I have no idea who advertises Wispa, but I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that none of the people tasked with approving this ad have even a basic grasp of English grammar.

Everyone involved, please write out 100 times: 'Its' means something belongs to it; it's is the abbreviation of 'it is'.

And don’t even start me on those cuntpipe triple exclamation marks.

Or the colon abutting a parenthesis.

Or the ham-fisted attempt at winsome neologism.

And where’s the comma or ellipsis that should come after the ‘Mmmm’?

Come to think of it, this could be the worst ad, grammatically speaking, that I’ve ever seen.

UPDATE: it seems that I missed the fact that this has been taken, bad grammar and all, from a Facebook contribution. I therefore retract my suggestion that the people involved have a poor grasp of grammar. They do, however, have a strange idea of what makes a good ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4wq9PU_A4

I think the performances are good, but I’m sure I’ve seen random people doing film lines somewhere before.

And if they’re bringing new films to London, why is London quoting old films?

I don’t know if you’ve seen a film called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but if you haven’t, you should.

It portrays the life of a British officer who has trouble squaring his sense of honour and fair play with the merciless nature of Britain’s opponents in WW2. The upshot of it is that if you choose to play fair your opponents will fuck you, stick you in concentration camps, fuck you again and kill you (perhaps then choosing to fuck your corpse). The film was a brilliant piece of propaganda, making it clear that The Hun would not play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, so if we wanted to win, we’d have to fight fire with fire by sinking to their level.

Bear with me here, but I think that the same situation is occurring in international advertising awards.

Although scam ads are certainly a part of the current UK ad scene (anything from Scambient ads to 2 minute directors cuts that run once on Granada Men and Motors +1), we are actually complete fucking amateurs when compared to the rest of the world.

Some agencies in other countries do the following: let you work on normal clients from 9 to 5 but make you work from 5 to 10 on scammery; mark out an entire floor plus photographic studio for creating scam; employ some teams to create nothing but scam; do ads for clients they don’t even have; do ads for Guinness that are actually ads for Irish bars and ads for Wonderbra that are actually ads for lingerie shops; take August off from their real clients to do their year’s scam ads all in one go; do adapts of international business but otherwise do nowt but scam; eat dogs and horses.

And in doing so they either fit within the letter (but not the spirit) of the rules, or accept that no one really checks up on them because certain award schemes quite like having the cash for the entries and can’t really be arsed to Miss Marple their way through an investigation that just results a big fucking headache.

So the UK doesn’t win the really big international prizes (or at least hasn’t for a few years).

Of course, I’m not saying that all the other award winners are scam (the reasons why UK advertising currently lags behind that of our overseas brethren is a whole other post), but when it comes to picking up the other prizes, we hamper ourselves by generally playing by the rules.

For example, why not create a bunch of complete and utter bullshit like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk

So we can either maintain our sense of honour and accept that we bugger our chances of more Lions, or we can get with the international cheating programme and pocket some more prizes.

I vote we set up a special clearing house agency for cheat ads. It can be called Fuck You Johnny Foreigner and it can be staffed by a bunch of brilliant account dudes, who will sell your generic ads for nose hair trimmers, superglue, hot sauce, dog food, animal charities and shoe polish. All agencies will chuck in some cash to pay for the staff and all the DPSs in Cement Mixer Monthly and the UK will top the Gunn Report every year.

Who’s in?

From Mr. Trott on Twitter.

So if people don’t join in with your little scheme, you kill them, kids included?

What a strange thing to say.

It would still have been shit but just a bit less offensive if it had been played for laughs, but the people who get blood all over them appear to be reacting almost realistically (except the Spurs players, who are obviously too thick to care).

And it’s too long.

How does an idea that fucking stupid get approved by lots of people then shot, finished and put on air/the internet?

It makes we want to change my unleaded car (that I don’t own) to four-star.

(Found via the Escape Pod blog.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLTXhF8XTRw

‘I think he’s Argos-ed it?’

Eh?

I have to confess that I quite liked this when I saw it on TV because I wasn’t really paying attention and I missed that odd bit of dialogue. What does it mean? What’s the point of any of it? Why is Bing beatboxing?

The beatboxing is well done and entertaining (if a massive riiiiiiiiiiiiip of Singin’ in the Rain), but if it don’t make no sense (and ‘keep up to date’ is a justification as weak as ‘I was only following orders’) then it ain’t no good.

And Fred, I don’t think you were being rude. I welcome suggestions for posts.

The theme is why this is a great time to be a creative in advertising (Details here).

The skeptical amongst you might consider that to be a thinly-veiled talking up of the recent-ish achievements of BBH’s offices worldwide, but as I’m never, ever skeptical about anything I’ll take it on face value and believe that Sir John of Hegarty truly believes that this is indeed a great time to be a creative.

But a couple of questions couldn’t help springing to mind:

1. Why is point 5 (agencies can persuade clients to be brave) illustrated with an ad from early 2002? Does he really mean 2002 was a good time to be creative?

2. ‘Creativity means ideas and ideas will get us out of the mess the bankers have got us into’. Um… yes, and ideas also got us into the mess. Creativity might well mean joining hands to promote world peace and saving Chilean Miners, but it also means invading Poland, bumming donkeys and inventing new torture devices. ‘It’s not intrinsically a good thing, but it’s all we’ve got’ would be more accurate.

3. Agencies have tackled ‘growing social issues’ for years. Unless I’m missing something, BBH’s new Barnados work is no bigger a deal than several campaigns Saatchis have done for NSPCC over the years. I guess Sr JoH is right that a creative’s current ability to take part in this reinforces his point but he might as well have said that you get to make stuff people see on TV.

4. Hats off to BBH for making products. Does anyone know how well they’re doing? (That’s not meant to be a facetious question; I’m genuinely interested). And well done for innovating through things like BBH Labs.

I guess creativity is very important to BBH right now. If you look at the current churn in their London creative department and the move to get rid of Kevin Roddy in the NY office they must be trying to get things exactly right to move forward as they see best.

Good luck to them.

McDonald’s food doesn’t really decompose. Daily Mail readers are twats.

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106 great internet campaigns.

Check out one of the most crazybrilliant print campaigns of all time.

The Wilhelm Scream

(Second hand thanks, J.)

One of the interesting/annoying things about advertising is that it seeks to go to where the people are.

That may sound obvious, but there appear to be strange rules to this.

Places where you get lots of people looking and can chuck ads at them ceaselessly include:

TV

The Internet

Magazines/Newpapers

Radio

Buses/Trains/Taxis

Places where you get lots of people looking but have to adhere to guidelines:

Cinema/DVDs (don’t interrupt the movies unless it’s in a way that we might not notice, eg: product placement)

Billboards (not too many please; they might spoil the lovely view of Marylebone Road)

Sports pitches/shirts

Places where you get lots of people looking but no ads:

Books (you do get a few ads in the back, such as chocolate ads in chick-lit etc, but otherwise this is a big no-no. Why?)

Phone (OK, people are listening rather than looking, but you could have an ad instead of a dial tone and lose nothing. Maybe get a few quid off the phone bill)

Public service things (Why have Barclays logos on the bikes but not Nike swooshes on Police uniforms, Boots logos on hospital bedsheets or Jeffrey Archer novels ads on public toilets?).

Ads seem to be there to offset the costs of things. Everywhere (legal) that you see an ad, someone is making some cash, so why can some surfaces take an ad without us getting fucked off? Sports pitches are an odd one because you’d think those massive logos would get in the way, both of our enjoyment of the games and the markings of the pitch. Then books often have plenty of spare pages at the back which could take ads but no one uses them to reduce the cover price by 50p. Why ads inside buses but not inside aeroplanes?

It seems that we have all made up a bunch of rules without actually talking to each other about it.

I guess that’s why this all appears to be so random.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw10G6-tfqg

It’s well styled, an original (until someone points out its YT antecedent. I believe something similar happened in the Omar Sharif film La Casse*) premise with an amusing ending.

However, if anyone cares, I find a large head really ruins a pint.

Also, I believe it is credited to Wes Anderson, but I hear tell he was rarely on set, instead delegating his duties to Roman Coppola.

*Although this is true, I’m not for one millisecond suggesting this ad is in any way a rip off.