Here’s the D&AD In-Book list.

You can pick the sweetcorn out of it, but the only thing that seemed odd to me was the entry of Cadbury’s Eyebrows in 41-60 seconds.

That’s it.

One entry for what most people would consider to be the event ad of the year.

Talking of event ads, here’s a shot from this evening’s T-Mobile extravaganza:

It was a massive karaoke event hosted by Vernon Kay (no relation, although I have met him a few times and he’s really nice). I walked around as the crowd seemed to have a lovely time singing Hey Jude and Is This The Way To Amarillo.

Then I had to leave.

It was a bit rammed and they kept filming me with the second unit.

Which brings us to David Ogilvy.

Odd, really…

You can get one person to write one article about a man that says everything that needs to be said, with just words and (electronic) paper.

Or (and I never tire of watching this) you can marshall 100 members of the current iteration of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known and produce the most dismal, pathetic, foetid puddle of monkey diarrhoea ever committed to YouTube.

Anyway, I hope the above ill-thought-out gubbins passes a bit of pre-bank holiday weekend for you.

x

UPDATE:

Apparently I missed Pink singing in Trafalgar Square.

T-Mobile appears to possess a fuckload of money:

I’d like to embed it, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to click through here.

It’s a great way to use a medium that has yet to be properly exploited, either artistically or commercially.

And here’s a good ad for Channel 4.

And the D&AD nominations are out.

Congratulations to Mark, Andy and everyone at Coy! Communications; Simon and Nick; Laurence and Mark (I think); DHM (who now have a nomination in every year they’ve existed); Paul and everyone at This Is Real Art and everyone else who got one.

Want to see what happens in the next T-Mobile event ad?

What does participating entail?

Over the last few days, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Steve Henry’s and Dave Trott’s Brand Republic Blogs.

Technology has brought us many wonderful things: instant access to more information than anyone could process in a lifetime; your entire music collection in a box the size of a fag packet; George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine.

The results of this week’s poll are probably pretty similar to the results I’d have got if I’d run it ten or twenty years ago. That is: over 40% of you would most like a D&AD Pencil for TV, followed by just over 20% each for Poster and Press, with Integrated coming in fourth with 12%.

So what does that tell us? Well, aside from the fact that radio is still the ginger stepchild it’s always been, the digital love-in has yet to gain any kind of equality in prestige with its old-school brethren.

I thought TV and Cinema would win, but I didn’t think Press and Poster would be twice as popular as Integrated, and never mind Websites and Online; they barely registered.

It seems that this blog may well be read by people who grew up with the triplet pillars of TV, Press and Poster, so you hold them dear in your hearts and high in your estimation. In addition, they are the three easiest media in which you can show someone else how good you are. Send them a quicktime or a pdf – they’re miles more immediate than the little films you make to sum up your integrated campaign. Also, and this is probably the hardest thing for advertising, digital still isn’t coming up with the kind of work that makes ATL creatives think it’s cool, or even worth working on. The work imbues the category with status, and until that happens, it’ll still feel like metaphorical nerds versus metaphorical film makers.

Of course, I think we’d all take a Pencil wherever it’s coming from (even Radio Crafts or Writing for Graphic Design) over no Pencil at all, but when it comes to the favoured categories, this might as well be 1979, not 2009.

New Poll, by the way. Enjoy.

An interesting phenomenon of the internet, that I don’t recall anyone predicting, is the enormous amount of time devoted to the anonymous amusement of strangers.

That must have taken ages. Will Brickvader profit from it in any way? Will it have any significance beyond your mild amusement? Is it simply that we are now allowed to look through people’s keyholes at their hobbies?

I think it’s the third one. In the digital age, it must be quite fun to show off something you’ve spent a long time honing to perfection. In the old days you’d just make your model of the Cutty Sark out of matchsticks and hope that someone unfortunate enough to come over for tea actually gave a shit. Now you can tootle around on your PC, whack the result on YouTube and with a bit of luck you might be worth a few minutes of Lilly Allen’s or Graham Norton’s time.

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose (said the bloke whose blog writing has probably taken up even more time for even less return than Brickvader’s movie mixing).

And here’s another:

UPDATE:

I could have made this post a bit deeper by exploring how these films are making it impossible to monetise the internet through their provision of free content that is better than most paid-for work, but instead I’ll simply suggest that you ‘put the fucking lotion in the basket’.

Ready?

Here it comes.

Buy good ads.

And if you really want to screw us, keep buying good ads.

Here’s how it works: when creatives get a brief they almost always address it in the most optimistic way possible. Even if it’s for the worst client ever, they will attempt to make the best ad they can. It may not take long before the thousand cuts of the process and the client’s track record beats that optimism down, but it will usually be there at the start.

If the ad looks like it’s going down the toilet, you will then get a slacker, less interested creative. Sure, they will still do their job to a decent standard (no one deliberately tries to make a bad ad; bad ads take as long to make as good ones, so trying to make it bad on purpose only creates greater misery all round) but nothing more. They will stop at the ‘OK’ endline, the third idea for a layout, the fifth pass on the script. They will read more magazines during the sound session, they will not push the V/O or the editor and they will not bother to pick up minor slips in the retouching. They will help the ad become twenty percent better instead of fifty.

However, if the ad look like it’s going to be a good one, you will get dedication that your fee could not hope to cover. You will get weekends and evenings that do not appear on the timesheet; you will get bat-like hearing at the sound session and hawk-like vision at the grade; you will get a pair of people and an entire support staff of post production helpers who will try dozens of different routes until they find the very best one; they will let your problems eat away at them while they are eating away at dinner; they will miss children’s football games to attend pre-lights; they will call the director ten times a day, and he will call them back; they will pore through the reference, listen through the pre-prod and work through the night.

In short you will have many times more than that which you have paid for, and it will translate to a better ad for you.

Get a reputation for this and the good work will start earlier. ‘Ah, a brief for Honda/Levis/VW,’ they will say. ‘Better burn the midnight oil on this one.’

And, amazingly, all this extra work will make them happier, you happier and your boss happier.

Go on: screw us.

Back in the good old days, advertising agencies were able to offer their clients a single solution to the brief they had been given. This was in fact the case when I worked at AMV in the late nineties: one brief, one team, one solution presented to the client because that was considered to be the agency’s recommendation over lesser ideas which should be discarded (I believe Bill Bernbach summed this up with the question, ‘Why would we show them our wastepaper basket?).

However, as the years went on, AMV’s clients were able to demand multiple solutions. I remember that one actually had a contractual agreement to expect three routes per brief, but this rapidly dissolved when the three routes were rejected and another three routes provided and so on until the client was satisfied.

The reason a client wants and demands multiple answers is obvious: several choices must be better than a single one as it gives the chooser a variety of solutions to select from, and he/she gets more work for their money.

But is that an improvement on a single choice? Not according to scientific research. If you were presented with 950 toothbrushes every morning you’d actually find your bathroom time a paralysing disaster. You’d have the luxury of selection, but it would waste your time and vex you. Then, when you had made your choice, the unchosen alternatives would nag at you forever, leaving you with the residual thoughts of what might have been.

You also end up with an escalation of expectation. With a thousand choices, one of them must surely be perfect? And if it isn’t, we tend to blame ourselves. ‘How could I not find the right ad/puppy/religion out of so many alternatives? I am indeed an arsebrained idiot.’

Humans actually prefer to have less choice. It leaves them happier, and the outcome is usually just as successful.

But is this the case in modern day advertising? Of course not. Many clients will always want and expect more routes because it means their agencies are working even harder for the money they pay them, and that makes Johnny Q. Client feel all warm inside.

And now agencies are so scared of losing accounts that they will do whatever it takes to keep the business, no matter how many vertebrae they put out by bending over so far.

So we have a a vicious circle of more routes, less satisfaction and attempt to cure that dissatisfaction with still more routes.

If anyone fancies jumping off the merry-go-round, science will back you up.