Apparently, you can have an orgasm even if you are dead.

Would you like a T-shirt that features the stirring image of three wolves howling at the moon?

Well, step right up.

But hang on.

The reviewers seem to require the surgical removal of their tongues from their cheeks:

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

I ordered next-day air (if only there was same day!), and, of course, a size smaller than usual to ensure the closeness of the wolves to my chest hair. When the package arrived, I tore it open, and I SWEAR angels sang. I think it was Freebird. I immediately removed my “No Fat Chicks” shirt, and replaced it with this finery. Lemme tell you: AW YEAH.

The thing is, they’re generally funny and really well-written.

Nice collective joke, amusing, talented American piss-takers.

Stealourideas.com does exactly what you might expect (ie: provide ideas for you to ‘steal’).

You can even send them specific briefs to work on.

There’s some nice stuff on the site already, so feel free either to take them up on their kind offer or employ them (I assume that’s what they’re really after).

In other news, can someone explain this ad for me?

Did Lebron James get caught with loads of coke or something?

And has Kobe gone really dull after his sexual assault charge?

When I was at Watford, we learned that in creating advertising, the single most important thing was to have an ‘idea’.

An ad could be cut down in seconds with the phrase, ‘Yeah, but what’s the idea?’

For the three of you who don’t know, an ‘idea’ is the conceptual framework an ad campaign is based on, eg: ‘Mobile phones that go off in cinemas ruin movies, so let’s show how an Orange mobile phone can ruin movies in other ways’. Or ‘Guinness takes a long time to pour, but good things come to those who wait.’ They could even be as simplistic as ‘The Economist makes you rich and successful.’ The ads are then written as reflections of this ‘idea’.

But what about ads where it is simply a piece of copy that is beautifully art directed?

The ads can still be brilliant, but are they able to fit within the ‘idea’ framework that is so revered?

(I got bored looking for a big Barnardos ad. If anyone’s got one, send it over and I’ll stick it up.)

And if not, do ‘ideas’ matter?

Well, in the two press ads there are ‘ideas’ at work. They may not be the easy-to-reduce-to-a-sentence conceptual overviews of other campaigns, but they have ideas about tonality and expression that run through the work like a stick of rock. They don’t explicitly say ‘Barnardos won’t give up on troublesome kids’ or ‘The Big Issue provides an answer to the awful reality of life on the streets’ (those are more descriptions of the charities than their advertising campaigns), but they do say it implicitly.

The fact is, with ads like this, the reader has to engage a little further to get the message out, but by then they’ll have a deeper relationship with what you’re trying to say.

And the ideas do have size and scale. Barnardos followed the above with this campaign:

And the year after the above Big Issue campaign happened, they made a TV ad which won a D&AD pencil.

In the end, great campaigns can have explicit ideas or do without them. It’s just that nobody really thought to mention that when I was at college and it’s rarely mentioned now.

Well, the second one, obviously.

I’ve had this idea that could be vaguely useful.

I could follow it through, but as it’s unlikely to make me rich, famous or fulfilled, I thought I’d just put it out there and see if anyone’s interested:

With the greater degree of churn in ad agencies (people are getting laid off; the freelance market is growing) I think it might be handy to provide a cut-out-and-keep (or whatever the digital version of that is) guide for people who are joining agencies temporarily and would like to get up to speed with the essential info before they arrive.

If I could be bothered, I’d email friends at agencies and ask them to answer the following questions:

Agency local:
Nickname for agency local that if you fail to use you will seem like a bit of a twat:
Nearest EAT and Pret:
Nearest newsagent:
Name of creative secretary/PA:
Does the ECD have a sense of humour:
What time does he arrive/leave:
Where should I park bike:
Chances of it getting nicked:
Does the agency have a bar:
Does anyone use it, or will ordering a drink there make you seem like a bit of a twat:
Does anyone over 25 use the pool table:
Nearest cashpoint:
Any people that will try to befriend you like the billy-no-mates latching onto the newbies at school:
What are the loos like (can you hear the person straining in the next trap?):
What daily papers are available:
Is Campaign accessible on Thursday morning or will I have to beg for a dog-eared copy on Monday::
Buses and tubes that go nearby:
Hangover caff (bacon sarnie and tea for under £2):
Library of D&ADs:
In case I get in the lift with one of them and make an off-colour joke about Jordan, what do the agency upper management look like:

Any other questions, or anonymous answers that illuminate your agency can be left in the comments, as can sarcastic and withering mots amusants about whether or not there’s any point to the above.

The other day one of Scamp’s commenters put a link up to Arthurkade.com

Initially my interest was merely a bored foray into what might or might not be an entertaining website.

Now I am fascinated.

Is it possible to be this much of a douchebag?

Surely not.

But he’s a real guy whose life seems to match his douchey web profile.

So what gives?

(By the way, don’t visit his website without a taking a look at the Kade Scale – it’ll make you want to gnaw your fist to a bloody stump.)

I think the problem might have been that there is only one famous ‘Brains’, so they couldn’t really do that visual pun again.

Instead we have an ad that seems completely hatstand for less discernible reasons.

If you add this one to Coke and Rubberduckzilla, the whole industry appears to have gone stark, staring batshit.

UPDATE: Oh, I get it now…’On top of your game’…pheasant is a kind of game…I’m a bit thick…

It’s like the client cut the budget, leaving the agency tea-lady to go through a stock footage website, except she’s got bad ADD and just woke up from the coma she entered in 1996.

It’s like Mickey Mouse breathed life into a mood board from Latvia’s equivalent of JJB sports then ate it and threw it up.

It’s like a blind dog covered itself in superglue and ran through the cutting room floor of a shitty Nike ad.

But worse that all that.

It’s fucking boring.

I don’t know what you think of when you think of Blackpool, but for me it conjures up images of corpulent, bearded men hanging around penny arcades and chip shops attempting to ensnare runaways into a web of greasy-handed depravity. That, or menopausal trouts on their third hen night starting fights that would make even the beefiest inebriated southerner run screaming in fear for the next train to Euston.

But hang on, I seem to have got it wrong. It’s actually a hot-bed of continental mystique and sophistication.

Helen France (apparently her real name. How odd), director of tourism for Blackpool Council, said: “Often when we get French visitors – they like to do London, Stratford and Edinburgh and often drop off at a seaside town on the way, and we hope that this will encourage them to come to Blackpool.”

Well, Helen, mission well and truly accomplished. You’ve made it seem like the kind of life-affirming, step-springing delight that I can’t do without for another second.

Either that or a shithole that’s run by a bunch of bovine fuckwits who think French people are as thick as they are.

One or the other.