Three reasons why you should buy it:

It’s full of brilliant advice from proper people who are really, really good at what they do:

It’s well-designed:

It’s got lots of great insights from someone who has a Cannes Grand Prix, D&AD Pencils and a bunch of other stuff that makes him worth reading:

I’d also like to add that it’s a great bog read. By that I mean it’s all laid out in digestible, bite-sized chunks that you can get through in the time it takes to read Campaign. Or take a dump. You might like to read the interview with Jeremy Craigen over a regular poo. Then again, you could add in Dave Droga’s Foreword and the Paul Silburn interview if you’ve got the runs.

And just in case you missed that Amazon link, IT’S HERE.

(Interest declared: I am friends with Simon. In fact we had lunch today. Yesterday if you’re reading this on Thursday.)

Sitting here in Saatchi and Saatchi London I often get told, although not by the people who work here, that I’m in the only agency my mum has heard of.

That’s not quite true. My mum used to be an above the line copywriter in London, so she’s heard of quite a few agencies.

But that aside, the fame of S&S does get mentioned quite a lot. I recall being at college and having an account person from there showing us a vox pop she had made asking people to name an ad agency. They only named S&S, even if they happened to be standing outside JWT or BBH (a bit of mendacious editing was used there, I’m sure).

Then there’s that truism that it’s ironic that agencies are unable to create big famous brands out of themselves. After all, if S&S could do it, why can’t anyone else?

I have no idea, but it does seem odd, because when you think about it, there are great benefits to be had from such fame:

1) People want to work for you. They’ve heard of you, therefore you must be the best and then they can tell their mums and dads, who will think they do something significant for a living. I once had a team resign because they wanted to go and work on more brands their mum had heard of. Understandable. This is a way of attracting better staff than you would otherwise and probably being able to pay them less.

2) Clients want to give you their business. Similarly, I once lost a client because apparently the uber boss of the company wanted to tell his mates he was with Charles and Maurice’s place (he had moved to M&C, which, I suppose, is sort of the second most famous agency in the country. I bet most of the bovine mouth-breathers in the general population don’t even know the difference, the fucking idiots). So the same effect of basking in a reflective glow occurs and that translates into cash and accounts.

3) Fame begets fame. If people want to interview an industry figure or do an article about advertising then it makes sense for them to choose so-and-so from Saatchi and Saatchi because it’s easier than asking so-and-so from Wieden and Kennedy, you know, that agency that did the Honda ad where it all went round a room like Mousetrap.

So why, in all the years of advertising, particularly the last thirty, has no other agency managed to do this?

We’re supposed to be the experts. Surely it’s like a doctor treating his own sprained ankle, or a vet sorting out his manky salamander? And yet 99% of agencies do it like a decorator who who gets his own wallpaper overlapping and his tiles skew-whiff. Or a prostitute who can’t manage a wank. Or something.

Can anyone think of a reason why an agency would not want to be famous? I can’t really see a downside, or at least a downside that outweighs the massive upside.

And, if so, why isn’t your agency trying to do it?

There’s something funny going on.

If it’s not Mr T selling Snickers or Bonnie Tyler flogging Mastercard, we appear to be in the midst of a full-on eighties revival.

I even saw this on TV last weekend:

Not sure why. I thought the whole eighties revival thing had been and gone by 2008. Should we be into a nineties revival about now?

Just think: Cotton Eye Joe, Chaka Demus and Pliers, Steps, Achy Breaky Heart, Right Said Fred.

Oooohhh… makes you want to gently commit suicide just thinking about it.

Results Here.

Now, maybe you’re a more eagle-eyed person than me, but I looked at the list of winners in the proper One Show (not the design or digital bits, which, frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck about) and could only find a single winner from a UK agency.

Four possible reasons:

1. We’re shit (let’s face it, it’s not been a good couple of years, so that might well be the case).
2. And we know we are, so we didn’t bother entering (less likely. Several agencies and production companies enter every year and there is something from Leo Burnett in the Design section, so they almost certainly entered the proper one too).
3. Lack of entry cash (Sure, but the best agencies would still have punted a few grand entering their best stuff).
4. We don’t give a shit about The One Show (well, we seem to give a shit about Creative Circle and (no offence, CC) that’s not nearly as prestigious).

But then, odd as you like is the fact that our only winner (I use the widest definition of ‘our’ here) has only gone and taken Best of Show:

Is that good? I have to confess I’ve never watched it all the way through, or even a minute through (I find myself getting distracted waiting for the cameraman to fall over so I don’t really pay enough attention to the story to find it engaging. And that’s Begbie, isn’t it? Why’s he gone all civilised? I much preferred it when he was glassing tourists for sport).

Anyway, congratulations to the people behind it and congrats to all the nerds in the nerdy agencies that won lots of ‘Interactive’ (meaningless) pencils.

UPDATE: Check that shit out! I embedded like a motherfucker. (Thanks, Guy and Sarah.)

Orange have heeded the wise advice of this blog and changed their dry old pre-movie campaign.

It’s now funnier, smarter and A-list instead of D-list.

Thank fuck for that.

I love it.

Get yourself a job with $6 and a little ingenuity.

(Thanks, F.)

The best World Cup ad so far:

(Thanks, A. Via Twitter.)

Total Recall: The Musical.

Last week’s poll was kind of like a hung parliament of things people liked best in advertising.

New Poll up now.

And finally, I have unearthed the YouTube clip that Juan Cabral stole to make his drumming gorilla ad:

Oddly enough, I think it makes too much sense.

It’s actually an ad which gives a specific benefit to the product.

I don’t think Pinata, Touch or Beard, for example, did that. I know they kind of suggested the sweets are in some way irresistible, but that’s not specific, so the ads could be more random in their fun-ness.

I went to Watford (the college, not the place, although if you go to the former, you do end up spending time in the latter. Horrible fucking shithole). We were taught a bunch of very useful things but we never had a single lesson on how to write a script.

Which is odd because, thinking back, I’ve never had a formal, deliberate lesson on advertising scriptwriting. I’ve had the odd bit of advice here and there, but no one seems to mind that you’re just shoved in at the deep end, producing (supposedly) professional scripts that clients will see and directors will work to.

Anyway, a few years back my boss sent me (after a bit of nagging) on Robert McKee’s Story Seminar, which is like this:

But here’s a free hour of his more recent thoughts.

It was a really good course, although geared towards feature film script writing rather than ads.

For further brilliant advice, this is a website set up by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the writing team behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and other big hits (the link is sometimes a little dodgy but it’s worth persevering). They explain why the names of your characters are so important and offer little gems such as the fact that M. Night Shyamalan didn’t realise Bruce Willis was dead until the fifth draft of The Sixth Sense (lesson: draft, draft and draft again). It’s all still films rather than ads, but many of the principles hold true for both.

Other advice: if you’re thinking of writing a movie script, get Final Draft – formatting is key. Also, read Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. It’s really enjoyable as well as really informative.

What else? There’s this interesting comment that was left on the blog yesterday by an ad person who has sold a script to Hollywood:

The joy of writing a screenplay is that you can do whatever you want in it. It’s sort of helped me stay sane in advertising. I say ‘sort of’. I am not entirely sane but let’s not go there. I never thought about what would sell, just developed ideas that grabbed me. There’s a feature film in every one of these ‘high concept’ ideas so if you have anything like that I’d encourage you to keep turning it over in your brain until it gains momentum. I suppose you could compare one of these ideas to a really good advertising idea. You’ve got the print ad but what’s the ambient execution and the iphone app. etc. If it’s rich enough you’ll find it has many dimensions. If you work on all of these you’ll find you’ve got enough ideas to flesh out into a screenplay. Before I started writing I found the whole idea of attempting something so big really intimidating but the more you time you spend on it, the more you break it down, the more it starts to feel like writing one ad after another after another – I believe Ben made a similar point a few months ago – which makes it much more manageable and very suited to our skill set. It’s also much easier than writing a novel because there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do it and we’re all pretty familiar with what makes a good movie.

It’s also closer to copywriting in so far as you can spend ages tinkering with a few lines. I’m guessing you can’t really afford to do that when you write a book.

Next to getting it read in the first place, the hardest thing to deal with is development. By the time you are asked to re-write something you are likely to be bored to death of it, not to mention impatient to see it made, but actually the development process can be very positive. It has been in my case. Entire threads were ripped out of the story and although I didn’t like it at the time I can now see that it was the right thing to do. In other words there’s a lot to be said for not being precious. Easier said than done obviously and I did lose a few things that I wanted to keep.

Now that I have sold the rights to it, I no longer own it which means they can do whatever they want with it. Another writer is on board now, working off the producer’s notes and that marks the end of my involvement. Pretty unceremonious. If he likes what they do, it’ll get made. If he doesn’t, it won’t and I’ll go back to freaking out about the horrible state of my career.

Anything else? Um… Dunno really. If you’re thinking of writing a script, do give it a go. As the above person says, it’s fun. I have my own screenplay Fuck Me Backwards almost finished. It’d be nice if someone was insane enough to want to make it, but I don’t really care because I’ve really enjoyed writing it and the process has been an education.

Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments section. I know at least one other professional screenwriter drops by here occasionally. If he would like to give us some insights, I’m sure they’d be greatly appreciated.

This year Adidas will be bringing us a reactive moving graphic novel, where stories of its players and their achievements at the WC will be changed as they happen.

They are launching it with this.

(From 180 Amsterdam and Jonny Green. Interest declared: I did some work on this campaign in December, but I’m not sure how much of my contribution has survived – I didn’t do any of the above. It was really fun, though. If you get the chance to work at 180 I’d recommend it, although it helps if you wear a woolly hat indoors and grow a beard.)

Aside from anything else, I like the fact that they have gone somewhere different, both in style and content. After all, the usual thing here, post Good vs Evil, is to set up a weird football match of some sort. This, instead, gives us the players as heroes in a separate world of their own.

(Poster by Paul Belford at This Is Real Art).

Do come along. I’ll be sitting in H4. If you say hello I’ll buy you an ice cream at the interval.

I often cast envious glances in the direction of Hollywood.

Not just because movies are bloody great, but also because the people involved in them seem to be so much better at what we do than we are.

We often try to create advertising campaigns that are viral, multi-media, 360-degree experiences, yet that’s what movies have been doing since before the terms were even invented. Star Wars toys, Happy Meal tie-ins, posters, radio ads, trailers that people go out of their way to spread and download, personal appearances by the people involved, premieres, reviews in the editorial sections of media… The list goes on and on.

You could just take the poster, a medium in which movies beat advertising hands down. They too have to communicate several things in one simple image, possibly with the backup of a line, but they do it so much better than we do:

I think a great lesson to learn here is that economy of elements can be boosted enormously by tone of voice. People rarely seem to mention this in advertising, but the TOV of an ad can communicate as much as, if not more than, the words and pictures. You can tell what those three movies are going to be like just be taking a glance at their representative images. And those images (I mean the whole poster, by the way, not just the picture) are better than anything I’ve seen in advertising in the last year.

And they all have it: brilliantly crafted image making that distills even a shit two-hour experience into one great picture:

Some of you might wish to argue that their ‘products’ are better/cooler/more interesting than ours. Well, that’s just one more thing that movies get right.

A studio never makes a picture that doesn’t ‘work’. It may not be of great quality or to your taste, but they almost always take 120 pieces of paper, filter them through a crew of 200 and come out with something at the other end that is a coherent whole that will appeal to a minimum of a million, but probably more like hundreds of millions of completely different people across the world.

Whereas we sift through some dismal shite from one car company/detergent/snack that is much like another.

Sorry, I’ve just realised this post is going to go on and on and on, so I’m going to break it down and do it in separate chunks.