Thanks for reading.

Merry Christmas!

Lots of love,

Bx

NYT Year in Pictures.

60 years of logos:

Amusing ad memes.

Black Thought of The Roots on a mad freestyle session (thanks, A):

Supposedly the best movie posters of 2017.

A year of voice commands from a 5-year-old (thanks, D):

JCB hot dog:

Starlings taking off at 200 fps (thanks, D):

https://vimeo.com/110136128

Here’s a delightful guest post from Father Critmas:

People are always asking me, Father Critmas, how can I be more like you? How can I be the World’s Best Creative Director™. And I always tell them the same thing. “How dare you talk to me.”

The best films of the year?

How rubber bands are made (thanks, T):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TIXDbxtzMY

David Bowie’s top 10 tips:

And Prince’s:

And Tarantino’s:

And David Lynch’s:

And Maya Angelou’s”

Christmas reputation management (thanks, R).

Last night I went to a screening of this wonderful movie:

Due to an interesting quirk of people from the movie business generally going to one particular LA cinema (the Arclight in Hollywood. The sound and picture are always brilliant) they’ve started having Q&A screenings so that Academy voters and their friends can see the stars/directors and ask them about the movie (a couple of weeks ago we went to see Murder on the Orient Express, topped off by an interview with the very affable Kenneth Branagh; Al Gore showed up for the Inconvenient Truth sequel; Margot Robbie, Justin Timberlake and Kate Winslet have also popped by).

So this showing of The Shape of Water ended with an interview with the director, Guillermo Del Toro, and two of the stars: Octavia Spencer and Doug Jones.

(I love GDT. He makes horror films with heart and humour, as well as blockbusters that have more brains than most. And he’s had an interesting life – for example, his dad was kidnapped and James Cameron gave him the money to pay the ransom.)

Here are three things Señor Del Toro said that could be applied to stuff you’re working on:

1. The relationship with an audience is like a game of tennis: you express part of the story, but for that to work, you need the audience’s response, so they hit it back, you reach that expectation and hit it over the net again. But the real trick is not to hit the ball straight at them. You need to give it something interesting and unexpected so they have to stretch a little to make the return. If you see TSOW you’ll notice yourself constantly reappraising the situation and how you’re responding to it. That’s the fun.
2. Along similar lines, you have to give the audience what they’re expecting, but not in the way they’re expecting it. So this film has a beast that’s a hero, a damsel who’s in charge rather than in distress, a leading man who’s an arsehole and a villain who’s a good guy. That helps the ball spin over the net in very satisfying ways.
3. When he was six, GDT saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon but he was disappointed that the creature and the girl didn’t get together. So he spent ages drawing them as a couple, going on bike rides together etc. Cut to 52 years later and he finally made the version of the movie he really wanted to. So never, never give up on your dream, even if it takes 52 years.

Which tech era did you grow up in? (Great charts; thanks, D.)

Privacy or pizza? Pizza.

How matches are made:

How well do you know your Christmas ads? (Thanks, G.)

Pick a country and a decade, then enjoy (thanks, J).

Cray cray video (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=48&v=_jolA2GYwZg

Life on London’s first AIDS ward.

Kubrick’s cameras:

Timelapse construction of The Louvre Abu Dhabi (thanks, D):

Lots of screams replaced with Tom Cruise’s weird scream from The Mummy:

Every story is the same:

Beautiful art made from rubbish (thanks, D).

Great mashups of yesteryear (thanks, T).

Great Jay-Z interview.

The one time of year UK advertising gets a big shot in the arm is Christmas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1Y-zhQURU

Thanks to Adam and Eve DDB’s stewardship of John Lewis we now have this kind of 2-month British Superbowl, where each of the big retailers squeezes out a couple of minutes of heartwarming loveliness for our collective delectation. As it’s been going for quite a long time now, it’s easy to dismiss certain efforts as ‘not as good as last year’, or ‘not as good as that other client’s’, but I think it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate that the whole shebang actually has the entire country (and some parts of the world) talking about advertising, and that’s a rare thing these days (I even heard Russell Brand mention John Lewis’s Christmas ads on his existential-angst-themed podcast).

Hats off for that, but is there something we can learn from the phenomenon?

Well, here’s an obvious point: pretty much all the talked-about ads are long TV commercials. Sure, they sell the odd toy alongside, or make a concomitant (love that word) donation drive, but none of those extras would exist without the 500lb gorilla: a long, usually expensive, TV ad with a big media spend. That might just nudge us into thinking that TV advertising is both far from dead and still the best way to create famous work.

And you’d have to assume that these ads work, otherwise there wouldn’t be more and more of them, year after year. If John Lewis’s Christmas sales had tanked into the toilet these ads would have done the same.

Another point: good old traditional ad agencies have still got it, as long as they’re trusted to come up with the goods. A&E DDB produces great stuff every year, alongside AMV, Grey and the others. Has an agency with a strange single noun name (Mother aside) come up with the goods? Maybe, but have they matched the big boys in fame and craft? Nope.

And have these ads needed a huge amount of intrusive internet surveillance to be effective? Are they behind the indiscriminate harvesting of our personal details? Is each one laser-targeted at our eyeballs via an in-depth analysis of our every last fart and nose pick? I don’t think so.

So the upshot seems to be: good old fashioned TV ads from good old fashioned agencies still kick ass. Yes, they are the tip of the pyramid as far as ads go, but that’s looking at it backwards: clients could have more tips of more pyramids if they trusted great agencies and their creative departments to produce more great TV advertising during the rest of the year.

And yet all the natter is about programmatic, data and Googlebook.

Sheesh…