(thank, J.)

For those of you who need a primer in the basics of advertising, Dave Trott has kindly offered everything you need to know in one simple TED talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0gZfhkoi1E

And when you’ve finished that you can read his new book, 1+1=3:

It’s entertaining, thought-provoking and comes in lovely little bite-sized chunks (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but those chunks seem to last about as long as a poo).

Buy it here and have a slightly better life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_hWeN249fs

What if ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League was just the line about working as a waitress in a cocktail bar? Well, you’d end up with something surprisingly wonderful (thanks, T):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=120&v=X58g1HKxXPo

Mark Hamill: best autograph signer of all time (thanks, T).

Houses that look like Game Of Thrones characters (thanks, A).

National Geographic photos of the Year (thanks, L).

Let’s mash up the XX and Biggie Smalls (more here; thanks, G):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=zuIYBvsYVGI

Kim Kardashian’s face as a roamable mountain range (thanks, J).

Another great musicless music video:

John Malkovich recreates famous portraits (thanks, A).

And then a lady recreates model shots with herself (thanks, G).

Football’s bad boys recreated with kids (thanks, T).

I was just listening to Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast interview with Judd Apatow.

About halfway through they started to discuss Stephen Colbert, who lost two brothers and his father in a plane crash when he was ten.

He said that as he’d already been through the worst thing you could possibly imagine there was nothing to worry about. Apparently his mum said to him, ‘You need to look at this through the light of eternity’.

When Stephen explained this to Judd, his reply was, ‘Yes, but why did you listen to her? Why didn’t you just do drugs?’

‘Oh, I did do drugs!’ Stephen replied.

At the time of the crash Stephen simply stopped doing any work at school and barely graduated. He felt that there was no threat anyone could have over him.

‘I was a broken kid,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. But I did not compound that by feeling guilty about not doing work. But the real point is that it forced me to look at the world differently.’

Then Judd says in the podcast interview, ‘What I don’t understand is why that works’.

Indeed… Why does that work? How do some people use that incident as rocket fuel when others use it as poison?

I then listened to Howard Stern interviewing Louis CK in 2006:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VK8IrVTpo

Louis had some pretty odd things happen to him as a kid, such as being sent to a summer camp for the mentally handicapped for three straight years at around eight years old.

And, after many visits to prostitutes,  he turned the lemons into lemonade, too.

It seems that whatever happens in our formative years, we make decisions about it that create what we are today. We have no choice over those decisions because we don’t know we’re making them, and the vast majority of us have no idea they’re still controlling everything we do.

If we’re lucky, things work out, even with a few bumps along the way. If not, they don’t. But whatever the decisions, they become the life we live into.

What I find odd is how the same incident can send one person to Skid Row and another to Madison Square Garden. Or both.

I’ve recently been judging some of the portfolios that have been entered in the Cream portfolio contest run by The Talent Business.

So far the standard has been very high, but not just of the work – the websites (there are no actual books) are remarkably professional.

That made me wonder: what exactly does it take to get your first job in the creative dept of an advertising agency these days?

When I left Watford back in 1996 things were kind of different. No one expected you to have access to a computer, let alone a website, so portfolios were no more technical than they were in the 60s: paper, pens, maybe a bit of (colour) photocopying and photography if you were really making an effort. And of course the work was almost all press, poster, TV and possibly a tiny bit of radio. 8-10 campaigns and with no computer wizardry to bump it all up, the idea was naked, front and centre. A CD would flick through it, maybe flick back at the work he or she liked and that was that.

Now, as far I’m aware, there are no physical portfolios (I have no idea what they’re planning to put up at the Cream exhibition). I only have websites to look at, and not much of your bogstandard Cargo Collective drag-and-drop jobs, either; these have landing pages and navigation that function as well as many corporate sites I’ve visited, and many come complete with blogs and other extra-curricular activities to help the team nose ahead of their competition. And the work is a mix of really well shot case studies that explain multi-media and digital ideas in the best tradition of a Cannes entry film.

So, a few questions:

Where do they find the time and money?

How long does it take to go from an idea to a finished ‘case study’ film?

There’s very little print and poster these days. Does nobody ask for them even though they’re still a huge slice of what makes up advertising today? And they used to give a CD a clue to the art directional abilities of the AD (or ‘creative team’). Without them will anyone bother with that skill (let alone with its nerdier cousin copywriting)?

How are CDs expected to view them now? In the old days you’d have a pretty good idea of a book’s quality within a minute of flicking through (especially as the best idea usually goes first). Nowadays that’s just about long enough to get through half a case study. Three or four books used to take 15 minutes. Now it’s usually going to take an hour most of them surely can’t spare.

How did things end up like this?

It seems there are pros and cons to all of it, and if everyone’s doing the same thing then I suppose you have to join the party, but I miss some of the old simplicity.

Yours,

Not a Millennial.

xxx