For fans of The Deuce: when Times Square was gritty.
The utterly fascinating Race of Life (thanks, J):
The bird:
Sleeping people embroidered onto handmade pillows (thanks, N).
Like most episodes of ITIAPTWC, my chat with Hugh offers many thought-provoking lessons on creating work, doing your best for different bosses and working out what to do next.
In addition, Hugh started around the same time I did, so I found the parallels and separations between his career and mine an interesting lesson in how you can choose many different paths in this business.
So we discuss that, and…
Watford.
Journalism.
Teaming up with Adam.
Trudging round Soho.
Making Harley Davidson.
BBH.
Euro 96.
Good brief/tough brief.
Gail Porter.
Hegarty.
Saatchis/Droga (he made shit happen).
Coco De Mer.
Toyota radio ad from real life.
Tony Granger to Nick Bell.
JWT.
Golden Skins. 30 albinos.
Post-Nick (Russell).
Post-Adam.
Lonely-o Burnetts, then a new team.
Co-op.
Back to Saatchis (and HSBC).
Then VCCP.
Man Shitty.
(Slight) return to journalism.
This is Hugh’s site, which contains all the work we discuss, along with his writing. And this is his blog.
Here’s our chat, the iTunes link and the Soundcloud link, along with a special topical link I think Hugh will enjoy:
The gay architects of classic rock.
Great article about Tom McElligot.
The greatest Instagram site on the planet.
Colour palettes of famous movies (thanks, C).
New excellent squatty potty ad (better written than any ad I’ve seen for years):
Ahhhhhh… I’d forgotten how great The Sopranos was:
Christoph Nieman’s excellent illustrations.
Best cinematography of the 21st Century.
Different dinnertimes across the USA.
Unintentionally bad movie posters.
Interesting historical photos.
Use stock footage to make a cool movie:
Fluid sculpture:
This ad’s been doing the rounds a bit lately:
Good for Jigsaw.
I can’t argue with anything written there.
But I can’t help wondering, after that thing I wrote about Femvertising, if Jigsaw is projecting at all.
I mean, after all they wrote, they couldn’t possibly have an entirely caucasian management team, could they?
To be entirely fair, I have no idea which of these people (if any) is an immigrant, and maybe the fifteen black, Asian and Inuit people on the management team were unavailable that day, but there does seem to be a lack of racial diversity in that picture.
The tricky thing is there’s very little transparency regarding the racial makeup of Jigsaw’s management. I had a good long trawl through their staff pictures on LinkedIn and they certainly seemed to be predominately white, but there’s no official shots of the people in charge as a group.
So it’s all well and good telling us you stand for immigration and, by extension, racial diversity, but in this day and age we need you to show us the extent to which that is your stance. A racially diverse management team would demonstrate that Jigsaw really means what they say, and it might inspire others to emulate its progressive attitude (if such a thing exists).
It’s one thing to explain how wonderfully committed you are. It’s entirely another to put your hiring policy where your mouth is.
Here’s my 6th, and hopefully not final, chat with Dave Dye. It’s the story of DHM and the various occurrences that created the excellent work at the bottom of this post.
As always with Dave, there are many excellent lessons for anyone who is either running or starting an agency, including…
Temporary time with Paul Silburn.
Looking for new partners (trust).
The name: Thingy? Not Thingy. Alphabetical order.
The Publicis breakaway that wasn’t.
‘Commissioning editor’.
New business/’interesting’ first pitch.
Fiddly and not lucrative but fun and good quality bits of business.
Creative Circle/David Abbott/awkward.
‘David Abbott in parts?’
Vertu: the unblingy-blingy phone.
Freelance: expensive quality over cheap quantity.
The Economist.
Jorian’s departure.
Hello Soho Square/Hello People/Goodbye Justin.
The hell of the name thing (‘Thingy’ rejected again).
‘My favourite thing I’ve done’.
A ‘disappointing’ new business ‘funnel’. ‘The very difficult thing is winning business’.
Further chats: digital; the rarity and difficulty of ideas that hold things together; the role of art directors way more important now; what you can say at different ages; has the job really changed?; the skill of distillation; more writing needed today.
It’s best to be cynical.
Here’s the chat, the iTunes link and the Soundcloud link:
And the aforementioned excellent work:
Two ads written by David Abbott:
And that ‘Beano’ Creative Circle Annual page:
46. ‘Mindmap’ The Economist, DHM 
50. Fallon Campaign dps 2 51. Wiedens Campaign dps2 52. Mother Campaign dps.2 
There’s a psychological phenomenon called projection. According to Wikipedia it’s a theory in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant.
And if you were, say, endemically sexist (and racist) and treated women much worse than the men in your organisation, you might build a statue to the empowerment of women. Unfortunately, the news might then come out that you were ironically sexist champions of feminism, making you look like right dodgy bastards, but by then you’ll have picked up a ton of positive publicity and awards, so no matter, eh?
I’m delighted about this revelation. Not because of schadenfreude or a hatred of advertising, but because I hope it slams a nice juicy nail into the coffin of these immensely tedious and misguided corporate social movements.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I don’t think a single one of them is primarily motivated by a real desire to right a societal wrong. Nope – they 1000% would not exist were it not for the fact that they help big companies seem much nicer than they really are, while simultaneously giving ad agencies a chance to look all virtuous, make some money and win lots of awards. I imagine that among most of the practitioners there’s also a large element of either guilt-alleviation or projection.
Allow me to make my case with the biggest femvertisers on the planet:
The underlying bollocks of Fearless Girl has been covered with chef-finger-kiss deliciousness in the above article, but what about Dove Beauty Sketches? We already have 100% projection from Unilever as they attempted to deflect years of Lynx sexism by pretending to give a toss about the problems of female body image that they helped to create. But what else? Well, what about the fact that they provide us with a ridiculously judgemental assessment of what female beauty is?
They say ‘The problem is, we’re so bombarded by unattainable standards of beauty – in magazines, TV, advertisements, on social media – that we undervalue the true beauty in ourselves’ (that massive bang you heard was another irony meter explosion). But also: ‘The (picture) based on the stranger’s portrayal was more beautiful.’ That means they showed millions of people these pictures and judged the ones on the left to be less ‘beautiful’ than those on the right:
And that’s from a company that says ‘Our body image takes such a battering that feeling beautiful can be hard’. Yeah, partly because you just showed millions of women that looking like the images on the left is somehow worse than looking like the ones on the right. But says who? If you were really trying to empower women to see the ‘real beauty’ in themselves would you present an image of one woman as less physically beautiful than another? Well, yes – if you had no real interest in such empowerment and instead were trying to sell a load of soap by looking nicer than you actually are.
And what about the third giant, Like a Girl?
Watch it again. Do you seriously think that this is a properly worked out scientific experiment? Does it have a control? Did we see any of the people who, when asked, didn’t throw/run/fight in that silly way that Always presented? How many were asked? Where did they get the participants from? How were the participants prompted in their answers? Did they give different answers before being nudged in this direction? Exactly how big a plate of bullshit are they serving us?
Always then makes the assertion that a girl’s confidence plummets during puberty, suggesting that this happens from 10-12 years old, as if there’s something magic that happens at that point where the rest of us terrible bastards start using the phrase ‘like a girl’ as a pejorative, as if that doesn’t happen to eight-year-olds. And that is based on what, exactly?
According to one interviewee, at that time girls are “already trying to figure themselves out. And when somebody says ‘you hit like a girl’ it’s like ‘Well, what does that mean?’. ‘Cause they think they’re a strong person, it’s like telling them they’re weak and they’re not as good as them.” What a delightfully inarticulate load of baseless conjecture presented as a cogent and substantiated statement that we’re supposed to take seriously (and, sadly, many millions seemed to). When you offer a straw man and knock it down with bullshit you’re not doing anyone any favours; you’re patronising the very people you’re pretending to be on the side of.
What about projection? Has Always ever made a commercial that suggested periods were something to be ashamed of? 10 seconds of searching on Youtube presents us with this poor girl who has to ‘tie a jacket around my waist’ when the wings of her pantyliner let her down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KSf3oBBX0o
Unlike Always, I won’t pretend my research is complete or scientific, but just calling these things ‘sanitary’ towels implies that they’re dealing with something unsanitary. Imagine that – you get to puberty, you get a period and you’re told that it’s an unclean thing that needs a ‘sanitary’ solution. Empowering? Doesn’t sound like it. Over the years Always has helped to perpetuate the perception of periods as negative occurrences (to which they can provide the solution), so now they feel bad about it (not really) and have created this ad to make everyone aware. I think we know the psychological term for that.
Perhaps someone can refute my assertion that these projects are nothing more than cynical marketing exercises dressed up as somewhat charitable endeavours, offsetting shitty behaviour and, for the agencies, making money and providing award-friendly Cannes entries. Whatever they are, they are certainly not rigorous scientific experiments whose results mean anything more than a bit of wank tossed off in the office of a pair of award-hungry creatives. But by masquerading as something more substantial they assist in the process of greenwashing the companies behind them, and that does real damage.
To be clear: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with experiments that attempt to redress the imbalance that years of sexism have created, but make them real, genuine and on behalf of organisations or companies that truly want to empower a downtrodden demographic. Silly bollocks designed to make very rich companies even richer will only get in the way of more credible efforts, and when we find out (as in the case of Fearless Girl) that we’ve all been taken for a ride, the likelihood of us paying attention to the company that does some actual good declines.
I’ll leave you with one of the daftest examples of femvertising I’ve ever seen (8.7m views), and the fervent hope that these school projects pretending to be Phd dissertations will either improve or die:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DdM-4siaQw
Update: Dove’s most recent clotheared attempt at empowering ‘real women’ appears to be a touch racist.
