http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj-HOzHarMU&feature=player_embedded

And now the endline has gone back to making sense, this one’s a real winner.

Funny thing, time.

As far as it relates to advertising it can stretch and contract to become virtually meaningless.

For example, any team with a just a day to answer a brief will gripe and moan about just how ridiculous that situation is. How can they possibly curl out their 24-carat shiz with so little time?

But then you hear of many a story where an entire pitch has been scrapped at 2am with just a few hours to rethink, redraw and re-stick the new drawings to an acre of polyboard.

So how long is best?

Legend has it that Terry Lovelock came up with ‘Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ after he had come up with nothing during his first six weeks on the job. In exasperation, Frank Lowe sent the workshy fop on a holiday to Marrakesh with instructions not to come back without a D&AD Gold-winning campaign. After a few days in Morocco, Terry duly obliged, and the rest is advertising history.

I once brought up this story during a conversation with Jeremy Carr, suggesting that the longer one had on a brief the better. Jeremy disagreed, saying that at some point the whole thing just goes round in circles and you end up wasting time that could be better spent executing the darned thing (I get the impression that in Terry’s mid-seventies day there was a whole lot more wiggle room to answer a brief, so the execution time may not have been unduly compromised).

I now think that work expands to fill the time you have to do it. If you’ve got an hour, there’s a good chance that your brain will go into panic mode and offer up something as good as you’d manage in a day or two. Of course, that’s not always the case, but with deadlines contracting and six-week briefs now few and far between, you’ve either got to adapt to work with what you’re given or go and find something less onerous to do.

But what this really comes down to is time’s relationship with money. As we all know, one equals the other, so with the jackboot of capitalism crushing all before it, a few more hours/days/weeks are now more likely to be thought of as a whimsical indulgence that simply gives creatives more time down the pub. The idea that it might actually result in better work is not something enough people care about. In the vast majority of cases the 6/10 will become 5/10 and practically nobody will notice.

May I leave you with a poem I wrote twenty years ago on this very subject?

Time is friend to nobody,

It’s only there to blame.

It elongates to piss you off

And shrinks to do the same.

Jew Got Served:

Fascinating interview with Scott Rudin, producer of many great films, including The Social Network and True Grit.

The other 100 greatest movie insults of all time (thanks, DaD).

The greatest Premier League goals of all time.

If only someone would come up with a blog about lesbians who look like Justin Bieber… (Thanks, J.)

Anger is illogical (thanks, A).

Josh Groban sings the Tweets of Kanye West (thanks, S).

Photoshop Handsome video by Everything Everything (thanks, B).

Fascinating visualisation of last year’s US box office (thanks, K).

And joyously wonderful art made of Captcha words (thanks, A).

Can be found here (thanks, G).

A couple of points:

1. Check out what’s at number one. Could someone at Cadbury’s please take their balls out of their handbag and let it run?

2. The intro says ‘Has their* been a funnier, more inventive year for advertising?’. The answer is, of course, ‘Yes. Otherwise Tom Kuntz would have been able to find more than two actual commercials for his list (the rest are pop promos/credit sequences/an odd website), one of which didn’t really run and the other would never get within a million miles of a British TV set’.

It’s like a celebration and massive diss of advertising all in one article.

Ka-Pow!

*Dear Esquire writer: how did you get a job in journalism without knowing the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’? Does no one check your work? Someone should.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLgetLmlggA&feature=player_embedded

It’s got flair, joie de vivre and – as the rap kids say – swagger.

It’s obviously been directed by someone really rather good (Fredrik Bond. Interest declared: my wife works for Fredrik’s production company, Sonny, but she didn’t send me this ad; I had to find it myself. I know what you’re thinking: divorce her. Well, let me tell you, the thought frequently crosses my mind, especially when I need good shit for this creaky old blog and she doesn’t even offer me the scraps off her table. If it wasn’t for the absolutely brilliant every other aspect of our marriage I’d be out the door like a shot).

The not-very-ugly lady singing the song at the end is Mette Lindberg of The Asteroids, and the song is called The Golden Age.

UPDATE: sorry, it was by Wiedens Amsterdam.

Last year I was interviewed by Shots.

If you are asked to do this you are then presented with an interesting problem: all interviewees must provide their own photo of themselves. Of course, you could just go to one of those machines in the station and give them four little pictures in front of a blue curtain, but this is an interesting opportunity to be a bit more creative (see Dave Trott’s most recent post).

However, not only am I the world’s worst photographer, as a copywriter, I don’t really know many professional snappers. Fortunately, the one I do know is really fucking good, so thank god for Sean De Sparengo. I didn’t give him much notice (I think it could be measured in minutes), but he (with art directional assistance from Mark Denton) really came up trumps. But that’s because he’s so darn good:

And he doesn’t just take photos. He also co-directed this:

So if you like the above, find him here.

Thanks, Sean.

Here.

Happy New Year.

xxx