Here it is.

After years of the most unmitigated dross, it’s as if they’ve suddenly joined planet earth, picked up a reel of Playstation Mountain and its many, many, many rip-offs and decided to do their own version.

I suppose the real question is why, or at least why now?

The obvious answer must be something to do with banking’s new place on the hate-chain. Now that Foxton’s couldn’t sell a house even if they filled it with tenners and advertising is having to make do with budgets in the region of 50p, it falls to the disgusting, greedy, fat-cat arseholes who shagged the country’s finances into oblivion then claimed they were owed bonuses for doing it to take their rightful place at number one.

Yes, Halifax: the entire country hates your industry (not least because of your advertising) and it’s nice of you to realise that and think that perhaps the high-budget wankathons you usually shoved down our throats were a little inappropriate for these more austere times, so full marks for effort.

And giving away cash. That’s nice, too.

But I’m bored of these bloody visual metaphors, especially the ones that show hundreds of people in the same place all rushing to do something.

A more honest one would have shown a murderer in the midst of stabbing someone to death realising he was doing the wrong thing, saying sorry then maybe driving the victim to hospital.

I shall give DLKW the benefit of the doubt and assume that was the original script but the BACC put the brakes on it because they were in a shitty mood.

Thanks, L.

When I set last week’s question I tried to think of a bunch of awards that might have a broadly similar appeal. I obviously got it wrong, but I have found the answers fascinating nonetheless.

The winners were the FA Cup and Booker prize with around a quarter of the votes each. This tells us that ITIABTWC is read by football fans and, I’d suggest, more copywriters than art directors (the very poor showing for the Turner Prize would indicate that ADs tend not to read this blog, or that they couldn’t really care less about the Turner. For what it’s worth, I don’t really care about the Turner, but then British modern art is in something of a trough).

My attempts to make the BAFTA and Olympic medal less glamorous obviously went a bit too far. What Olympic prize equates to the Booker, then? 400m Gold? Decathlon Silver? And which BAFTA would have been appropriate? Supporting Actor? Adapted Screenplay?

To the couple of people who wanted a Legion d’Honneur, are you French, or were you being mischievous?

And to the eight people (including myself) who fancy a Purple Heart, you are a shining beacon of nobility amongst those who would otherwise prefer a Cannes Grand Prix or D&AD Gold. Although, now that you can win one for being injured in a terrorist attack, maybe I should have chosen the Victoria Cross or Congressional Medal of Honour.

Talking of D&AD Gold and the CGP, I suppose their inclusion was the real point behind the question: are they as valuable to ‘us’ (whoever we are) as proper awards are? And I suppose the answer is yes. Both of them got 10% of the vote – only slightly less than a minor Oscar and the Nobel Prize for Economics (which, in case you didn’t know, comes with a monetary award of £900,000).

Now I understand that this is just a silly poll on an even sillier blog, but if that answer is genuine, I think it’s pretty sad. An Oscar, no matter how small, allows you to be the Oscar-winning Joe Bloggs for the rest of your life, and stick the gold man on your mantelpiece. The Nobel, likewise. You can’t do that with the two ad awards because (for those of you who wanted one) NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT THEM OUTSIDE THE TINY WORLD OF ADVERTISING.

OK, I might have made a mistake in allowing multiple choices, so perhaps some of you just chucked the D&ADG and the CGP in with the proper ones, but the point that was buried deep within the question was something about the insularity of advertising. No one ever wrote an obituary for a CGP winner unless they did something more significant in their lives (such as winning a Purple Heart, or even a Special Effects BAFTA).

So, for clarity, I’m going to run the poll again, except this time, you can only vote for one award, and I’ll try to select a few better choices.

Because, you know, I found the answers to last week’s poll intensely interesting.

My friend Steve has just moved from an ATL agency to a digital shop.

As I am a particularly nosy and skeptical old sausage, I asked him what really lay behind the Wizard’s curtain and how it compared to ATL (it also meant I didn’t really have to bother writing a post today):

“The main difference has to be diagrams with lots of arrows. Digital seems to have loads of them, while my old agency had none. There’s a good reason for this: digital campaigns are impossible to understand without a heavily-arrowed diagram. This is because (and this was the hardest thing to wrap my head around) it’s almost impossible to separate digital media from planning and creative. Your ‘ideas’ are almost always partly to do with where and how they appear; the style, if you like, rather than the content. It’s perfectly possible to have a creative presentation where you talk about a mixture of virals, interactive billboards and mobile communications without really going into what will appear in those media until later.

So campaigns end up looking like a diagram of fractional distillation because you have to write, for example: Florence and the Machine gig gets streamed live to a select few, while other people are sent a code on SMS that they can use to unlock a VIP room to the gig, then this all gets chopped into little viral films that are sent to the FATM fanclub and finally posted onto YouTube. Or something like that. So you’re inevitably dealing with strategy, media and creative simultaneously. But then the media and strategy people are all doing it with you, so it’s OK. You just lean towards your discipline and take final responsibility for it.

To be honest, it might be better if that was how ATL agencies did it. The idea of having all these separate disciplines that depend on each other all working without each other’s complete knowledge and involvement seems crazy, and not the best use of the client’s money.

On the other side, Digital still feels like the poor cousin to ATL and will continue to do so until the money flows in properly. If you’re a good creative, why would you want to organise banners and widgets for 50 grand when you can make two-minute cinema ads for 100 grand? Of course, for some people, the chance to do something newer, fresher, deeper and more innovative makes up for the cash, but the budgets are just not quite glamorous enough. Yet.

Also, there seems to be a great deal of digital that does not require an ‘idea’ as ATL people think of it. Often it’s just making things work, digitally. When did you last see a website with an ‘idea’? There are a few, but most of them are just portals to the content of the website or the company behind it. And this goes back to the inseparable nature of digtal: you then get functionality being bound up in creative. How does that button work? Should it explode when I press it? How big is the explosion? What do we see then? Why? Do we continue through the website or link to a blog?

Actually, I’m finding that writing this is a bit confusing. But then I find digital a bit confusing. I’m not really sure what I’m doing here to be honest.”

Er…thanks, Steve.

I apologise to any digital people if you don’t agree with what Steve said. He’s a bit thick (he might be a retardalist). I tried to get him to explain it to me over the phone and it all went a bit messy.

But if you’ve worked in both places and you can do better, send me your answers on a postcard or post them in the comments section.

Here’s a new ad for Careerbuilder.com:

It’s really, really good for several reasons:

1. Great choice of vignettes.
2. Brilliant editing.
3. Well balanced V/O (quirky, but not too quirky).
4. Truthful.
5. The koala.
6. They made it look about a million times easier than the many hours that definitely went into it.
7. Endless rewatchability, despite repeating itself during the ad.
8. “Mmm…It’s gold.”
9. But way more than any of these, it’s the kind of ad that makes you jealous because it could have been done for many other briefs – many other briefs that have passed across your desk – but you didn’t crack them like this. And nor did I.

UPDATE:

Compare this to the new Monster.com ad. Which do you prefer?

It links to a site that continues the information.

At this point I’ll assume that you’ve now watched it and maybe even been taken in, to some extent.

I wasn’t. Here’s why:

The first person who sent it to me was my friend Cam, the creative behind it, who didn’t give me any kind of warning about what it contained. Unfortunately, before I had time to click through his link, I got sent another email from someone else involved in it. They decided that it would be better for me to know it was a hoax before I viewed it (the point of the second email was to ask me, as a blogger, to spread this hoax).

I just thought that the person sending the second email could have given it a bit of thought. Did he want me to write about how well the trick worked, or how well I believe the trick might have worked had I had the chance to experience it?

Anyway, it’s a nice bit of digital from an ATL agency, and even if you suspected that it wasn’t ‘real’, it was still fun, and well put together.

And if you want to hear Christian Bale swearing at his DP on the set of Terminator 4, enjoy. Christian, if you’re reading this, Batman was shit and you’re a cock.

According to someone I read in the Guardian Review section, a (good) book will have either one, two or three of the elements in the title of this post.

One done well will make a good book, two will make a great book and three will make a classic.

For example, something like The Fountainhead has ideas and plot but little in the way of impressive language, whereas A Confederacy of Dunces hasn’t got much of a plot, but makes up for it with great language and ideas.

So, can I torture this piece of information until it relates to advertising?

Well, our version of an idea would be a truth, so this ad hasn’t really got a plot, but it has a visual language and an idea:

Whereas this has a great plot and great (visual) language, but no idea:

No plot, but visual and verbal language, as well as an idea:

All three? How about this:

So there we have it: an insightful literary theory bummed into a post on an ad blog.

Congrats to me.

About half of you think that altruism is possible, and considering that answer number three (What’s in it for me?) was one of my ‘comedy stylings’, the actual number of altruists might be even greater.

I voted ‘no’. I just think that you always get something out of whatever you do. It’s human nature: if there was nothing in it for you, then you wouldn’t do it.

This week’s question has been inspired by the weekend’s kerfuffle.

Think hard.

Then forget those thoughts.

Then vote.

(You can vote for more than one.)