Some agencies are better than their reputations, while others are much worse.

But whatever the reality, the perception can be a powerful thing.

This makes itself most obvious when you are telling people you haven’t seen in a while where you are working and what you’re working on.

Sad though it is to admit, I’d rather tell people I was working at well-thought-of but less good place than a turning-it-around shithole (Of course, I’d rather work at the latter, but telling and doing are very different things).

Of course, agencies know this, and are able to attract better staff for a smaller wage based purely on reputation (although that reputation would of course have to be based on something more substantial).

But I’m surprised agencies don’t exploit this still further. In these difficult times, getting every financial advantage possible would seem a bright thing to do, so it seems a big waste of cash to be a crappy agency who has to pay more for lower quality staff. Having said that, it really is a buyers job market out there, so I suppose the ‘less good’ places can get better staff than they could before without the tedious bother of having to sell difficult work.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, pride in your workplace=greater job satisfaction.

It also has other benefits. I recall visiting a friend sometime in the 1990s when I was working at what was generally considered (through little fault of my own) to be one of the best agencies in the world. Her flatmates were two account guys who worked at another agency, that was, frankly, shit, and they were quite rude and mean to her. Then the subject of what we all did for a living came up. When I told them where I was and in which department they stopped being rude/mean to my friend, making her life a good deal more pleasant.

Obviously, they were a pathetic pair of tits, but I never forgot the unexpected advantages of working somewhere good.

The future, Mr. Gittes:

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

(Thanks, K.)

Lars Von Trier advertises Denmark.

Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier

’90s hip-hop classic, Sesame Street style:

(Thanks, A.)

And some food for thought:

(Thanks, K.)

Hello.

Another very kind commenter has written a nice long comment that saves me writing a post.

Thanks Anonononymous (wink).

By the way, I have to say that I haven’t read Campaign for about six months, so if the following refers to anything specific, I plead ignorance.

Take it away, A:

THE DNA OF PRIVATE VIEW

I am going to open my private view by making an observation outside of advertising, possibly relating to one of my adoringly intelligent children, or my gorgeously playful and understanding wife, and then draw a parallel back to advertising. To conclude this piercingly well-observed parallel, I will coin a phrase that I may have stolen from Google and then pass off as my own. I will put a couple of tongue-in-cheek jokes (in brackets) just to let you all know, with a wink, that I’m not taking this whole ad review thing seriously. In fact, I will even tell you that I have only just opened the parcel of “goodies” from my friends at Campaign, even though my PA would confirm that I have blocked out two whole days just to research past Private Views so I can work out a fresh new angle. And when I say fresh, I mean cool, too.

The second paragraph is the one that most of you cynical fuckers will jump straight to anyway, because you wish to keep the department copy of Campaign bile-free.

Mentioning the word “bile” now allows me to launch offensively into my first review like this: speaking of bile, I wished that I hadn’t just eaten my lunch when I reviewed the contents of this first ad, which, by pure coincidence, has come from an agency whose creative director fired me because it took him all of five minutes to realize my talent lay in PR, more than it did in ideas. Well Mr Creative Director who fired me, PR this you piece of shit. This is the worst fucking idea I have ever seen. Apart from the ones I have done myself, but that matters not, now that I am gracing the pages of Private View with my acerbic and weighty opinions.

By now, anyone with any judgement and instinct will not only smell a rather unsavoury waft of horse manure, but skip to the quotes running underneath the pictures and then maybe, but not definitely, look down at the credits to see if there’s anyone they know. Which means the rest of you are probably on placement or junior at the most, and you’re soaking up every word I’m saying as though I were David Abbott himself. And then you’re looking at my little match box picture and thinking, “wow, he’s smart, he’s young, he’s handsome. He really does have it all. How can I be like him?” Well, young college graduate, no one will ever be like me, because I am fucking amazing and I have it all. Just look at my photo again.

But I digress, because the next piece of work is done by a Director that once rejected a script of mine as though it was email fucking spam. And even though I like the work, I will say that I remember coming up with exactly the same idea many years ago, but bravo to the account team for selling it to the client. And then to bring the focus back to me, me, me, I will dust off my coined phrase to remind you of the neat thread that runs through the entire body of this article.

Something like that, anyway. It doesn’t really matter because nobody’s reading this anymore – except for maybe one poor placement team, who have even read Claire Beale’s column while they’ve been waiting (two days) to show their creative director some work. While he carefully crafts next week’s Private View.

Have you ever noticed how often things at work turn out differently to what was generally expected?

Not just differently, but pretty much the exact opposite to what many people thought was going to happen?

It never ceases to amaze me how many times the people involved in a job, with all their expertise and experience, get it 100% completely fucking wrong.

I recall a situation where I was in one of several creative teams involved in a pitch. We received the initial briefing, did some work based on it and waited for the feedback. Once the CD had thrashed it out with the MD and the account guy who had been on the account for over a decade, we went again with a slightly different twist to the brief. Then the ‘improved’ scripts went to the client for a tissue meeting. A few days later the feedback, filtered through the head of planning and her deputy, was given to us and a route was chosen.

A briefing route, that is. We were then told to write to one of the ideas (which to my mind made not one molecule of fucking sense), which we duly did, repeating the above paragraph to get another big chunk of client feedback.

We did weekends and late nights, working on nothing but this account for weeks, getting steers from all the agency personnel who believed they had the exact right answer and had enjoyed over twenty separate contacts with the client along the lines of ‘Is this right?’ ‘Not quite. Try it a bit more like this.’

So at the end of it all, my office happened to be next door to the one where the highly-paid agency top brass were having a conference call with the client. All I could hear was the telephone voice telling the people in the room that they were miles away from what was wanted and required. He sounded exasperated and amazed.

I saw that shitslide coming a mile off.

We might as well have sent the client a pint of piss for all the good it would have done us.

And yet, at so many stages, people argued for their way of thinking because they were certain they were right.

But they were wrong (the client was not, in this instance, being a dick. The fault was definitely with the agency).

It had happened before and has happened since.

For a communications industry, we can be really poor at listening.

Too many people are shouting to be heard, trying to give their POV some significance to the detriment of the project.

I’m not saying there’s anything that can be done about it, other than, perhaps, shooting all the dildoes in the industry.

But next time it looks like it’s going to turn out badly, don’t be surprised when it does.

The people who claim to know are often the stupidest tits in the room.

Last week was the greatest Nike Ads.

This week: Levi’s

In order, from one to however many I find on YouTube:

1. Drugstore. Someone will complain about me wanging on about this again, but it is the best Levi’s ad bar none. This is a sad admission to make, but when I first saw it in Screen One of the Odeon Brighton I felt like applauding. Thank you John Gorse and Michel Gondry.

2. Odyssey. Not quite perfect, but only because the ending doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the initial running through walls. Best opening shot ever. Brilliant music. I used to rush in from the kitchen to watch this on TV whenever I heard those first strains of Handel’s Sarabande.

3. Creek. Another sad admission: I bought this song and helped it get to number one. Owes a great debt to Ansel Adams, but you could just watch it again and again.

4. Launderette. Made the whole country wear boxer shorts. I bet some of you weren’t alive when it came out. Maybe you were conceived to its insouciant sexiness.

5. Flat Eric. After a few years where Levi’s advertising, shall we say, lost its way (remember the dead hamster?) it became as cool as fuck all over again:

6. Swimmer. Robbed of the Cinema pencil in 1992:

7. Washroom. During the nineties, cynical ad folk used to say that Levi’s ads were just cooly-shot Benny Hill sketches (see Creek). Here’s the coolest:

8. Twisted. I’ve never been hugely keen on this, but it got a Gold Pencil, so here it is.

9. There were some classics that just seemed to make you believe there was a never-ending stream of these things being pumped out of BBH at will: the pool game for the jeans with ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go?’; the one where the bloke drives his motorbike into the office to the sounds of ‘The Joker’; the one where the bloke comes downstairs to get his jeans out of the fridge; The one with black 501s, Eddie Kidd and ‘Stand By Me’, and The Procession. If you recall, it was a time when we all waited for the new one and it very rarely let us down. So here’s one from that era to represent all the others:

10. The one the went in the other direction: Mr. Boombastic.

And then there was Spaceman, Riveted, Mermaids, Tremor, Pick-Up,
Tackle, Bath, Cochran, Undressing and Kung Fu.

Got a fave I’ve left off the list?

And this lovely ad for Observer is exactly that:

(Editing excellent too).

The other reason I like it is because news is indeed a torrent of bullshit.

But don’t think you’re exempt from that criticism just because you’re aware of it, The Observer.

Occasionally I get asked how I have time to write a blog, a book and whatever ads need doing on a particular day.

The short answer is that I just get up and, at some point, do them all. I also read two or three newspapers, change nappies, have three meals, watch a movie, chat, email, play some Scrabble on Facebook, stare out of the window, Tweet, read other blogs, waste time on The Superficial and Hot Chicks With Douchebags, watch a TED lecture, play half an hour of Bejewelled 2 on the iPhone, get dressed, have a shower, enjoy five or six trips to the lav, buy some food, watch The Daily Show, read Rolling Stone/Private Eye/Q, listen to some Led Zeppelin, play with my son, put him to bed, pretend to talk to my daughter just to stop her crying in my face, read some of a book, comment on a few blogs and, well…a whole bunch of other things.

Maybe I am a little more constructive with my time then some people, but I still manage to fit plenty of wastage into an average day. Plenty.

But then I do a few things that produce a visible result. This blog is a daily (weekdaily, that is) demonstration of how I use my time. It probably doesn’t take as long as you think, but then I’ve written about 1500 posts in the last four years so the practice has made the process quicker and easier. Same with writing ads: they don’t take as long as they used to and the results are (I hope) better. The book writing takes as long as it takes, but if I didn’t have one that was about to be published it might appear that I was wasting my time noodling around with that.

I have a theory that if everyone applied themselves, and circumstances allowed, we could probably all do our day’s work in about three hours. However, things always seem to get in the way. Those things may be helpful little spongey things, like finding YouTube videos to be inspired by (nick) that make the three hours easier, but usually they’ll just be time wasting bollocks.

There are six billion people and rising in an increasingly automated world. They can’t possibly all have enough proper constructive work to fill a day (or eight hours). So we have lots of jobs that aren’t strictly necessary and therefore involve time-wasting. For example, if you have a planner at your agency who takes a month to go back and forth with a client and come up with a strategy that a monkey could have thought up in ten seconds, then that’s time wasted right there: both client and planner are doing something unnecessary for their money. Ditto creatives who have to do all the cannon fodder that gets shot down by a client who has to see 3/4/5/6/7/8/9 routes before he can dither about for a few days picking the one least likely to get him fired. Ditto CDs who now have to go to dozens of client meetings because the account handlers are shit at their jobs. The same with editors who have to produce another cut because of some shitbrained and unnecessary changes that the client’s wife just thought of. Then there’s account handlers who have to go back to the client for the eighth time because of some CHRISTING FUCKING INSANITY THAT COULD BE AVOIDED IF ONLY THE PEOPLE CONCERNED HAD EVEN A THIRD OF A FUCKING BRAIN CELL AND A LITTLE MORE COURAGE THAN A MOUSE THAT’S ABOUT TO BE SPLAYED OPEN AND ELECTROCUTED IN A COSMETICS LAB.

Anyway, the bottom line is that too much time is wasted in stupidity, inconsistency, fear, arse-covering and just plain old ‘being a cunt’. If you can avoid as much of that as possible you could find the time to write a blog, play with your kids or watch a box set of Deadwood. Or, if you run an agency and decided to remove all the wastage, you could probably manage with half the staff.

But then there’s be more unemployed.

So maybe agencies are just benevolent work homes that keep the jobless figures down and potential alcoholics off the streets.

It was quite interesting yesterday.

First he talked about the recent news that kids are being used as brand ambassadors. Like me, he didn’t think this was a big deal as he assumed that it had been going on for a while already.

Then he talked about Kraft’s recent takeover of Cadbury:

‘…the consequent, regrettable job losses are not because of a sudden lapse of conscience at Cadbury; from the day its stock was floated, it didn’t have a conscience, any more than a circular saw has a soul or a great white shark a sense of irony.’

Exactly. It’s amazing how we think that corporations are in business for anything other than money (I guess a very few are in it for something else, but money drives about 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of them). Businesses know we like to anthropomorphise them and they like to exploit this through a process known as ‘branding‘. This is essentially a way of making a soulless, faceless entity appear to have a face and a soul, and we all lap it up day after day.

He goes on to talk about all those Books for Schools/Playgrounds for Poor Areas schemes, pointing out that their only function is to make more money for the corporation, and that maybe we shouldn’t participate in them:

‘”Well, wouldn’t that be a shame for schools?” you might say. Not really. Companies would have to woo us honestly, with better services or lower prices, and would be unable to cream off enough to sling a few coppers in our education system’s begging hat. But customers could always spend their saving on schools, directly or through taxation, rather than via the purchase of 2,000 creme eggs, 4% of the value of which would go towards a basketball hoop.’

I wrote a post about that in this blog’s previous location. The strange, complicated and ultimately wasteful relationship that we have with brands is an odd kind of insanity, yet most of us can’t stop ourselves participating in it.

And as people who create ads, we don’t only participate, we engineer.

Did you know you were doing that?

Do you care?

The excellent list of the most deserving Oscar winners (can I show myself to be a pseudy wanker by saying that I’m delighted to see the inclusion of ‘Sunrise’ at number two?)

Cassetteboy Jeremy Kyle:

(Thanks, A. Via Twitter.)

And Princess Diana tweeting from Heaven.

Another questionable selection.

If I think of anything better I’ll stick it up over the course of the day.

Someone has compiled a list of what they believe to be Nike’s best commercials.

I disagree with a bunch of it.

First, Y2K (their number seven) is my number one.

Then there’s the omission of Tag:

:

And Parklife:

And the grandaddy of all those ‘lets have an unusual game of football’ ads, Good vs Evil:

Actually, there are loads that didn’t make the list, like that one where all the posters kick the ball across the world.

But different strokes for different folks, eh?

UPDATE: off topic, but you can now watch the making of that brilliant Old Spice commercial.