Publicis have just launched an app that allows users to feed and help a virtual homeless person.

It’s called…

Wait for it…

iHobo!

Yes! iHobo

You are supposed to help your own little homeless fella live, like he’s some kind of 2010 Tamagotchi.

The reason why I ask if it’s real is that someone’s already done it as a spoof (a cursory check on t’internet would have found that out pretty quickly).

And the name: iHobo.

We don’t call homeless people ‘hobos’. That’s what they did in depression-era America.

Besides, even if we did, it’s a pejorative term, making this kind of like creating an iSpazz app where you can help a mentally handicapped person dribble his soup a bit less, then donate to Mencap.

Odd.

(Thanks for the spot, A.)

UPDATE: it’s real, all right…

And it’s in the ‘entertainment’ category of the iTunes App store, not ‘education’.

(Thanks, P.)

Maybe it’s more of a visual pun.

I don’t know.

All I know is that is sucks the shit off a dead cow’s arse.

If I need to explain further, it smacks in the worst possible way of the utter desperation of the creative team/agency/account man at the 11th hour when everyone else refused to touch it.

‘Give them (like a gift) the chance to own the road (an actual chunk of road)’. And these recipients actually seem delighted at these chunks of asphalt. How odd. And they don’t seem all that heavy. How much odder.

It even won an award for being shit.

Congrats, all involved.

I like an ad that wears its bollocks on its sleeve.

This one has taken a big chance and I think it’s come off a treat.

Rewatchability, stop-you-in-the-pub-ability, talkability.

What more do you need?

I know Sell! Sell! put this up yesterday, but just in case some of you don’t venture to that corner of cyberspace (you should), here’s advertising at its very, very best; perfect in both concept and execution:

And here is the making of:

Changing the subject with no finesse whatsoever, I’m currently reading a book called How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson.

It’s an enjoyable potted philosophy on how to opt out of the demands of what I can only describe as The Man, and getting back to reclaiming your life for yourself.

The main principles are freedom, merriment and responsibility, ‘otherwise known as having a laugh and doing what you want’ (the responsibility bit refers to taking charge of your own life instead of numbly sleepwalking through a life that is most convenient for those in charge).

The reason I mention it is that I sense from some past comments on this blog that there is a degree of dissatisfaction from some of you. You bought your ticket but the movie turned out to be shit, and now you’re itching to leave but you can’t quite bring yourself to waste the money you’ve spent.

Well, I used to walk out of movies on a regular basis (I still do, but as I’ve got older I tend to choose more wisely). My friend would stay in the cinema and we’d meet up later whereupon he would ask me how I could bring myself to walk out of something I’d paid a fiver for. The simple answer was that I thought the idea of paying not to enjoy yourself was absurd and it was much better to stop the boredom ASAP and go and do something else.

Of course, my tortuous analogy is much easier than the reality of changing your career, but I urge any of you are who are unhappy to take a baby step in another direction and see where it leads. Perhaps reading the book will be that baby step.

I’m going to have another G&T and check out as many of The best movie endings of all time I can lay my hands on.

If you’re still undecided about who to vote for, you might want to check out this very even-handed and balanced piece by Stephen Fry.

I would seriously urge any of you to read the whole thing, but if you don’t have the time (it is quite long), it boils down to this:

Do not let the Conservatives in (or BNP, but that kind of goes without saying).

Here’s how to do it.

For further info, this is quite enlightening.

As is this.

And a great Guardian Q&A here.

I wouldn’t point you in any direction (other than away from David Cameron’s party) but there is only one policy that I’d like to address specifically, mainly because it seems to have been the victim of a lot of wank-ridden conjecture that doesn’t stand up to gnat’s fart of logic:

The Lib Dems want to bring in an amnesty for illegal immigrants. HOWEVER, this is for those illegals who have been here over ten years, speak English and have no criminal record. Both of the other two parties slag this policy off as if it means we will just open the gates to all illegals or at least ‘let them off’, but it’s very easy to forget that it is those two parties that let them in in the first place.

The idea that this policy will mean wave after wave of illegals will now see us as an easy touch is fucking ludicrous:

‘Hey, Fritski, lets go to Britain! All we have to do to get those saps to let us stay is learn English, commit no crimes and remain in the country undetected for a decade! Piece of piss!’

If you want to come to this country illegally, it’ll be as easy/difficult under the Lib Dem’s policy as it is now.

And besides, there’s no evidence to show that countries who have imposed amnesties before end up with such an influx as a result of this.

AND it would cost a cunting fortune to find, detain and get rid of them all (I’ll say again that they were all let into the country by previous governments) instead of letting them work legally and contribute to the tax income. And that’s ignoring the fact that if they’ve been here ten years, some of them are probably contributing to society in a positive manner already.

The alternative seems insanely expensive and unworkable.

Also, the Conservatives say they will cap immigration, but they have yet to put a number on this cap because they can’t fucking do it. 80% of immigration comes from the EU, and we’re not allowed to cap it. By all means, cap the other 20%, but your (eg) 20,000 non-EU cap can then be supplemented by 400,000 from the EU and there’s not a damn thing David Cameron or anyone else can do about it. So his policy is bullshit. You can’t stop the vast majority of immigration to this country. Sorry. But at least there’s a party that has a policy for dealing with the immigration we’ve already got.

So I’m not saying vote Lib Dem. I’m just saying don’t let the illegal immigrant amnesty thing stop you doing so.

And, as always, feel free to disagree with me and vote Conservative. Or BNP.

But if you still can’t quite work out who is for you, this should help.

Let me start this post by saying that I fucking love YouTube. It’s full of the most amazing shit that I would never otherwise have seen.

And it’s free!

Shit my leg off.

It’s great recreationally, but we also know the impact YouTube has had on the creative side of advertising in the last few years: a non-stop torrent of clips from which to take inspiration that must have widened tenfold the frame of reference of the average creative.

And that would be great if the issue ended there.

Alas there are a couple of downsides, where this wondrous tool has hindered as much as it has helped:

1. YouTube as judge, jury and executioner.
The weekend’s discovery of an ad that’s similar to the new John Lewis commercial brings this issue into focus. I mentioned that the team involved were too good to have consciously remade an ad that already existed and I’m certain that is the case, but the similarity is out there for all to see and for all to judge. In the absence of a signed affidavit from the people concerned, ANY ad that is now released will also be subject to the same scrutiny. Is that fair? Well, the problem is that all too often the presumption of guilt is the first port of call. This may be due to the ingrained reflex of the ad creative to call ‘Unoriginal!’ on anything with any obvious precedent. Now the ‘source’ material you may not even have been aware of can be plucked from obscurity and blogged (sorry, guilty as charged) and commented on.

However, the big problem is that pretty much everything has a precedent of some kind, as this site shows. In the past, people didn’t mind that you nicked/were inspired by a scene from a movie:

But now, if you happen to use a single frame or photograph to inspire your work, people will cry foul.

It blows up out of all proportion the issue of how creative a creative is, and there’s nowhere to hide.

2. Youtube as diluter of the creative department’s status.
I firmly believe that people admire what other people do for two reasons: one is the inherent quality of the achievement and the other is the degree of difficulty involved in achieving it. The latter is what’s under the microscope here.

For the last twenty years the Apple Mac has made this job far easier than it used to be. I wrote about this a while back, but this actually meant that the clients gradually realised that a colour/logo size could be changed at a touch of a button, one hundred times if need be, right up to one minute before the supply deadline. So that’s what they now do: changes are many, late and much less expensive (chargeable) than they were before.

Now, the proliferation of ads that use YouTube clips as reference has meant that the TV part of our job also looks much easier to a client. If you show a client a clip then ask him for £350,000 to remake it, that just seems to the client that creative departments are stuffed with people who (very expensively) search YouTube all day. Now why would they respect that? Why would they think that wasn’t something they could do with a spare afternoon? Of course, the creative process is much, much more than the initial reference clip, but I can understand why an uneducated client might think that he’s not getting value for money, and that creatives do very little that he couldn’t do himself. In addition, they see a director getting £50k for remaking the clip, and wonder exactly what creatives do that is worth what he pays.

You may have noticed that the rise of YouTube has coincided with a fall in the standards of creative work. Is that because we are less impressed with YouTube clips that have new logos on the end, or is this just one part of a general slide towards oblivion for advertising creativity? Either way, it means we will get less respect and less pay and it will be very difficult to turn that situation around.

3. YouTube as reference.
We’re all aware that you can no longer simply show a scamp or a script and hope that is enough to convince someone to let you make it. Reference is where it’s at. You may or may not use reference to clarify an idea to your partner or CD, but when it comes to client meetings you’d better have a clip that lays it all on a plate. YouTube is a massive repository of these pieces of film which help lead the client by the hand into waters that are familiar, that he can see working. If you jump straight into the unknown, the client may well be too scared to follow, after all, he might need to persuade his boss, and without that clip from an old episode of Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds, how can he possibly hope to do that?

That might seem like an upside – making the persuasion of clients easier – but it also means that you end up having to make ads that are very similar to the source material, and that reduces originality, further depleting the perceived contribution of the creative.

Overall, it can take the client behind the curtain and show him really clearly how we do what we do. In the old days (you know, the days when people thought the ads were better than the TV programs), the making of ads was an interesting mystery which was given the time, money and respect it needed to become as good as it did. The guy who wrote Heineken Refreshes… (Terry Lovelock) did so after a month of failure was followed by Frank Lowe packing him of to Marrakesh for one last chance. Indulgent? Maybe. But that was one hell of a piece of work, and if it came about via a month of nothing and a Moroccan holiday, who are we to argue?

Nowadays, the other people in your agency want to keep the creative down. The funny thing is, we’re colluding wholeheartedly in that process. We’re turkeys voting for Christmas; we’re Tiger Woods leaving messages on hookers’ voicemails; we’re the fresh meat on D-wing and we’re dropping the soap on purpose.

The above downsides to YouTube may not be readily apparent, but I believe they are helping to finish us off (and not in the good way that masseuses finish you off).

Please feel very free to tell me I’m wrong.

I’d love to be.

A kind person (Thanks, O) pointed these out to me last week.

I think they’ve been well crafted and sit just on the right side of fun-poking rather than slipping into the murky realms of mean and nasty. And it’s nice to see that lots of thought and effort went into them. The usual ad in these cases is a shit pun and a hastily cobbled together stock image, so a proper illustration and an arseload of good copy is a pleasure to see.

An anonymous commenter has just pointed out this News of the World suggestion that the recent John Lewis ad (that, by the way, got big chunky mentions in the newspaper sections of both the Guardian and Observer on the weekend) is a rip-off of this Italian lingerie ad:

Now, this is an interesting question.

If you look through the comments on the original post, you’ll see that the technique was done 23 years ago for a John Lennon video:

Imagine (J.Lennon) – Zbigniew Rybczynski (1987) from Thomas Mantero on Vimeo.

And we now have an ad with the same ‘plot’, but which also uses the same track.

Hmmm…

Technique, plot and song all used before in very similar ways.

Ah, I’m torn between thinking it doesn’t matter and worrying that this post I put up on Friday has just come true in the most glaring way.

Time for a pint, I think.