Here’s a small doc about Bill Shannon:

Here’s RJD2’s promo for Work It Out:

And here’s the new Visa Ad:An anonymous commenter on the next post down has pointed out the provenance of the ad with the sentence ‘plagiarism reaches a new low’.

I wish I could arsed to get into the whole stealing/borrowing/inspiration debate AGAIN, but I can’t.

You have all the brilliant geniuses who say ‘lesser artists borrow; great artists steal’ (Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Sir Thomas Beecham and others.) and then God, who says ‘thou shalt not steal’.

But the thing here is that Saatchis have used Bill Shannon. They haven’t ripped him off. They’ve said we like what you’ve done in your many YouTube clips and thought it might work for Visa. Here, have some money and come to Buenos Aires for a few days.

Just as Tom and Walt liked that picture with the horses on the waves and Ben and Matt liked Der Lauf Der Dinge. But this is morally ‘better’ than those because the original guy got paid and will now be even more famous.

I take my hat off to those who produce true originality (if such a thing is possible), but we can’t, as an entire industry, say that what we do must never, ever have been done before in any form. Visa did exactly what these ads did. I don’t remember any uproar at the time.

Oh no. I have got into the bloody debate again.

Bollocks to it all. We’re never going to agree.

Nice ad. And why does he get such cool crutches? When I broke my leg (both times) I got those crappy grey ones from the NHS.

Is it me, or does it look like the interviewer dies at some point during the first question? I’ve never seen anyone sit so still.

And for those of you with more than two minutes to kill, here’s nearly an hour of David Ogilvy:

UPDATE: Leo Burnett comes across a lot like David Abbott (meant as a huge compliment to both):

So, most of you want to be a man trapped in a woman’s body.

I’d guess that’s because most of you are men and you thought you might go to a lesbian bar and imbibe from the furry cup, or go to the gym changing rooms and just…hang out.

That’s fine.

The headmash of what life would really be like as a human transformed into a chaffinch which is then trapped in an otter’s body appealed to some of you, and who can argue with that?

Then a few of you went for the option of ‘handbag trapped in lightbulb’s body’. I don’t think you were taking the poll seriously.

But the one thing I’ve learned from this is that more people participate in the poll if the question is not frivolous.

With that in mind, why not have a go at this week’s conundrum?

The embed seems a bit sticky, but persevere, or wait till Simon puts it up ;-).

I like the track, but I’m not 100% sure I understand the ad.

It’s supposed to be advertising the smoothest picture ever, but aren’t Zoetropes a bit flickery? Do they get less flickery when they’re enormous?

And I appreciate the use of Kaka, the world-famous, ironically-named footballer of the year, but could we have been given something slightly more interesting to watch? He’s dribbling against himself on a white background.

Well, whatever I think, it’s going to be the topic of the week, so feel free to leave your trenchant analyses in the comments.

There’s an article in this week’s Sunday Times that discusses the pros and cons of appropriate celebrity endorsement. Apparently, brands are ‘much cleverer’ now, with their incredibly much cleverer choices of Duffy to hawk Diet Coke and the Ting Tings to flog Adidas.

Well done to them.

But then I saw this in my local betting shop (wonderfully, it’s called ‘Better Betting Shop’ and sits adjacent to the Odeon Camden Town).

For those not familiar with the man in the picture, that’s Paul Merson, the former Arsenal and England midlfielder who was addicted to gambling to such an extent that he effectively became homeless.

This seems so unbelievably arse-brained that I struggle to think of something comparable. Amy Winehouse flogging WKD? Mickey Mouse recommending Rentokil? Actually, no need to wait for something similarly ridiculous, because Joan Rivers thinks that she can be an authority on plastic surgery, despite having a face that looks like a Hallowe’en mask of Joan Rivers.

This is what celebs should really do with their time.

I’m sure some of you were sent the email about Cadbury’s merging with Nestle to er…save money in the credit crunch and make this lame gag set up work, but for those who missed it:

Ha ha ha ha aahahhahahhhahahahhahahahhahahahhahha!!!!!

And good luck to Smith and Foulkes in the Oscars on Sunday:

You can check it out here, but to save you the giant, throbbing arse that is clicking on that link and cross-referencing through the results with the bronze-and-above short list, allow me:

Best idea in 30″: the double grand prix-winning VW Dog was only deemed good enough for In-Book here, which backs up my theory about different juries=different results.

Drench Brains didn’t make it to the shortlist for best commercial, having been bested by BBC ‘White’.

Dft ‘Awareness Test’ was worth the shortlist in Best Cinema Ad, but only the In-book list in Public Service.

AKQA’s Christmas card was apparently a better Viral than BBC Penguins.

We see several ads that have made the In-book list in craft, which suggests that they were surprisingly entered and declined in other categories. These include: Financial Times St Bernard, Barclaycard Waterslide, Levi’s Secrets and Lies, Nike Next Level, Financial Times Global Downturn and Toshiba Time Sculpture.

Well, there’s nowt so queer as folk.