gave it another go. We didn’t really consider it consciously but whether it was the fact that we knew we were watching it at the same time as millions of others, or that the immovability of a TV schedule meant that we couldn’t just pause it to make a cup of tea, thus making it closer in experience to watching it in a cinema, or that we preferred to have someone else decide how we spent our Sunday evening, there was some way that the lack of choice beat the ostensibly superior option of being able to choose.

I guess this happened again on Saturday night when I felt strangely drawn to the final of X Factor. (That Irish kid who looked like a teddy bear and sang like someone emptying the bins nipped the feeling in the bud pretty quickly.) I hadn’t watched the series up until then and had little idea what was going on, but it felt like one of those occasions where the whole country was doing something at the same time, however educationally subnormal it might be.

But hang on.

Doesn’t this fly in the face of the Tivo, BitTorrent, Sky Plus, Long Tail world where we can all have exactly what we want, exactly when we want it?

On the surface, having all entertainment at your personal beck and call sounds fantastic. In fact, where’s the downside? This is what the entire rise and spread of individuality, fueled mainly by the internet, has grown from. We want things on our terms and now, finally, for the first time in history, we can have just that (nearly).

But.

Isn’t there still something to be said for the communal experience? That’s part of the reason why millions of us will go to movies, theatre, gigs and stand-up comedy: the collective occurrence where you can look around and see that you are part of something bigger than your own personal tastes. No man is an island and all that, and sometimes you want a reminder that you’re not as unique as you might think.

So where does that leave the future of the media experience?

It’s all heading one way, with not so much expanding into the other direction. Yes, there’s social networking and flashmobbing, but the appeal of those is provided by the participants rather than the medium.

Perhaps that’s where the next gap in the market, or even in the joy of human existence, will be filled.

Well, well, well.

It seems that the majority of you have eaten 1-100 crumpets.

Maybe there are some who have never had one of the delicious hole-ridden comestibles.

Look, there’s still time. All I’d say is the bog standard ones are often better than Taste The Difference or Finest or whatever. They hold the density of jam or Marmite in a more complete way.

And to the person who’s claims to have ploughed through more than 10,000: you’re either very old or a man/woman after my own heart (to be eaten on a crumpet, of course).