“Cowboys are your dad’s generation, so we went back to the animal.”

Etc…

(By the way, you can skip to 2:30 and still get all the info your brain can handle. And this particular F (Fred) seems surprisingly normal. I was expecting frogs to jump out of his ears and eat the Palais Du Festival. Maybe eet eez Farid who eez, ‘ow you say, ze whacky one.)

I was going to post this a couple of weeks ago when it would have looked really prescient, but instead I got side-tracked and now I’m just going to look like a lame band wagon-jumper..

No matter.

I think it’s about time that someone pointed out just how brilliantly Philips is doing what we’d all like our dull, giant, international brands to do: it’s becoming, for want of a better word, cool.

I won’t put Carousel up again, but let’s not forget this ad, which won a Cannes bronze last year:

I wrote a post at the time that expressed my surprise at a big, boring corporation promoting themselves with the whimsical musings of a tranny.

And this year, the bar has been well and truly raised again with Carousel taking the Film Grand Prix at Cannes.

It reminds me of Honda, and how it went from spewing out some of the worst advertising on earth to some of the best within the space of a couple of years. Philips appears to be doing the same (can you remember any of their advertising before these two?) and it has to be the mark of a good agency and a very good ECD.

Step forward Neil Dawson. Here’s hoping you have even better ads up your sleeve.

And while we’re on the subject of huge international corporations suddenly producing award-winning advertising, is that T-Mobile I see carrying several Lions away from Cannes?

T-Mobile used to be the most anonymous-bendy-world-generic-metaphor-shot-in-Cape-Town telco in the universe, until the most recent work came along.

Then it became talked about, famous and highly-awarded.

And all this has happened since Paul Silburn joined Saatchis London as the joint ECD.

Possibly not a coincidence.

Is it not enough to have elected someone president of the USA?

Do you really need yet another, far smaller pat on the back?

I mean, for crying out loud, that’s like winning the Olympic Gold at swimming then claiming your 100m Butterfly Cub Scout badge.

And that’s aside from the fact that the campaign was helped somewhat by the crapness and stupidity of the man who held the office before Obama. Will Dubya Get a credit for his part in electing his successor? What about Dick Cheney?

Super-Duper Platinum Lion award for dumbest comment of the year goes to Steve Mykolyn, chief creative officer of Toronto-based Taxi, who said: “We’re going to get another copy of the award and send it to Bush.”

Yeah, and the man who ignored international treaties to wage war and dismiss the importance of global warming is going to give a big old shit about that.

This looks good (and RIP Farah Fawcett, and maybe Michael Jackson (he’s not dead as I write this. UPDATE: He just popped his clogs. Time to get your money back on those O2 tickets. Look, I realise this is a Princess Diana moment for many of you, so feel free to use this blog as a focus for your tributes, grief, jokes about him being a pedlo and righteous ire at his getting away with all those terrible things he did)).

(Second Update: Apparently the O2 concerts are going to go ahead. He won’t sing, but he will hum a bit.)

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Arcadia.

It’s a very enjoyable play with a fantastic cast (except for the young student girl who appeared to have learned to act by watching Hollyoaks) and I heartily recommend going if you get the chance.

It’s not only very funny but it’s also thought-provoking in an entertaining way that doesn’t feel at all didactic.

I only mention this because one of the recurring thoughts that swooshes around my mind on a regular basis is the question of constant progress.

Wherever you go, people want to grow their businesses, make more of themselves and move forward, as if it’s some kind of mortal sin to stay where you are or, Heaven forbid, go backwards.

Richard Dawkins is particularly fond of this idea, suggesting that tradition is the enemy of progress.

However, during Arcadia, there’s an interesting point made by the girl who can’t act. She says that we can stir jam into porridge but we can never un-stir that jam by moving our spoon in the exact opposite direction.

She wants to know why and (spoiler alert) finds that the answer lies in the fact that all actions involve a displacement of heat that is impossible to return to the action, thus making it something that cannot happen in reverse.

In between considering this and, since, leaving rude messages about the crappy actress girl on one of her fansites (she’s got a minor role in the Harry Potter films, so let’s just say 12-year-old girls get very defensive when you trash her), I finally realised why progress is a human imperative:

We can never go back. We can’t unlearn things and we can’t deliberately learn less about something we already know about.

Forwards is the only way we can move and, like sharks, we do it or we die.

I found this simultaneously heartening and frustrating. Sometimes it’s nice to know that something is inescapable: it means you don’t have to worry about trying to escape it. But then, what if you want to keep things as they are? Well, you can’t. You’re always moving forwards, whether you’re getting better at rolling spliffs and playing GTA4, or you’re persuading people to come and look after a beautiful island.

So now I’m going to embrace forwards and I thank Tom Stoppard for helping me to be OK with that.

(larger copies here.)

Personally, I think it’s a load of old bollocks.

But pourquoi?

Well, I think it’s a bit of contrived reasoning that has little or nothing to do with the product. We’re not really like animals, and if we are, it’s not in the way that’s been demonstrated here, shitting in the woods and half-submerging our faces in water. It’s in a more basic, more engaging way, where we can lose our millennia of sophistication to become the creatures of our origin.

Nice pictures for a photographer’s portfolio, but otherwise, meh.

(By the way, there are many other press campaigns awarded this year that are actually pretty good. You can find them at the above link and while away a couple of hours playing the interesting pastime of ‘Bullshit or Real?’)

I love these because they are a New Page, they’ve got some good, original copywriting, the tone of the writing and art direction is spot-on, and they’re really difficult to ignore. They’re an object lesson in how to do print advertising, and the more of that there is, the better.

So the UK is currently performing a big, fat belly flop at Cannes.

That’s all well and good, but before Campaign asks The Agency Head, The Creative Director and The Tea Lady why this is the case, I’ll have a go, and you can join in in the comments section should you be so inclined.

(Actually, this is my wife’s theory, but what the hey.)

The countries that are doing well are the ones that have emerged as international forces recently. They might have won awards before, but now seems to be the big time for South Africa, The Far East, Australasia and other parts of the world that didn’t exactly dominate the previous years.

This could be because of the ever-increasing globalisation of advertising. Those regions may well do the pan-world ads that are usually the remit of Europe and North America, but they don’t do nearly as many as we do. They get to work on more local business because, as international offices, they haven’t yet grabbed all the lucrative, often more homogenised, often duller work.

Look at the ad that’s won the PR and Direct Grand Prix:

Local business, innit? Cummins Nitro Brisbane? Who the fuck are they? Well, they are the agency that just scooped a couple of CGPs.

And look who’s just won the Outdoor GP. That’s right, SA agency TBWA Hunt Lascaris. For a Zimbabwean newspaper.

Network BBDO Jo’burg won the radio GP, admittedly for Virgin Atlantic, but it’s radio, so no one’s keeping the purse strings tight, and the client probably played it once in his car on the way to a golf tournament.

And Japan has won the Media Grand Prix.

That’s a 100% shut out for USA and Europe, the usual winners.

Let’s see what happens in the other categories.

That’s not to say it’s a viable excuse, after all, most UK agencies also handle local business. But you can see from the general output here that we’re not exactly producing our best work at the moment.

Unlike the ’emerging’ countries.

The other day I was having a chat with some other creatives (that live inside my head) and one of them asked what we all thought would be this year’s Cannes Film Grand Prix winner.

Creativity Online picks the sweetcorn out of Leo Burnett’s prediction reel, but I’m not sure.

There doesn’t seem to be an out-and-out favourite, so whatever wins may well not be a conventional TV spot.

If I could choose, I’d hand to either Philips Carousel:

Or Diesel SFWXXX

If it’s not one of those, I think my give-a-shit gland just left town.

The whole point of lat week’s poll was to try and find four disparate men that an equal number number of ITIABTWC readers would like to be/have been.

Well, colour me stoked (as Parker Lewis’s sister used to say), but I got much closer than I ever thought possible.

The results were: Michael Crawford, 12, Jamie Oliver 12, John Webster 11 and (kind of screwing things up, but not too badly) Sid James at 17.

Thanks to everyone who voted. These small near-victories hold a special place in my mouldy cheeseburger of a brain.

And thanks to eveyone who has sent me a suggestion for CD of the Year.

I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by saying that names like Droga, Craigen, Waites/Saville and Davidson/Papworth were mentioned. I was also delighted to see multiple suggestions for the lovely Damon Collins and one renegade punt for ‘The Client’.

Keep ’em coming and I might whittle the most popular down to a shortlist.

Or I might not.

Right. Now to think of four disparate women you might like to be.