Steve Harrison (see posts passim for mentions) said an interesting thing to me when he came to speak at my agency (he said more than one interesting thing but I’m only going to refer to one). He mentioned the phenomenon of weekday frequency of social media posts, i.e. many more posts occur during a working day than a weekend.

So why is that? Well, obviously we all have better things to do on the weekend than tell our friends what we’re eating or what we think of the new Muse album. But during the week it’s much harder to stop us finding even the most mundane thing so interesting that we decide to tell all our friends about it.

I’ve often thought of this blog of nothing more than a diverting manner in which to pass a few minutes, on a working day or otherwise, but I am fully aware of the way readership figures tend to slump on Friday afternoon, picking themselves up like a a coke-fuelled middle manager on Monday morning. So you’re all just killing time when you could be working, but you’re much less likely to sacrifice any of your precious leisure moments to do something so pointless.

(By the way, a few years ago I checked my analytics on Christmas Day (at that time it was an almost Pavlovian reaction to opening my laptop; now I have no idea how many people read my blog and haven’t checked my analytics for years) only to find that 100 individuals had come seeking a post or comment with which to pass the tedious hell of Yuletide.)

So what does all that tell us, other than the somewhat predictable fact you’re all bored at work but not so much on weekends? Well, I think it’s interesting that social media is just something that’s slightly more attractive than work, but much less so than the rest of your life. It’s a low-level pastime that barely competes with reading a copy of Heat in a doctor’s surgery. Its attraction is not immediate and necessary; it’s adequate and tangential, and I suspect that much of what gives it its appeal is its easy access and consumption – right there, a mere click away from that spreadsheet/catfood script/great American novel you’re ‘supposed’ to be getting on with. It’s the medium as much as the content, providing us with a simple way to dip in and out of fuck-all, every single minute of the day.

But have you ever wondered if that has anything to do with the creative dip advertising is currently still suffering? I do like those John Lewis ads, but there hasn’t been anything truly great since Gorilla, a dry patch that has coincided quite neatly with the rise of social media. In those heady Facebook-less days of the nineties and early noughties there were multiple great ads each year. Now many creatives are either surfing the net for vaguely second-hand inspiration or just killing time. Does that prevent the brain stretch that a long think about a problem in a vacuum brings on? Does it lead to earlier, less interesting answers to briefs? Or is it just one more of the many factors that have contributed to this status quo?

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I sincerely thank you for choosing to fuck up your career with a visit to at If This Is A Blog Then What’s Christmas.

The truth about honesty (thanks, P):

Billie Joe Armstrong is not happy at having one minute left (thanks, E):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJoKTf8ZoOE

isbarackobamathepresident? (Thanks, P.)

Breakbad Mountain (thanks, J):

Art lessons (thanks, P):

Hollywood’s waning creativity (thanks, G).

Two kinds of people (thanks, V):

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (thanks, Z).

The man with the biggest balls on earth (thanks, S).

Words of advice for young people from William S. Burroughs:

And TS Eliot on creativity (thanks, P).

Street ghosts (thanks, J).

Artist takes every drug known to man then draws a self portrait after each one (thanks, J).

Man has sex with couch abandoned in street.

LA album cover locations (thanks, A).

And what would your life be without Samurai Cop? (Thanks, W.):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v1J_QhxivY

Here’s the new Skittles ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j22SfSS9x7c

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why they’re not as good as ‘Touch’:

Or ‘Piñata:

or ‘Sour’:

It’s down to character. All three ads have the same weird situations, but there is a deeply tragic story in ‘Touch’ and ‘Piñata’ and a really dark dynamic to ‘Sour’. 30 seconds of proper story, rather than a vaguely amusing premise and nothing more.

‘Funny’ is one thing, but situations that you can relate to, that touch you more deeply, are something else.

Whatever else it does (not much), it makes you like the bus company and the people behind it. They look like they have a sense of humour, instead of the po-faced jobsworthness that many bus drivers have in the UK.

If I was in Denmark and I needed to get somewhere and there was no other form of transport available, I’d definitely take the bus.

On my way to the cinema the other day I considered the recent phenomenon of 3-D.

Current cinema prices are ridiculous, with tickets in central London costing up to £22.00, so the fact that they charge more for 3-D is a bit of a choker (especially when it’s a cartoon and the glasses slip off your kids’ tiny noses and they’d rather watch it in 2-D anyway but cinemas never seem to show the 2-D version anywhere, which is kind of forcing you to buy an expensive option you don’t want rather than giving you an even choice, and that is a kind of tacit admission that they have to force you into the more expensive option because otherwise no one would ever choose it because the 3-D is kind of shit and makes the whole thing much darker).

But it was only today that I thought how brilliantly the movie studios and cinemas have managed to carry off a pretty shameless scam: yes, it costs more to make a movie in 3-D, but it also costs more to shove a load of CG monsters into a movie, or pay Scarlett Johansson to be in it, or to film it in lots of sexy locations all over the world, yet they don’t charge more for any of those things.

So why, when they ‘enhance’ a movie in this particular fashion do you have to pay £2 (plus another bleeding pound for the bloody glasses that you always forget to bring with you even though you now have a 3-D glasses mountain at home)?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question, the answer to which is ‘money’. They’ve left us grumpily paying for something we don’t want because if we want to see the basic movie we don’t really have a choice. Clever.

And I have nothing against charging a bit more for an enhanced experience. All those fancy-schmancy cinemas which serve martinis and brownies and give you a massive leather armchair to sit in are fine by me; you pay your money and take your choice. But 3-D is an illusion in more ways than one, and the move bastards have really managed to pull a pretty impressive double-fast one.

And they wonder why people pirate their precious art…

My upstairs neighbour, Jordan Waid is a thoroughly good bloke, and happens also to be the recipient of a student Academy Award.

He won it for his short film, The Piece, which tells of an art thief who steals a tiny bit of a paint from some of the greatest artworks in the world to create his own collection. Meanwhile, a detective is tracking him down…

I was always intrigued by this plot, but never got around to asking him if I could see the finished article.

Fortunately I need wait no longer, because he’s putting the film online.

But more interestingly he’s going to be Tweeting the entire screenplay based on the short. He’ll then be doing the same to other screenplays he’s writing to receive feedback to influence the story.

Jordan says: ‘I am carefully formatting each Tweet so it has a good flow yet retains all the elements of the screenplay. With all the screenplays I release I’ll be watching to see which scenes gain the most comments or retweets and which characters drive traffic. It’s immediate and brutal but I’m excited about how this might influence future works.’

And here’s a blog about the whole thing.

As a writer of longer plots, I’d love to see how this works. Please follow him @Tweetfilmproj and see if your contributions make a difference to what happens next…

When I watched Arsenal in the mid-nineties my favourite player was Ian Wright.

He scored the kind of goals kids tried to replicate in the playground, he looked like he was loving every minute of his job and he had buckets of what I believe the kids now call swag:

And we had/have the same birthday.

In the years since then, through a series of fortunate coincidences, I’ve met him several times, been to his house and been to his wedding (best wedding ever, partly because of his fantastic speech). He’s a lovely guy: funny, welcoming and really good at laughing at my crap jokes as if they’re the most hilarious thing he’s ever heard.

So I was really interested to find this short documentary on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_MaGEFH8g

You might not have a spare 27 minutes right now, but I really suggest that you make a bit of time to see it.

It’s just Ian talking to camera with a couple of clips to illustrate what he’s saying, but the story of how he grew up with an alcoholic mother, an absent father and a stepfather who hated him is incredibly moving (try not to cry at 9:30). Then you find out how he came into football really late in life and worked his absolute arse off because he loved the game, eventually playing for Arsenal and England.

I was fascinated by what made him maintain his effervescence in the face of all that abuse, but the overwhelming inspiration you take from what happened to him is that it’s never over. No matter what’s happened before, you can decide at any moment to become the person you want to be, to do whatever you want to do.

Starting now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC7zfgCXQFs

It’s very well shot, very well cast and very well observed.

And the stat at the end is a killer (pardon the pun).

Excellent work.

By the way, if you’re as much of an ad geek as I am, you’ll have noticed an interesting similarity between this ad and the one with which John Hegarty (whose agency produced this ad) won his first D&AD Gold Pencil. I could call it a lazy rip-off, but I have a funny feeling there was no deliberate connection between the two (smiley face made out of punctuation).

Audio recording of 1966 Kubrick New Yorker interview (thanks, P).

Some American soldiers are not very nice (thanks, J):

Very funny bad children’s books (thanks, P).

New York drawn very quickly:

Film nutrition facts (thanks, J).

Man Tweets acid trip (thanks, P).

Pole dancing classes for kids (thanks, T).

The Wire as a classic video game (thanks, O).

Karate Kid first auditions (thanks, A):

8-bit OK Computer (thanks, T):

The truth about Nestle’s bottled water business (thanks, P).

I’ve noticed a few changes in my use of social media/email over the last few years.

1. As my use of Twitter has increased to become my default choice of social media my use of Facebook has receded: it used to be the place where I really would communicate with my friends, quickly forgetting about the 100 or so random acquaintances I’d collected over the years who either no longer used the site or didn’t update their statuses enough for me to remember they were there. Then, as the number of ‘friends’ grew, I became more reticent about what I chose to put out there on my status/comments. This soon became a snowball that strangely rolled up and down a hill simultaneously: on the one hand I began to collect more ‘friends’ because I had depersonalised it to the point where I felt I could include more people in the smaller version of me, while on the other, I updated even less because I felt there was less I could share that would be appropriate for all my new ‘friends’. I still check Facebook regularly, but I’m much less keen to post anything more than skin deep. (By the way, I do realise that this is why the circles on Google Plus are such a good idea, however, there aren’t enough people on there, so it’s a great concept that’s going to waste. Let’s all kill Facebook and use Google Plus instead. Ready? Go!)

2. I don’t feel the same inhibition about Twitter. Ironically, there are so many more people who follow me on Twitter than Facebook that I have no real concept of them all and consequently I’m not so careful about what I Tweet. I suppose it’s a far higher proportion of strangers, so it doesn’t feel like it’s hitting anyone with significance. My mum and brother and wife are on FB but not Twitter. My dad uses both enough that I know he’ll read everything I write on each site, although that doesn’t stop me using the word ‘cunt’ on a regular basis. So Twitter feels like a big anonymous cloud while Facebook is lots of people that I actually know, including my boss, work colleagues, aunty from Scotland and many random people I’ve picked up along the way but would never be rude enough to de-friend. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve de-friended anyone. Have you?

3. My writing changes depending on which medium I use. That probably goes without saying, but the big thing I’ve noticed is my great and unexpected kindness towards exclamation marks. I used to loathe them, using them only ironically, and even then reluctantly. But now, as I notice the limitations of the typewritten word in the personal message, I find myself using them more and more to give an idea of my tone of voice. That should be clear from what I’ve written, but in an age of all-pervasive irony it isn’t as unequivocal as I’d like, and I can’t quite bring myself to use the emoticon as much as others do (which is why I write ‘smiley face made of punctuation’ despite the strain it puts on the Twitter character count). But as computer-written messages proliferate, I do recognise the need for nuance in my communications, and one of the ways to achieve it is through grammar. Yes, the exclamation mark looks like a sledgehammer, but used in the right way it can become less offensive.

4. My blogging has calmed a little in both style and content. Despite yesterday’s post I find myself ranting much less than when I started. This may be for several reasons: I have covered most of the topics of advertising at least once, which means I now find myself writing about other stuff that I’m interested in so that I can get a bit of feedback that opens the subject up for me. That means less ranting because I’m coming from a more inquisitive standpoint; I’m also getting older, and I have kids, which means that I’m a bit more mellow than I used to be; and the advertising scene has changed. It feels that to some extent it has regressed and become less intense, so it’s harder to give a shit when no one else does.

I’ve tried Google Plus/Instagram/Pinterest, but haven’t found that I’ve really taken to them. Maybe the first one is too unpopular and the other two are too picture-based. I love looking at other people’s but don’t feel inclined to contribute myself.

Has your use of Social Media changed? Where does it feel like it’s heading? And do you give a toss?