It’s an ad for Philips that apparently plays in a non-stop loop somewhere on their website.

It’s by Tribal DDB, the director was Adam Berg and the CD was Neil Dawson.

UPDATE:

A commenter has suggested that it’s merely an extension of this Sky HD ad:

I know I didn’t really elaborate on my reasons for liking the Philips film, but it’s not entirely because of the technique.

However, a comparison between these two ostensibly similar commercials allows us to examine a few aspects of what makes one ad more engaging than another.

Of course, the technique is superior in the Philips ad. It’s a single shot that moves through an increasingly unfolding narrative that repays attention and further viewings, whereas the Sky ad is a single scene. So we’re not just talking about extra time here; we’re talking about a development of the craft that exploits it more fully and allows us to see it really breathe.

But beyond the technical aspects, the Philips ad also does a great job of the scenarios. If we assume that the original script was a somewhat elaborated version of ‘gang of criminals dressed as clowns battle police in a hospital’, it’s really impressive that every individual vignette (the clown kicking the cop through the window; the wheelchair reacting to the explosion; the man on the floor etc.) all contain a brilliantly contained mini story of their own. It’s very difficult to get one good, well-executed, believably-rendered story into an ad, but to get several is quite an achievement.

Next is the tone. LIke the ad about the transvestite that won Philips a few awards last year, this brings a grown-up edge to a massive corporation. With these scene of mayhem and murder, they are treating us like adults, not running towards a scene of anodyne dullness that would have demonstrated the technique equally well. Thank you, Philips. I like you a bit more for that.

Last, the details. From the location, to the masks, to the cops, to the guns, to the score it all rings true within its context. It brings to mind something from The Dark Knight without looking like they’ve simply ripped off last year’s big thing. Again, that’s a lot of things they got right that they could have got wrong, and that’s a hell of a lot harder than they made it look.

On a personal note, I also like the fact that it doesn’t have that ‘ad’ bit puncturing all the good work. When the guy walks in at the end of the Sky ad, I can’t help feeling like the magic disappears slightly. Don’t get me wrong; I like the Sky ad too, but the Philips clowns played it to the hilt, and in this day and age, that’s something to be admired.

In the early/mid part of this decade, every press ad award in the country seemed to go to DDB’s Guardian work. They had some very good teams: Justin and Adam, Grant and Patrick, Dylan and Feargal etc. who managed to produce consistently incisive advertising on a huge range of topical issues, and the crossword:

Then the Guardian left for W&K. Now, I’m a big fan of the new brand look they created:

It gives them a distinct visual identity that seems very much in keeping with the vibrancy and boldness of the paper itself.

But what they haven’t done (and this may be because it’s not part of the current remit) is continue the topical strand that DDB were so good at.

But no matter; DDB seamlessly moved their skill in that area to a new account: The Financial Times. The look is different to their Guardian work, but the witty commentary on current events has stayed the same:

I know Jeremy Craigen hates the idea of dumbing down advertising. I think we should all thank him for that.

Picture the scene: an eager account person enters your office (for the purposes of this theoretical situation you have to pretend to be an advertising creative) with a smile on his face. “Hey guys,” he says, like the prick he is, “got a cracker for you. Your favourite charity wants to do a huge multimedia campaign and the brief is yours.”

So what’s your first thought: ‘Wow! An opportunity to do some real good.’

Or: ‘Wow! An opportunity to do some real good ads’?

As there’s no such thing as altruism, I’d bet that if most of you were being honest, you’d admit that the second choice was your first thought, and even if it wasn’t, it definitely followed close behind.

Charity advertising is a strange anomaly in the capitalist steamroller that is advertising, but the attractions are obvious:

1. Ease. You don’t really have to get people on your side in the same way that you do with Persil Automatic. Do you care about starving Africans? Devastated Rainforests? Agonised kittens? Of course you do! And so does everyone else. It’s like trying to persuade people that orange is orange. Piece of piss.

2. Awards. Over the years, award schemes have tried to separate charity from ‘other’, but all that does is make your competition even smaller. You don’t have to go up against Nike and VW; you only have to beat the other charity ads.

3. Feeling darned good about yourself. Over the last few years, I’ve proudly worked on Samaritans. It’s great to help out suicidal people from the comfort of your own desk, especially when some of them actually write to the charity to say that the ads have made them feel better. But, again, there’s no such thing as altruism: because they feel good, I feel good.

4. Telling everyone how lovely you are. Do you see what I did in the last paragraph? I told you that I’m as lovely as a puppy wrapped up in a duvet full of kittens and it was all in disguise. Clever, eh? You can even whine about your working day and the boneheaded clients you had to deal with, but all the while you’re actually saying, ‘Look how nice I am. I do nice things for disadvantaged people (and animals when the situation arises), so I’m not quite the complete and utter advertising arsehole you think I am.’

This self-interested loveliness was summed up by a story I heard from an agency that had recently taken on the account of a really good and worthy charity. The team who were assigned to work on the account gathered together in a meeting room to discuss how they were going to work on it. Before anyone else spoke, the Creative Director said that he didn’t want to hear the word ‘awards’ mentioned anywhere near this campaign. Murmurs of agreement confirmed that this was the right and noble way to address the job. Cut to a few months later and all the ads have been entered into all the awards. The original point appears to be that the CD didn’t want to deliberately produce award-winning advertising, but dammit if the agency weren’t going to get their slice of the kudos pie. They did a lot of great work for charidee, but they didn’t like to talk about it. Much.

In the end, it’s difficult to argue against any kind of publicity for a worthy cause, no matter what the motives, but let’s not kid ourselves that those motives are 100% pure.

If we really, really, really cared about the charities we do ads for, we’d leave advertising and go and work for them.

Any volunteers?

By the way, in the interests of moral offsetting, here’s the best TED talk I’ve seen:

John Donne once said that ‘No man is an island’.

However, Nietzsche came back with: ‘The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’

Which brings us to advertising.

How are the ambitions of the individual reconciled with the needs of the group?

Fortunately, they often run together; where one succeeds, so does the other. But not always.

For the average creative, the most important thing to their salary (and therefore the size of their home, coolness of their trainers, standard of their son’s prep school, lack of arguments with their spouse etc.) is winning awards. If a copywriter wins three Gold Lions on a piece of work whose incendiary cutting edge loses the agency the account, he has done very well for himself. The agency has suffered, people might have been fired because of him, but he will be in a better position for a lucrative move elsewhere. However, if he knuckles down and produces something 7/10 that doesn’t scare the horses, then the agency keep the account, but he will personally gain nothing.

What a dilemma, eh?

Equally, if an account guy is looking to make his next move to step up to board level at another agency, he might think it’s a good idea to persuade his client to move to his prospective agency. He will have screwed his current team, but made a substantial gain for himself. He could have just kept the status quo as it was with conscientious maintenance of his agency’s client relationship, but like the copywriter above, he will have gained nothing compared to his other possible course of action.

Those are extreme examples, but I know of many smaller choices that are made daily in agencies across the world that demonstrate the same principles, but in a less significant way. For example, have you ever, as a creative, recorded your own version of a voiceover during a session that the client has paid for? Well, in that case, you wasted the client’s money to further your own career. Have you ever fibbed about changing an edit or a grade? What about moving a logo up a few point sizes for a presentation, then back down again after sign-off? Or avoiding presenting a layout that the client would love because it might harm your chances at Creative Circle?

You can also find situations where a strong play for the individual can mean a greater, unexpected benefit for the team. When Tom and Walt were making Guinness Surfer, a senior account man called them in to his office. The post had yet to be completed and it was going to cost another £250,000 to put the horses on the waves. The film already looked stunning, so the client and the account man decided between themselves that the horses were an unnecessary indulgence, so could T&W please leave the film as it was, ta very much? Well, no, they couldn’t. They said they’d resign if the horses were not added. The account man’s face went greeny-white (Tom and Walt were, deservedly, ginormous superstars of the creative firmament) and the budget for the horses was miraculously reinstated. Surfer was voted the best ad of all time, the client was quite pleased about this and the agency still retains the account now, partly based on the excellence of that commercial.

Everyone was a winner:

In an ideal world, that’s what it would be like in every situation in every agency. Unfortunately, it’s just not the case, so bear that in mind next time your collective of individuals makes like a dictionary and puts ‘I’ before ‘we’.

I’m a little underwhelmed. I like the music, but visually it feels like a somewhat whiffly verson of his Frozen video.

And miles away from his finest hour:

It’s one of those tedious diarrhoea puddles that demands the question, ‘What are these people up to?’ In this instance we are dying to know why some cookie-cutter pan-planet characters have replaced money with kindness.

‘Why? Why? WHY? Why have they done this?’ you scream as you stifle a yawn.

Well, it’s because they live in an Absolut world.

In an Absolut world, giant booze companies buck the credit crunch by spunking a million dollars business-classing an agency and crew all over the planet in the name of some kitten-weak excuse for an ‘idea’ that tries to connect vodka to something other than getting pissed.

You know you want to:

In last week’s poll 35% of respondents revealed that if they did not work in advertising, they would like to be an author.

In William Goldman’s great memoir on Hollywood Screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he laments the fact that writers end up with much less respect and money than they deserve because they rarely insist on owning their creations.

Apparently they are so bloody delighted that someone actually wants to commit their guff to celluloid that they enter a state of delerium where they can be persuaded to sign away the rights to their painstakingly realised stories and characters in perpetuity.

So when the toys are sold and the sequels are made, no one asks or pays the writer, because they don’t have to and because writers can be quite annoying people to talk to.

In the world of advertising, this shit-owning problem is equally true.

When an agency creates a great campaign or endline, they simply give it away to the client for a few pennies and the privilege of working for them for as long as they are granted such a beautiful gift. This can even happen with pitches, where the creator doesn’t work for the client at all, and yet still gives all his goodies away for the square root of fuck-all.

So when John Webster invented the Gary Lineker Walkers campaign or the No-Nonsense John Smiths campaign the clients were able to move them to AMV or TBWA without any compensation.

The same is true of directors, who sign away the ads they shoot forever, and post houses, who never see a brass farthing of any continued success their creations might have.

Perhaps that seems reasonable, after all what’s the alternative? Well, how about photographers and illustrators, who merely lease their work to the agencies for a certain period of time, but retain ownership; or actors who get repeat fees and can renegotiate their fee if they become the ‘face’ of some client.

How come they can own their output, yet agencies and production companies who, arguably, create far more valuable products, cannot?

Life’s not fair on the fairer sex; they have to go through all sorts of obvious buggers that guys don’t (menstruation and its attendant stresses; the pain of childbirth; choosing motherhood over a career; can’t piss standing up without making a frightful mess; if they’re firm then they’re lesbianic harridans; if they’re soft they’re little puddles of pointless melted marshmallow that no one takes seriously; they’re valued disproportionately for their physical appearance but if they’re unattractive then they’re dismissed for being so, etc.) but there’s one more inequality that seems less obvious…

Some women spend much of their time and money on trying to looking younger and more attractive than they might naturally be. Plastic surgery, make up, hair highlights, the gym etc. are all a bit of a chore and often quite expensive. But what are the male equivalents?

Well, I’m sorry to say that, ostensibly, laziness and indulgence can be the way forward. I know of at least two ECDs who have been promoted to that position despite their youth. So, deliberately or not, they have both grown beards. This gives them a little more age, and therefore gravitas, with which to convey their bons mots in client meetings. So, basically, they don’t have to shave, which is the exact opposite of the ladies’ careful routine of Mac and Clinique.

When I worked at AMV there was an account man, who has since left, that went about this quandary in another way: he put on weight. This filled out his face and gave him a physical presence that belied his years. Again, this is the flipside of the dietary regimes that many women seem to put themselves through to maintain an ideal poundage.

Other men make a virtue of baldness, attaining a level of seriousness and respectability merely through losing their hair, whilst simultaneously removing another grooming inconvenience and expense (the hairdresser).

Well, bollocks: life isn’t fair. Women are advantaged in other ways like…um…shit…I honestly can’t think of a good one. Sorry.

Any suggestions that don’t include being able to rub their own breasts when the mood takes them would be wonderfully edifying for the mostly male audience of this blog, including me.

Thanks in advance.