Things worn down over the years in a fascinating way.
Jim Carrey gone cray-cray:
New mean tweets:
The Scared is scared:
This week’s guest is the lovely and excellent Mr. Dan Germain, whose name almost looks like ‘Dangerman’.
His involvement in advertising, writing, branding and design has almost entirely been in the service of Innocent, which is now a big, global company with plenty of funny writing on the sides of the bottles.
So he’s basically created all the stuff that you love about Innocent beyond the mixture of some bits of fruit.
To find all about that and the following, click on one of the links below…
Starting as an English teacher.
A friends ethos.
Quite tiring/difficult at the beginning.
The words on the labels.
Social before there was social.
What does a Head of Brand do?
Working with external agencies.
Help from Richard Flintham and Andy Macleod.
And Ed Morris, George Prest, Johnny Leathers and Steve Paskin.
Doing exchanges at Wolff Olins and Method.
Ethics and sustainability. And health.
Getting together with Coke.
Designer of the Year 2014.
The future…
Here’s the chat, the iTunes link and the Soundcloud link, along with some of Innocent’s labels:
I once wrote a post about how advertising is essentially lying.
On the minuscule off-chance that you haven’t read it, the upshot was something like this: advertising is inherently mendacious. We use euphemisms like ‘dramatise the proposition’ to justify the creation of exaggerated representations of what products and services are capable of. Is waiting for a pint of Guinness anything like waiting for that wave? Does wearing Levi’s jeans make you feel like you can run through walls or twist your body around? Does the slightly better colour on a Sony TV seem anything like millions of balls bouncing around San Francisco? Of course not. Dramatised propositions can be entertaining and memorable, but they’re miles away from the product experience.
And when we’re not exaggerating we’re presenting things in their ‘best light’, which usually bears little resemblance to their ‘usual light’.
Don’t think I’m writing this after a moment of sledgehammer epiphany (that happened to me in 2002 and it didn’t stop me cracking out another fifteen years and counting). I understand what we do and why we do it, and I don’t have a day-to-day problem with that because it’s not good or bad.
(That’s a bigish ‘but’.)
We have to accept that there are consequences to that inbuilt degree of bulshittery. The first is that advertising is not generally regarded as the most trustworthy of practices. I know trust in advertising has increased recently, but I think that’s down to a kind of reconditioning: we’ve all watched so much untruthful advertising over the years that we no longer expect any real truth, so our standards have shifted. For years people have added a pinch of salt to every corporate communication they’ve been exposed to and ignored most of what they’ve been told. Perhaps an apposite metaphor is that of the current British public who are fed so many Brexit-shaped bulshitifications they can no longer be bothered to call each one out. Or anyone who reads a British tabloid: there’s some sort of distant nod towards the truth somewhere but not in any way that makes you trust what you read.
But that’s not actually the point of this post.
In recent months I’ve been noticing more and more articles about shady practices in the online side of things. Of course, I’d been aware of this shadiness for years because I’d been paying attention to the excellent work of Bob Hoffman, AKA The Ad Contrarian. His regular clarifications of online advertising bollocks have provided a front row seat to a number of problems that affect all our daily lives, yet few people discuss.
If you want the gory details please buy his excellent book. Here are some of the bullet points:
Ad tech means that you are followed wherever you go online. Every breath you take, every move you make, every visit to Pornhub that makes your genitals shake, they’ll be watching you. Instead of selling advertising to people, they’re selling people to advertising.
Google and Facebook know how much you earn, where you spend it, how much is in your bank account, your sexual preferences, your medical history, whether you’ve committed a crime, all your phone numbers and email addresses – and those of your friends, your political opinions and every other thing you think should come under the umbrella of privacy.
In many cases, less than 5% of online media ad budget goes towards ads people actually look at for more than a second.
Agencies have paid millions in compensation to some of the largest clients who have been defrauded by the online ad process. Unfortunately for the smaller clients, confidentiality was a condition of the deal, so nobody knows who was diddled out of how much money, so they can’t use that information to pursue other claims, or check that it isn’t continuing.
600 million ad blockers have been installed, and, much to the annoyance of online ad firms, Apple is automatically adding them to its new operating system.
So how do you think that affects the level of trust between clients and agencies, consumers and advertising, and you and the internet?
I’m going to guess it hasn’t improved matters.
So we now have an industry that, through its own actions, has spent decades eroding trust in what it does, only to take the little that was left and flush it down the toilet. And it’s been one of those incremental processes that has been both too gradual to notice and big enough to allow people to abrogate any responsibility they had in the matter: ‘My tiny contribution can’t possibly have made much of a difference, so I might as well keep doing it.’
But look at where this has left us. Are we in a golden age of advertising, where our work is welcomed with open arms by a grateful public? Are graduates forming a long and hopeful queue to join our industry? Do clients respect what we do so much that they’re willing to pay top dollar for it?
No, no and no.
Is the trust issue the reason for all those problems? No.
But does it help? No.
The funny thing is we’re all consumers as well as advertising people, so we all go through the above experience. We all hate being followed around the internet. We all feel a shiver of revulsion at the way our deepest secrets are bought and sold without our explicit permission. We all despair at the lack of imagination and wit displayed by 99.999% of the work we see. We all stab the ‘skip ad’ button like a demented woodpecker. We all use ad blockers. And yet there’s a weird disconnection which makes us think it’s all someone else’s fault.
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and that’s the essential process we’re currently missing.
Have a chat with your clients about whether they want to be treated like idiots. Whether they want to be part of the process that buys private, ill-gotten information from all over the net. Whether they want to be bored, irritated and annoyed by what they pay for. Whether they want to finance terrorism, drugs and human trafficking through their ad budgets. Whether they want their companies to produce something that subtracts from the sum total of human happiness.
They’re difficult questions, but until someone starts to to ask them the descent will continue apace.
Spike Jonze creates live dance thing on Tonight Show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=47&v=45iF4hnVZHI
Deep oral history of The Wire.
Slightly less deep oral history of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Unendurable line:
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/231498722
The game that time forgot:
The most recent explosion of sweary common sense is now available from the peerless Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman:
It’s so full of fascinating, terrifying, essential information that you really need to read it yesterday.
It explains the reasons and the finances behind so much of the advertising you loathe.
Unfortunately, it’s probably going to make you much more annoyed and angry, but at least you’ll be aware.
And it’s reasonably short and formatted in bite-sized chunks, making it a bog-read* perfect enough to rival anything Dave Trott has written.
I don’t use Amazon because I don’t agree with how they go about their business, but it’s the only place you can get a copy of Bad Men, so follow this link and get ‘woke’, as the kids probably don’t say anymore.
*’Bog read’ is the highest compliment I can bestow upon a work of literature.
Libby Brockhoff is the current CEO/Founder of the agency Odysseus Arms. You can read all about them here.
We discuss how that agency came about, but we also discuss how Libby became one of the founders of Mother.
It was a somewhat circuitous route, but when it finally happened she was just 27 years old.
I think that’s pretty amazing: to have started the most revolutionary ad agency in living memory (and given it the name which then spawned a million other agency names that weren’t actual names), come up with it its internal structure and creative blueprint, and turned the London advertising scene upside-down at the age of 27? Hats off.
And, let’s not forget – very, very few women had ever been creative leaders of ad agencies at that point. So Libby broke through the conventional age and gender conventions to change the ad scene forever.
Colour me impressed.
Here’s a brief rundown of what we discussed:
Hooked by exposure.
A crazy Cajun at the University of Delaware.
5000 started. 5 finished (including Libby).
D&AD education.
Lots of great US agencies then GGT.
And Tom, Dick and Harry. I mean Mother.
You have to keep moving.
The creative core of an agency is what’s most important.
Launching Channel 5.
The genius of Robert Saville.
Everyone does everything.
Leaving Mother to become a mother.
Then back in.
Starting up again.
Why ‘Odysseus Arms’?
Why Odysseus Arms?
Caitlyn Jenner.
SF.
A creative and female agency CEO.
Here’s our chat, the iTunes link and the Soundcloud link:
14 things you didn’t know about The Game.
Passive aggressive work email lines.
A cobbled together Paul McCartney song:
Typeface made of piss (thanks, J):
Mid-movie twists (thanks, J2).
The other day this ad campaign popped into my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbtlv2cImxM
Man, those ads were good. Until they got a bit less good. But even then they were better than 99% of ads out there.
But they literally had not crossed my mind for over a decade.
Great campaign, big brand, many awards, as an avid cinema goer I watched them countless times… but utterly forgotten (by me, at least).
Which got me thinking: what are the ads that spontaneously pop into my head when I try to think of the best work of the century so far?
So let’s give this little test a go (try to do it before reading my answer; it’ll give you a clean list): spend one minute thinking about the best ads of the 21st Century. Any country, any medium. Then lost what comes up…
Go….
Keep going…
I’m not going to nudge you in any direction (although you might now be thinking of more Orange ads…)
Are you finished?
Nearly?
OK.
Here’s my list:
Honda Grrr
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Nike Write the Future
Dumb Ways To Die
Chipotle Back To The Start
Honda Cog
Honda Choir
Guinness Noitulove
Guinness Dreamers
Channel 4 Meet The Superhumans
Cadbury Gorilla
Skoda Cake
Playstation Mountain
Levi’s Running Through Walls
Reebok Sofa
Playstation Life on the Playstation
John West Bear
Levi’s Twisted
Met Police Knife Crime
And… I’m done.
So… Almost entirely TV. Most over a decade old. Almost entirely English.
I think it’s because that’s when and where advertising was most important to me.
Anyway, that’s my list, and it cannot be denied.
What’s yours?
Brilliant low-cost cosplay (thanks, T).
Fun/cool editing/lighting:
Postcards of locations that used to be lovely but are not any longer.
Lots of construction workers die of skin cancer. Here’s an excellent solution (thanks, S, D, M).
How to put shit-hot dominoes together:
Cool animation (warning: mature!):
Just click on this clickbaity link!
