Have a good hearty read of this (thanks, R).

Over the last few years there have been quite a few agencies that have operated for a while without an overall CD.

We’ve had agencies that have appointed a whole bunch of under-partners while waiting for an ECD, agencies that have spent a very long time without an ECD before finally appointing one, and agencies that have lost their ECD and just not bothered replacing him.

Call me old fashioned but I was brought up to think that an overall CD was essential to the smooth running of an advertising agency. Not only do I discover that this view is hopelessly outdated, I also find myself having to admit that in some agencies (shit ones) it’s wrong.

From small independents to massive multinationals, ad agencies of all shapes and sizes can plod along for years without an official ECD to shape, marshall and improve the creative output. The department can apparently cope without a central figurehead, clients don’t really give a monkeys whether or not the CD-type is available for a chat and agency management seem to organise and enjoy lots of big important meetings without him or her.

Cripes.

So why is this the case, and what does it mean?

Well, I’ve written many times about the demise of creativity and its reduced importance in the current world of advertising, so I suppose the lack of perceived CD importance is just another symptom of that. I would also guess that the non-CD parts of an agency’s management actually quite like taking the creative reins. It gives them delightful little stirrings in their downstairs portions because they find themselves at the business end of the creative process, yaying and naying the scamps and scripts of those creative johnnies who get to come to work in jeans and trainers. They might also have been inspired by the many agencies who have managed perfectly well without that guy who demands £350k a year, after all, if TBWA and Lowe could manage with caretakers for a while, why not Ogilvy?

And what does it mean?

In my opinion, very little. I’ll say again that it shows a stunning lack of respect for the power and quality of the creative output, but that seems to matter very little these days. I don’t think you need a very good, expensive CD to make work 5/10 instead of 4/10, and that’s the kind of standard that most clients currently seem to be happy with. Then again, in the end, these agencies do end up hiring an ECD eventually, so I suppose there isn’t an industry-wide feeling that the job is entirely superfluous. Let’s give the non-CD agencies the benefit of the doubt and say that they were CD-less for a while because they simply did not want to rush into making such an important hiring decision (the alternative, that no decent ECD would touch their job with a bargepole because they couldn’t pay a decent salary and had a truly shitty bunch of accounts, is too painful to contemplate).

I heard of an agency a few years ago that was permanent ECD-less and was told that upper management were giving constant assurances that the hunt was on for a new one. Many great names were mentioned, imminent arrival dates were rumoured and PR releases to Campaign were duly prepared.

But days, then weeks, then months passed, and no appointment was made.

Then the other rumours started: the agency couldn’t afford the marquee name they wanted; the loss of all decent accounts meant the job was not tempting the candidates the agency felt it deserved; the management were a bunch of arse-brained losers who couldn’t tempt a doberman to a cats home.

In the end, no appointment was made, no work was made for several months, the agency carried on in an utterly mediocre fashion and the world kept turning.

Around a year later, an ECD was acquired.

Within a few months he had left.

The agency is again without a permanent ECD, but I hear they’re not really in any hurry to find one.

Their work is still shit.

And no one in charge gives a fuck.

See? Appendix.

Land Rover ad, press section of D&AD 2001

Winner of Winners, ANNA Awards, 2011

This throws up a few questions:

1. Why are RKCR/Y&R running a remade version of a Land Rover ad (same creative team, by the way) ten years after the original? It even has the same rather tortuous and unnecessary pun (‘don’t be weather beaten’).

2. Why did someone award it Best Newspaper Ad of the year, bearing in mind it’s kind of been done before a teensy little bit?

3. If at least three people in my agency noticed this, why didn’t the judges?

4. Have we really come such a short distance in ten years that an also-ran ad from a decade ago is today’s best?

5. Why is the new ad dark? Is it just to differentiate itself from the old ad, or is it a comment on the veil of darkness that has descended over UK creativity in the last decade, as evidenced by this rum old do?

6. Who gives a fuck?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

Saul Bass wants to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares (thanks, J):

Talent imitates, genius steals (there are loads more of these if you click through to the YouTube page. Thanks, K):

Steve Jobs on Dragons’ Den (thanks, G):

I can’t stop laughing at this (check out Andrei Arshavin at 1′):

And along similar lines, an entire site devoted to white people rapping poorly.

The Tarantino Mixtape:

Play the game where you have to try not to shit your pants (thanks, A)…

Then watch Cole the Rapper pee his (warning: this might be even worse and more depressing than the awful depressing rapper I linked to a couple of weeks ago).

And, oh God, here’s another one (thanks, D):

The very funny Black Swan make up tutorial (thanks, W):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3HLQlW_jwM

A history of rap in 4 beatboxing minutes (thanks, R):

Let’s be honest here, the only reason 99% of you read this blog is to waste a bit of time during the working day.

Of course, I am chest-puffingly proud of making a contribution to that (I dream of the day I am officially responsible for 100,000 wasted man hours), but I wonder…

Where else do you go to piss about from nine to five?

I’ll start with a few of my own crackers:

All of the previous day’s football highlights.

LA property porn.

Celebrity scuttle.

Quid pro quo, Clarice…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P0iPoukGeA

‘In return for one night together, eating proper food with proper gravy.’?

Don’t you just love that subtext that’s supposed to guilt frazzled parents into making sure they have a proper meal ‘together’ with ‘proper’ food and ‘proper’ gravy (by the fucking way, Bisto, your powdery shit from under the fridge isn’t ‘proper’ gravy. That would be the juices from whatever meat you’ve cooked – tricky with a sausage, I grant you – mixed with flour and a drop of wine/cider/sherry/similar. And if you claim to make proper gravy, what’s improper gravy? A cup of the runs?)?

This giant food corporation (RHM) has the bollocks to lecture us about how we bring up and feed our kids? They make Mr. Fucking Kipling cakes! How many extra calories have they piled on the nation’s waistline over the years? How many child-parent arguments have been sparked off by the desire for one more Bakewell Slice? You don’t really fucking care about the fabric of the British family, so don’t try and serve up this mendacious load of shitmongous condescension.

And for the fucking record, sausages aren’t exactly ‘proper food’ either. Unless you buy the expensive ones, they are generally reconstituted abattoir scrapings, as much sawdust and dirt as testicle and eyelid, and pouring your dessicated  turd powder over them isn’t going to help.

So, bottom line: you are inconsistent, duplicitous cunts who have tried to leverage the guilt of Britain’s parents by suggesting they have failed in some way if they haven’t done what their kids really want, namely: to sit down in a kitchen with their parents and eat shit in shit sauce.

Thanks for that.

Arseholes.

Back in the day, some of London’s agencies only offered clients a single answer to their brief. I only have proof that this was the case at Lowe, where Frank made it well-known, and AMV, where I worked.

That might seem like a strange idea to some of you. I mean, how many of you work in an agency that does that today? None, I’ll wager. The current situation is typified by a client I worked on who had a clause in his contract saying that he would be offered three solutions to any brief. However, if he didn’t like any of the solutions he could (and usually would) then demand a further three routes and so on until the number was closer to twelve.

Now, you might think that there’s nothing really unreasonable about this, after all if you were buying a coat and didn’t like the one the man at the shop offered you then you would feel entitled to check through the rest. But then advertising isn’t clothes shopping. The client agency relationship ought to be one established on the basis of trust, where the client will believe in the the agency’s ability to choose and provide the best solution (and why anything else?) and see it through to reach the optimum conclusion. To go back to the clothes analogy, it would only apply if you had three prior meetings with Miuccia Prada, Mr Reiss and Mr Byrite, chose the designer most sympatico with your coat vision, gave them several months of back and forth about exactly what you wanted out of this particular coat at this particular time, then a further month to make it with constant contact throughout the process. I’d guess that by then you would know what you were getting and would be quite pleased with the result.

So there’s no more trust. Not real trust. Clients will say there’s trust because to say anything else would be a bit insulting, but let me repeat: CLIENTS DO NOT TRULY TRUST THEIR AGENCIES.

Why? Well, we could come up with lots of reasons for that but pretty much all the fault lies with agencies. Over the years some of them may have acted in a high-handed manner that they couldn’t possibly justify (those ridiculously over the top parties may not have helped. Clients might well have wondered how agencies could afford them then adjusted their terms of remuneration accordingly). Now we also have the brain drain, where worse pay and conditions (still very cushy compared to a nurse, but all adjectives are relative, aren’t they?) have led to the very best leaving the industry to be replaced by, well, not the very best. So clients look at what they are offered and might not think that much of it, so they ask for more work and that suggests even less trust.

So clients don’t trust agencies for some pretty good reasons. But this situation then gets exacerbated by the agencies’ collusion in the lack of trust. If an agency gives several routes then they do not have integrity. They are not spending their time doing their very best work because they are spending a lot of time on routes which will they know will die (not their very best work). They are showing ads in the hope that the client will chose one, pay them and move on to the next one. They also know that there are few measurable consequences of this: ads rarely increase sales on their own, so unless you have laid a real turd, no one can really take issue. Keep your head down, do something adequate and hope no one notices.

If an agency genuinely offered only its best stuff then the client would be able to trust in the fact that this was the case. What we have instead is agencies implicity saying: ‘I Dunno what’s any good. You choose.’ How can you trust someone who does that? You can’t. The client then has to do the choosing, make the decisions and erode the trust still further.

So clients do not trust agencies, but agencies do not act with integrity.

Which came first? No idea, but until one side starts acting with trust or integrity, this will never improve or end.

UPDATE: check this from about 2:50 (thanks, Anon):

See what you can do with no budget?

Charming.

(Thanks, D.)

For those who are interested, the top five in each category can be found here.

1. Congrats to my old AD Cam and his number 5 TV ad.

2. Congrats to RKCR/Y&R for their ‘5th best agency in the world’. I guess that makes them officially the best agency in the country.

3. Congrats to the Dixons campaign – most awarded in the world.

4. Congrats to Donald Gunn for thinking up a way of making loads of money just by adding up awards and making it all a bit secret so we can’t just do it ourselves.

The joy of destruction (thanks, J).

An unscientific study of what drugs do to creativity (Thanks, K).

Axe Cop! Written by a five-year-old, illustrated by his 29-year-old brother (thanks, M).

Another spoof case study. Soon someone will have to spoof spoof case studies (thanks, M):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oo7_eFftuM&feature=youtu.be

What’s it like living in other countries? (Thanks, K.)

This isn’t by Chris Cunningham, but it reminds me of his work (NSFW):