Here’s a nice technique that someone will probably nick for an ad in a year or two.  Perhaps an ad for Frank’s ‘acid is so very, very wrong’ strand:

But then Kanye also got hold of it:

Who wins? You decide.

(In your head, obviously. There’s no need to debate the relative merits of droopy pixelation promos in public.)

According to legendary headhunter Liz Harold in last week’s Campaign, teams ought to have a website for their work.

Well, not to be outdone by the multitude of students and juniors who possess such a thing, Daryl and I have committed some of our ads to the worldwide cybernet.  (We used to have a mac.com site but it seemed a bit crappy and it’s nice having a proper url.)

When you do this, you have a choice: functional and simple or whistles and bells.

The advantage of the first is that you can show your sweet, sweet stuff without anything getting in the way. When we had a 2D portfolio and reel (actually, we still have those things, but they are embarrassingly 2006) we didn’t present them in a pop-up book (we thought about it but the whole thing seemed like a bit of a chore), so why have a KER-AZEE website? Even super-progressive, cutting edge agencies go for clean and simple, so it seemed like a good idea to do the same? CDs just want to navigate through your work quickly and easily. They don’t have time to enter ‘Rick and Hector’s Admongous Theme Park’.

The only time whistles and bells are better is if you are a digital creative and, more specifically, a website designer. Under those circumstances, the medium is the message, so go all out.

Some of the stuff is work we’ve CD’d rather than done ourselves, and some of it was created with previous partners, but the job of the site is not to get into niggly minutiae; agencies often show work done by teams that are no longer there, and we think that’s OK, so long as there’s enough of a connection to justify its inclusion.

Do you have a website? Is it as wanky as a teenager in a Razzle factory, or as straightforward as the instruction manual for a sock?

Last week’s poll, the modified version of the poll from the week before, has fascinated me further (and I was already pretty darn fascinated).

The title of this post refers to the 11 of you who would like a D&AD Gold three years running.

All those people have done that very thing. Did you recognise them? No fibs, now.

Actually, I’m talking bollocks: they won it four years running, and you still don’t know who they are.

(They are part of the Apple design team that brought us the various bits of hardware (imac etc.) that wowed the juries of 1999-2002.)

Before you get all snicky and say that you’d love to have brought the world the iphone/ipod etc., that wasn’t the question. You went for the benefits/honour of three D&AD Golds in a row. AND IT MEANS VERY LITTLE.

And if any of you who went for the Cannes Grand Prix are feeling smug, could you name the creatives behind Dove Evolution without looking them up? Of course, it only won two CGPs in the same year, but one of them was the prestigious Film award. Your three might only be Radio, Cyber and Press (if that happens you’ll get a month of attention, then no one will mention it ever again).

I’m sorry. I’m allowing my personal opinions to get in the way (again), but how can anyone want a D&AD Gold over an Oscar? Or a Nobel Prize? Or an Olympic Decathlon Gold?

Then again, the most popular response was the Knighthood, something I wouldn’t really care for because its gift is so riven with political corruption. I guess you could argue the same about the Oscar (what if you won it for Titanic or Legends of the Fall – both past Cinematography winners?), but surely it’s always going to have roughly a million times the cachet of an ad bauble?

Sod it. If you want a stubby black pencil (you can’t even write with them, you know) or a tin lion with a big plinth, all power to you.

At least they are within your grasp.

The day you have to admit the AVN Best Group Scene is beyond your powers is a sad day indeed.

It reminds me of those ads from a few years ago where everyone wore a T-shirt to show what they’re supposed to personify, eg:

The Supernoodles ad was brilliant, but the technique reached its elastic limit pretty quickly as a fallback for slack creatives who wanted to communicate some vaguely complicated stuff with a quirky analogy. There were hundreds of the bloody things (I did a couple) and they all bore unfavourable comparison with the very best.

The same agency resurrecting the technique 8 years later doesn’t exactly thrill me.

“Dull, obvious, cheap and insistent. They make our evenings look like Moldovan cable channels. Badly styled, awkwardly energetic young people stand in front of green screens, pointing at products and shouting, finishing with electric jingles that sound like a toddler’s ringtone, or a Paul Merton voiceover. There is more than a whiff of desperation about it all, and why wouldn’t there be?

“I blame the depression on advertising agencies — bankers merely shuffle noughts, it’s the advertisers who are supposed to sell us the idea of capitalism. Consumers are the engine that pulls the economy; advertising is the rails it runs on. Money is merely the stuff you burn. But advertising on telly now looks dim, frightened and timid. There’s no sense that the advertisements are made to be things of cultural importance or something you’d be proud to have made.

“I think it all went wrong when agencies stopped using their own names on the letterhead and started calling themselves things like Granny and Spanner and Blue. In the late 1970s, I was shown a leading agency’s showreel. It was a better half-hour than you could have got in any cinema: more imagination, romance and emotion than a hospital library trolley. Advertising doesn’t merely sell you stuff, it tells you where you live. It’s the fixtures and fittings of the culture. When was the last time you saw one that made you want to see it again, or shout “Come quickly, it’s that brilliant ad!”? We’re living in depressing, discounted times.”

Thank you, A.A. Gill of The Sunday Times.

In the comments of the last post an anonymous person asked why the Creative Circle nominations for Best Ad are not included in the nominations for Best In Timelength.

Mr M Denton Esq told me that it was down to the simple fact that these categories were judged by different juries, and that the opinions of those juries happened not to coincide (for those who don’t know, CC organises several juries, each of which judges several categories to Silver level. These Silvers are then put before the incredibly prestigious Gold jury to see if any of them are allowed to be converted by some mystical process of alchemy into Gold).

But the question does raise an interesting point: does your award haul, and consequently your salary, and consequently your career, and consequently your happiness depend on the composition of the jury, rather than the quality of the work?

In a word, yes.

There will always be the solid gold behemoths, such as Gorilla and Surfer, that will find a warm hug from any 10 creatives (or at least the majority of them needed for the award), but when the ad’s quality is a matter of opinion, well, you’d better hope that jury has the personality or mood that will lean towards your schtick.

How many times have you heard of a jury that had arguments or stalemates about the inclusion of a piece of work? That means that at least two equally prestigious industry bods felt strongly enough in opposite directions about your ad that neither would concede to the other.

In D&AD Gold judging, it happened to Cog and Twister; Surfer did not get the Cannes Grand Prix; the supposedly classic Sony Balls lost the same award to Guinness Noitulove by 20 something votes to 2 and Dunlop Unexpected did not get a pencil for best ad because the jury could not decide whether it was advertising or art.

The best work polarises people, eliciting strong opinions for and against it, but that means that when it comes down to it, the composition of a jury can mean the difference between Gold, Silver and nothing.

Equally, the not-best work can find itself on the pleasant end of many juries’ decisions because it doesn’t stimulate enough to piss people off.

That doesn’t mean it’s better. It might just mean that it’s not worse.

UPDATE:

I forgot to mention, the most glaring example of this is Ikea Lamp. It won the Cannes Grand Prix (beating Cog) and the Clio Grand Prix, then got a mere Merit in the One Show and one D&AD craft entry for direction. With four D&AD-esque juries it would have been another miniscule footnote in ad history, whereas four Cannes-esque juries would have made it one of the most awarded ads of all time.

I was recently sent an online pregnancy test.

Aside from the amusing diversion it provided, I have to say that it left me somewhat confused.

It doesn’t seem to be attached to a brand, or telling me something useful. Perhaps there’s something in all the real pregnancy test ads that surround it, but their affiliation to the jokey bit is unclear.

Either we’re looking at a good old fashioned unbranded joke that is so ‘funny’ that vaguely related companies are willing to advertise around it, or the pregnancy test people who advertise around it have made and funded the ‘joke’ without making the connection explicit – something that’s quite unusual.

If the latter, then the end of the ‘test’ could have said something like, ‘for a real pregnancy test, visit blah blah blah’, but it doesn’t.

Perhaps this is an early step towards online branded entertainment, where people create good versions of the crap you send round to your friends, and stick an ad next to it.

It certainly makes it more intriguing, at least until until everyone starts doing it.

By the way, the Creative Circle Shortlist is now available here.

Well, it’s the bastard love-child of this:

and this:

Obviously.

…is the kind of drive, dedication and, yes -I’ll say it: gumption that leads a person to do something like this:

(thanks, L)

A cursory glance suggests the involvement of such movies as Troy, Aliens, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings and (ahem) Garfield, but if you weren’t paying close attention, you’d think it was real.

I could steer this in the direction of advertising by making some lame observation about new directions to take now that budgets have been cut, but sod it: this is what a guy can do with lots of free time, a darkened room and no girlfriend.

Hats off to that.

What will this recession/depression/armageddon mean for you?

Well, the way I see it, you’ve got a mixture of good and bad that might net out at no overall effect whatsoever.

On the pro side, you’re cheap. That means that when a CD is deciding whether to hire two £100k creatives or eight at £25k, he might well do the latter. This isn’t just a financial decision: because of the marginalisation of creatives that has happened in the last few years, some clients are now looking for quantity over quality. If they get four six-out-of-ten routes, they prefer that to one ten-out-of-ten because it gives them a choice, the ten-out-of-ten is usually both a risk and difficult to spot and they need multiple routes for research.

(NB: the above paragraph is the vanilla version of something that was so rude my wife wouldn’t let me post it. She asked me if I actually wanted to work in advertising. I said yes, looked sheepish and changed it.)

So that’s the good news.

The bad news is that there just isn’t any money at all, anywhere. I don’t know where it all went but Agency finance bods are currently checking down the back of the sofas in reception in the hope of finding a 20p piece to keep the wolf from the door, and that means that even your meagre, Pot Noodle-esque needs may not be met by them.

The combination of the above means that some of you will get jobs and some of you won’t. It’ll be a bit of a crapshoot, but then that’s kind of what things are like in non-recessionary times.

xxx

Oh, and to make up for the censorship, here’s Cartman telling a joke that I’d suggest you don’t play at top volume in front of your MD as he’s showing a famously intolerant and puritanical client around the agency. Actually, this might be the most offensive thing you’ve ever seen, so don’t say I didn’t warn you: