Dear Indra Sinha,

Although I will also send you a personal email of apology, I’d like to point out to any readers of this blog that you did not do the thing I said you did a few posts ago (I’ve removed the offending anecdote so there’s no record of it, although I’ve left your explanation in the comments section of the post, just in case you’d like people to be able to read the truth).

I hope that by leaving this up for the weekend I’ll have corrected some of the damage I did.

If you’d like me to do anything else, please let me know.

Oh, and the Bhopalis are not Bangladeshis. They are from India. Sorry to them, too.

Ben

PS: I’ve just called Indra, and a more reasonable and pleasant person you couldn’t hope to meet.

Back in the mid-nineties there was a football tournament called Euro 96. It was held in England and had the country on its knees in a drunken stupor until the inevitable exit on penalties at the hands of the Bosh.

This coincided (if my Stella-addled recollection can be relied upon in any way) with a surfeit of Campaign Private Views that compared the ads to footballers. So a Persil ad would be ‘Gareth Southgate, a stalwart centre-back, doing the job without any noticeable flair’; but a Levi’s ad might be ‘Nicky Barmby, light of touch but devastating in the final third’.

This doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore (probably because it was shit), but as I look with rose-tinted spectacles back to that age of innocence, I can’t help feeling there’s a pretty mediocre blog post in this Rizla-thin recollection.

So, for your Friday timewasting delectation, I bring you the UK agencies and their opposite numbers from the world of hip-hop:

AMV: The Beastie Boys. White, middle class, been doing the business for a long time, but just when you think they’ve faded a little, they’re back with a hit.
Mother: Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Unconventional methodology, fine results.
TBWA: Tupac, Biggie, Jam Master Jay. A great past, currently dead but you never know.
Publicis: MC Solaar. Big creative moments rare. French.
Fallon: Jay Z. General standard scarily good.
BMB: Lil’ Wayne. Out of nowhere, getting big fast.
Grey: PM Dawn. Fucking enormous and almost entirely shit. Maybe due a comeback.
W&K: Missy Elliot. Likes to do things differently for the sake of it, but it often comes off.
WCRS: De La Soul. Really nice (biggest hit was in ’89).
BBH. Kanye West. Confidence backed by quality.
JWT: Dr Dre. Huge. Occasionally.
DLKW: Duran Duran’s cover of 911 is a Joke. Memorable, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

Anyway, staying on the theme, I’d estimate that a good 65-70% of you have little time for the fine art of rapping. No problem. For the rest of you: enjoy:

Most days I read The Sun backwards, as I have done for the last 23 years (I also read The Guardian for balance).

This week, along with the Gary Lineker story that inspired yesterday’s post, the Sun appears to have gained a strange fascination for the world of advertising.

First, on Monday, we had this article about the immense popularity of the T-Mobile flashmob ad.

And then, today, a double page spread about the complaint letter to Richard Branson that’s been passed around t’internet. For the uninitiated, it was written by WCRS creative Oli Beale and I had thought about putting it up here as an example of some really fine writing (minor grammatical errors aside). Anyway, it’s very funny, and looks like just the kind of thing Campaign would like to feature in its brilliantly witty Diary page.

As The Sun is £3.40 cheaper than Campaign, I’d love this trend to continue, but somehow I can’t see Jeremy’s Photo Casebook being quite as stimulating as Deidre’s.

I was reading The Sun on Monday and they ran a story about Gary Lineker explaining why classic goalscorers do not make good managers.

He said the main reason was the mentality: to be a goalscorer you must be selfish, thinking of no one but yourself as you power your way to the Golden Boot. However, to be a good manager, you must think of the team, juggling the fragile egos of many to produce a better collective result.

Funnily enough, this chimed with a recent chat I had with a friend who works in New York.

He said that in effect you should only become a CD when your need/desire to win awards has waned through the winning of so many of the bloody things. That way, you can move aside and let your employees take all the glory, raising the profile of your agency in the process.

Of course, there are exceptions: to continue Gary’s unintended analogy, there are the player-managers who need to step up for their department, either because the agency is too small or because the department just ain’t good enough. Or, in exceptional circumstances, because the creative/CD in question is so bloody good, it’d be a criminal waste not to have him or her sending his talents in the direction of the occasional brief.

So, in the fully functioning agency (I’d cite my time under Peter Souter and Tony Cox as a fine example of this), you’ll get a CD or two who simply soak up all the day-to-day impediments so their charges don’t have to. If there’s a juicy brief, they won’t get their teeth into it unless the whole department has tried and failed and the deadline is looming large.

Whereas, in the fully dysfunctional shop, you’ll get an insecure CD with a fragile ego who is happy to squish the progress of his department so that he can have 23 D&AD entries instead of 22. He may be the best in the agency, but we’ll never know because he won’t let anyone else play with his train set. End result: miserable, demoralised department, a CD who passes all the mucky jobs on to someone else and, unless the top man is a genius, a drop in standards. And if he’s taken a good brief, the end result had better be shit hot, or it could be the start of something suboptimal.

Which do you work for, how much fun is it and how good is the work?

Showing your work to Walter Campbell for a bit of improvement advice was always a brilliant experience.

He’d give you an elaborate handshake involving finger clicks, take you into his office, tea would be offered, you’d try to find a seat (Tom and Walt’s office was by far the messiest in AMV, if not Europe), then he’d tell you stuff that made your ad better.

One time he did this, he said he had a story that explained what advertising was all about (I apologise, because I’m going to get the details wrong but the essence right):

A boat was shipwrecked and everyone aboard, fifteen men and one woman, were washed up on a desert island.

Eventually the men killed the woman because they couldn’t come to terms with what they were doing.

Then they buried her because they couldn’t come to terms with what they were doing.

Then they dug her up because they couldn’t come to terms with what they were doing.

Walt offered no further explanation, but I believe he was referring to the dynamic of leaving the audience to fill in the blanks/complete the circle.

And however that tale affected Walt, from what he said, it was part of what made him (along with Tom Carty) by far the best TV creative of his generation:

Once upon a time there was an advertising copywriter called Indra Sinha.

Now, Indra was not your ordinary copywriter, for he wrote very, very, very long copy ads that won many, many awards.

I can’t be arsed to get my D&ADs out, but I know off-hand that he won the Copy Pencil in 1986 for the Imperial War Museum (I just love the headline, ‘Somewhere in this picture, 2nd Lieutenant Eric Heaton lies dying’) and 1989, for the Metropolitan Police:

I think he was also nominated a couple of times in 1998 for Amnesty International and some other ads in other years.

In 1993, he created the Bhopal appeal to help Bangladeshi people who have been affected (that word is a deliberate understatement) by the Union Carbide disaster. It has helped tens of thousands of people and continues to do so. Good for him.

And he was nominated for the Booker Prize a couple of years ago for Animal’s People. It didn’t sell many copies, but who gives a fuck? In case you didn’t know, every decent copywriter secretly or openly wants to win the Booker Prize (the Pulitzer and Nobel are a bit remote to fantasise about), so being nominated is an incredible achievement. (If you’re an art director, imagine some important picture people like a picture you made.)

So, quite a career.

You might also like to know that he doesn’t have many of his own ads on his website because he burnt his portfolio when he left the industry.

And his website is full of brilliant stuff.

Booker, Charity, Pencils, Fire etc.

I can’t help admiring the guy.

And apologising for what I’ve corrected on this post. Sorry, Indra.

80% of you suggest I retain the naked breasts that have been tattooed on my arm. Even though I forgot to mention that it looks a little like Doubting Thomas is bending down to give the left breast oral attention, I think I’ll stick with the poll result (besides, my mum says to keep them).

This week’s question is one that I was asked by one of my A-Level History teachers. He was an interesting bloke: double starred firsts from Cambridge and one of the worst cases Alcoholics Anonymous had ever seen. He stopped teaching us, with no explanation, sometime during my second year. Soon after, my old Physics teacher was murdered by a bloke he picked up in a gay club.

On a lighter note, here’s another interesting promo from the excellent chaps at Oneinthree.

Thank you, Dougal Wilson:

And here’s an ad with a completely generic brief that produces a genuinely funny moment:

Enjoy.

x

For what it’s worth (nothing, as usual) I will happily watch it again (and probably again. And maybe even again).

It’s definitely at the Gorilla end of the scale rather than the Trucks end.

Joe Q. Public will lap it up.

And talk about it. And pass it on. And the ‘kids’ will be eyebrowing up a storm in the playground.

It will win lots of awards.

The balloon is the best bit.

The track is great.

The casting is perfect.

Shall we get the Youtube argument out of the way now, so we can ignore it?

I think I’m going to watch it again.

Maybe after I’ve checked out the Agent Provocateur ad one more time.

Nice one, Chris and John.

Update: Chris and John were CDs. A guy called Nils-Petter Lovgren was the creative. He’s Swedish and he’s really good and he has a fantastic beard. Apparently.

OK, the other one was bad, but at least they tried to do something creative (they failed miserably, but at least the intention was there).

But this one:

Words fail me.

Except for the words: ‘a’, ‘cardboard’, ‘fucking’, ‘pencil’, ‘in’, ‘Trafalgar’, ‘fucking’, ‘Square’? ‘Jesus’, ‘fucking’, ‘Christ’, ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘music’, ‘is’, ‘still’, ‘awful’, ‘this’, ‘organisation’, ‘is’, ‘dying’, ‘on’, ‘its’ and ‘arse’.

Oh, and ‘piss’, ‘poor’, ‘waste’, ‘of’, ‘time’, ‘and’, ‘money’.