Hey Ben,

 One day we had an idea for a client and they didn’t really go for it. So we did it ourselves and made a business out of it. It just went live today – below is a nutshell.

 www.haircvt.com

 HAIRCVT is a new service to help you make inspired choices with your hair: and then find the perfect stylist to cut it for you.

 HAIRCVT salons and barbers are a handpicked selection of the best in London – spread across the city and across different budgets.

 Each of their stylists or barbers has a portfolio of real work, and each hairstyle is smartly categorised. So it’s super easy for you to explore and find what you want – and then book the stylist to make it happen.

 Adam and Tarik (we were planners, last seen at Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi)

Well, Adam and Tarik, I do indeed think it’s ‘cool’ (as the kids say).

I’ve kept a stash of the times my ads or I have merited some kind of mention in the press.

Now that I’m moving house/country/continent it’s time to take photos of those mentions then throw the mags away.

Here are a few, plus some explanatory info:

This was a thing Campaign did about Lunar’s early days. They used that picture for all Lunar articles because it was the only one they had of any of us on file (it was a shot they took for Faces To Watch the previous year).

This is the process of having your photo taken by Campaign (or it was for us): a guy turns up and says Campaign is now taking more ‘graphic’ pictures (as opposed to the ones they used to take on fire escapes etc.), so you look for a more ‘graphic’ background (we used our boss’s office) and set up the shot there. I don’t know what I was trying to do with the clothes – that might just be how I dressed nine years ago – but if I’d known it was going to be used several times I might have given more thought to wearing a T-shirt under a shirt etc. So then he suggests how you should stand and takes a bunch of pics. The annoying thing is that if someone takes fifty shots of you in various expressions/stances, then you have no idea which one they’ll choose and how you will then appear to all the readers of Campaign who may not know you that well. I think I look a bit condescending and serious, which, to be fair, I probably was in those days. So that was used in Campaign maybe five times for different reasons, and however unhappy I might have been about it (somewhat), at least it’s not as bad as this one:

I mean, bloody hell. I look like I’m saying, ‘Oooh, get you in your raspberry culottes on a Wednesday afternoon.’ I guess that was one of the other shots the guy took, which they then used a year later in a recap of the previous Faces To Watch. If I looked condescending and serious in the first one, this one makes me look so far up my own arse I can just about see my molars.

Moving swiftly on…

Look! Page 3 of the Daily Star! If you worked on Walkers then chances are you’d be working with at least one famous person (Gary Lineker), and possibly others. In this case it was just Gary, and clearly it was only a VO session.

He was delighted that we’d made him into a potato head. Or was it his fee he was delighted with? No idea. Anyway, I can’t remember if we invented the whole Potato Head thing (Daz, if you’re reading this, do chip in) or just did the ad, but it was kind of nice being in the paper next to some soft-core pornography. And is the positioning of the upper Gary Potato Head photo deliberately intended to make him look as if he’s ogling the boobies?

And on the subject of Walkers and low-fat crisps, there was also this little effort:

That one appeared as an article in everything from the Sunday Times to the Daily Mirror. This time I only did the press ad (I say ‘I’, but much of the credit has to go to Cam for art directing it and Erwin Olaf for taking a great shot), but it was fun hanging around with Victoria at the height of her fame. She sat in that bath with a sort of flesh-coloured bra thing on, munching M&S low-fat crisps (Potato Heads had yet to be invented) and chatting away with the four or five of us allowed in the room. Then I got in massive trouble for blabbing about it on Popbitch. Oops.

Finally, the old days of the blog:

I’d forgotten, but when the blog started it caused a bit of a stir, mainly because I swore a lot, the opinions were quite forthright and it was technically under the umbrella of BBDO, which made the whole thing seem 8x as naughty. And in the absence of many others doing the same, Campaign would often reprint favourite posts in their ‘Best Of The Blogs’ column. It was all jolly fun at the time, although also quite weird and a bit scary, as comments sometimes led to emails being written to the then Chairman of AMV, suggesting we remove some of the fruitier or more personal opinions (to be fair to Cilla, she never really asked us to do that and was very good about the whole thing).

But as the blog plodded on and I saw nothing from Campaign that seriously took up the issues I wrote about (women/racial minorities/gays in advertising, corruption in awards, shit ads actually being shit etc.), I started being somewhat negative about the magazine. I felt it was another issue in the industry that our biggest trade publication essentially just reprinted press releases and was a pretty poor excuse for ‘journalism’. After a few of these posts Campaign stopped mentioning my blog, which was fine by me – I’d had all the publicity I wanted, and now resented them for using my hard work to fill their own pages for free, so, y’know, fuck ’em. The mag has been a bit better recently, but it was pretty dreadful for a good decade.

At one point I announced I was stopping the blog, a gesture which merited a mention in their diary:

Nice to be appreciated, but I dunno about the blog not being a clever idea. Maybe ‘clever’ is the wrong word, but it’s certainly been good to me.

So there are a few pics and a little stumble down memory lane.

Ahhh, 2007… Scamp getting hundreds of comments… me posting disgusting flights of fancy in the guise of Kate Moss… the blog occasionally getting sued… Happy days…

Hi Simon.

Thanks for your email. I accidentally deleted it, so if you want to send me another I’ll reply more substantially.

Arnold Fartzenegger:

How to dance in a fabulous manner (thanks, B):

Donny and Marie do Steely Dan (thanks, B):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDeVAF58jPg&feature=youtu.be

David Lynch on where ideas come from (thanks, T):

Taking crazy photos of waves (thanks, B):

Send ANYONE a giant cardboard dick (thanks, V).

Men saying dumb things to Playboy (thanks, J).

Mmmmm… watching calligraphy is niiiiiice (thanks, B):

What if England had won the War of (non-) Independence? (thanks, D):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1YvJBwC4xQ&feature=youtu.be

Awkwardly sitting cats (thanks, T).

US comedy screenwriting masterclass (thanks, R).

So the big winner at Cannes was this campaign:

It won Grands Prix for Film, Press, Promo and Integrated. So that’s four separate juries who loved it enough to give it their last Rolo.

Funny thing is, at D&AD it scored a nomination in TV, an entry for Integrated and didn’t even get in for Press (I assume it was entered). It did get a Pencil for branding, but I don’t think that category crosses over.

So one Film jury of top-level international creatives loved it, while another liked it a fair bit; one Integrated jury of top-level international creatives loved it, while another quite liked it; and one Press jury of top-level international creatives loved it, while another didn’t.

And it’s not the only example (oddly enough from the same agency). This ad won TV ad of the year at the BTAAs, Gold at Cannes and nothing at Creative Circle:

The point I’m taking ages to make is that awards are, of course, matters of opinion. If your ad meets the right people at the right time it will do well, but another, somewhat arbitrarily selected group might ignore it.

So go and worry about something else.

Thanks, Vik.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRKyQ11494

Next month I’m leaving London to go and live in Los Angeles.

There are lots of reasons for my move, but I’m afraid I can’t go into any that are particular to the job I do. I am staying with the same company, but beyond that, the many NDAs I’ve signed prevent me from revealing more.

So what about the other reasons?

I’m a big fan of LA as a city. My parents took me there in the early 80s and there was something about the heat and sunshine, in such stark contrast to London’s fifty shades of grey, that I missed when I returned home.

When we took further holidays there in 1986 and 1987 I caught the movie bug pretty hard and spent many hours watching films like Robocop, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Untouchables in their natural habitat (for some reason I’ve always found watching movies in America to be more exciting than in London. This might be a throwback to the days when they were often released six months earlier in the US, and thus remained in my mind as unattainably exotic, pregnant with possibility. In subsequent holidays my brother and I would hoover up all the movies we could find for fear that we might not get the chance to do so for half a year, and then in rainy Golders Green or grim Hendon).

So my love of LA was intertwined with my love of movies, but then in the early nineties we entered a great period for hip-hop and, considering myself pretty fly for an extraordinarily white guy, I popped over again. Although I didn’t venture into Compton, I did meet some interesting junkies in the Greyhound depot Downtown. Anyway, it was all jolly good fun and I didn’t get killed at all.

In 2000 my wife and I holidayed to LA, got married in Vegas and took our honeymoon around California. Fortunately Gabi took to LA to the same extent I did and we always felt we’d end up returning. In 2005 we both came over for something I had spent my career dreaming of: an LA shoot (ie: going to LA on business class and staying in the Sunset Marquis). When I was at Y&R my friend Lee Goulding had gone over to shoot the Steve McQueen Ford Puma ad and returned with tales of convertible Mustangs and some other stuff I probably shouldn’t mention on a family blog, so the idea of going over there without worrying about the expense was ridiculously alluring, and the experience did not disappoint. Waiting outside the hotel one afternoon, John Voight walked past, still looking as cool as a Midnight Cowboy. In London John Voight has never walked past me, but I once had a nice chat with Jarvis Cocker after sneaking into the Groucho Club.

In 2006 my dad moved to LA (Pasadena, actually; no self-respecting Angeleno would tell you they lived in the indistinct sprawl of ‘LA’; they all belong to one of the towns that bleed into each other to make up the wider city) and took to it like a Brit to LA, which might have given me a subconscious impression that making that move would definitely work out for the best. In addition to his job with the Sunday Times he took up stand-up comedy and screenwriting at the age of 59. This is what California does to some people: from the movie business to Silicon Valley there’s a clear home for the creativity that you just won’t find a reception for elsewhere. I think it’s because California must have been populated by the people who wanted to go further west than anyone else. That kind of attitude, of seeing how far you can go, feels present in the optimism and positivity of many people who live there. Then again, that might be bullshit.

In recent years I’ve had to visit many times for work, and my love of the place has only increased. From the beaches to the canyons, from Ralph’s to Sugarfish, from the feeling I get when I’m driving down the PCH and Zeppelin comes on the radio to the massive sunsets that turn the Pacific Ocean pink, there’s always something else to make me think this is the place for me and my family.

Of course, LA isn’t perfect, but its property prices are less than half of London’s, you can plan ahead for a barbecue and it has several branches of Mendocino farms.

So here we are in 2014, and the move is on. I love my job, and am very much looking forward to taking it on in an office 5500 miles away from where I currently work, but fortunately I also love LA. If any of you live over there or are popping over temporarily and would like to go for a kale smoothie, don’t hesitate to get in touch: the email address is the same, but the real address will be in Laurel Canyon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ty_WlmIKvY&feature=kp

GoT theme as it oughtta be (thanks, N):

100 ways to attack the groin (thanks, J):

Cost/speed of collecting the entire Panini album.

Fuckloads of ducks.

Grindr Lolz (thanks, J).

Another top-class OK Go video (thanks, J):

World Cup sex faces (thanks, N).

The hilarious no-music music video:

Mexican fighting cars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZ-x2HWLx0#t=204

Japanese urinal game:

It’s this year’s Dollar Shave Club.

Kinda.

(Thanks, D.)