On their own, four perfectly British institution-y ads for British institutions.

But why now?

I can understand Persil celebrating 100 years, but 125 years of M&S? 140 years of Sainsbury’s? 123 years of Hovis?

I’m assuming there’s something behind all this that I just haven’t been able to spot. Have the planners in the different agencies all had a meeting and agreed that a big chunk of nostalgia will promote a sense of trust and stability in these untrustworthy and unstable times? Is it all about shoring up a solid profile rather than thrusting ahead into a future unknown? Or, least believably, did three companies (I’m leaving Persil out of this; anyone’s allowed to celebrate a 100th anniversary) independently think that 123, 125 and 140 years of existence is a birthday worth celebrating all at the same time.?

(Thanks, L.)

(Some clients are wankers.)

This spot for Thinkbox is very good.

Very good direction, very good performances, very good ending.

See? It’s very good.

Which is why we must doff our cap to these:

(Interest declared: they were done by friends of mine. Nice one, Laurence and Mark.)

If you’ve never had to do idents, you might think they’re fairly simple little things.

Not so.

First problem is the short time lengths, usually 6×5″ and a 10″ and a 15″. If you think writing a good 30″ is hard, try getting a decent ad into five seconds.

Second is almost always budget. Idents tend not be considered in the same way as normal ads, so your minute of footage usually has to be made with the kind of cash that would be cheap for a regular 30″.

Then you’ve got the fact that, despite a flurry of Pencils in the 1990s – including a Gold for Doritos:

…they’re not all that sexy, and would be unlikely to attract a Budgen or Glazer. That means your potential talent pool is smaller from the word go.

So let’s pat the good ones on the back.

The difficulty level is high and the kudos level low.

Make the Cold War Kids your bitches.

(Thanks, Paul.)

I was hoping there was a Wings version that allowed you to isolate Linda McCartney’s singing.

Oh, there is (sort of):

Can you spot the common thread between the following:

And this.

Full marks if you spotted that they’re all ads produced by Saatchi and Saatchi London in the last year or so.

Even fuller marks if you noticed that they’ve all been shot with the kind of cheap, everyman production values that you’d find in the average YouTube clip.

And that’s a good thing.

We’ve all been watching plenty of YT for years, so its visual language is something that really ought to have been harnessed before now. Despite the fact that its whole ‘thing’ is all about being genuine and home-made, the above ads have managed to borrow that vibe without any kind of ‘giant corporations stick their nose in where it’s not wanted’ backlash.

In fact, the opposite has been true: there’s no need to explain to what extent T-Mobile has been a hit, but everyone loves that Carlsberg ad, and what’s not to like about the NDS promo?

What I don’t understand is why there’s really only one agency in town that’s successfully doing this for its brands. Usually the ad industry is the first to rush headlong towards the next successful craze, yet there seems to be very little stand-out work that is YouTube-esque.

In America, the best practitioners of this strand are Cutwater, whose Ray-Ban virals won a Pencil last year:

And, of course, the daddy of them all from Droga 5:

So if it works, why aren’t more people doing it?

Gordon Comstock’s written a CR article about the creative’s uniform.

He makes a fine point that overdesigned T-shirts, baseball caps and Converse are all very well, but the older you get, the less appropriate and more craven the wearer looks.

Perhaps this contributes to the ageism that happens in creative departments: in an attempt to look younger, the mutton-as-lamb factor can have the opposite effect.

Mr Comstock also laments the fact the we can’t dress in suits a la Mad Men because then we’d become ‘suits’. My experience of this chimes with his suggestion: in 2002, for reasons that are too boring to go into, I acquired several decent suits and shirts. As an admirer of the 1930s, when the working uniform for all men, even those who threw peanuts around at Yankee Stadium, seemed to include a suit and matching trilby, I decided to wear my new threads to the office. After two weeks of enquiries as to whether I had an interview/funeral that day, I just couldn’t be arsed anymore. Even my ECD found humour in the fact that I was wearing a tie.

Having said that, one of my creative colleagues at the time wore a tweed 3-piece suit and polished brogues every day to a total of zero batted eyelids. I’d guess that because he was slightly older and he’d never worn anything else, he didn’t get any ‘amusing’ comments, despite the fact that his behaviour was as childish (if not more so) than anyone else’s.

There could be an element of mirroring body language, where people who meet, and need to suck up to, clients (ie, ‘suits’) dress in the same way they do (ie, suits). Creatives don’t usually have to do this, in fact their creativity is often expressed and appreciated through their ‘creative’ dress sense, and perhaps creatives think they are asserting some kind of authority of their own by not having to bow to the man by wearing his stuffed shirt straitjacket.

Many creatives also like to think of themselves to some degree as artists and artists (post-1980 or so, Gilbert and George excepted) do not wear suits. Of course, ad creatives are not artists, and the attempt to pretend to be so may further undermine our credibility.

It might also be worth bearing in mind the maxim that you should dress for the job you want to have, not the job you do. This might help explain why suits become MDs and Chairpersons, while creatives (and planners, who dip their toes in the same sartorial waters) are either not interested in those positions or realise that the chances of being appointed to them are are minimal. But it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: David Abbott wore a suit and was AMV’s chairman. No creative suit-wearers since, no creative chairmen since.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting to ask what came first: acting in a less respectable way or being treated with less respect?

Today’s Sun contained an ad that might have been art directed by Arden in his prime, written by Bob Levenson when his muse was sitting upon his knee and conceptually created by, I dunno, Bob Barrie and Luke Sullivan? Neil Godfrey and Tony Brignull? Charles Saatchi and Jeremy Sinclair?

Behold:

And don’t just feast your eyes on the avant-garde layout, drink of the glorious copy, too:

“Now, after months of wrangling over the strength of the scenes, Xcalibur is finally to be made available in the UK…Shot in Maxmacolour, both the filming and the post-production have been meticulous.”

And let’s not forget the sign-off: “But what mainstream movie will give you great acting, great sets and action PLUS lashings of explicit, unadulterated, Triple-X action.”

That sentence doesn’t even need a question mark because it’s such an obviously rhetorical question, Mr Sun Reader. For the answer is Xcalibur, The Lords of Sin.

Imagine if you were just twiddling your thumbs when in came the following brief:

Product: Xcalibur, The Lords of Sin on DVD.
Target market: Masturbatory Sun Readers.
Tone of voice: Epically erotic.
Mandatories: 35 calls to questionable action and a coupon for money off the product in a porn shop.
Media: full page national press.

It’s a very strange job but somebody has to do it.