I can’t seem to move for decks.

Every time there’s a new stage in the creative process, a new deck is started. Sometimes (shudder) it’s a Google Doc; if I’m really lucky it’ll be in Keynote. But sure enough, if ten minutes have passed, somebody, somewhere is starting a decky old deck for me to contribute to.

Like everything I complain about in this series, I’m going to point out the fact that at some point, way back in the mists of time (usually the 1990s, but in this case I feel like deck proliferation didn’t really start until five years ago) there were no decks, and yet really, really good ads still managed to happen. How? Like the action of Russia, it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

I finally hit peak deck when I was asked to prepare one for sending to a potential director. I didn’t understand the task, so I tried to elicit further explanation without looking like a thickie. Apparently it’s now usual to get decked up when asking a director if they’ll lend their talents to your ad. It’s like the exact reverse of a treatment, in that you start off by telling them how much you love their work before presenting your vision of the ad to see if it might pique their interest.

Now, I’ve made quite a lot of TV ads in my time, and never have I felt the need to persuade a director to get involved via the medium of a deck. Like the treatment, I would expect all that to be covered in an initial meeting, where some back-and-forth would take place over what’s often referred to as a conversation. You can explain that you want to reference Boudu Sauve Des Eaux, and they can tell you they were thinking more Bad Boys Two, and you can meet somewhere in the middle. If you do that by deck the whole thing is implied to be far more set in stone, and not to be messed with, limiting the parameters the director might feel able to worth within.

Also, the only time it ever seemed appropriate to add extra persuasive material to your script was when you wanted turn-of-the-century Glazer, Budgen or Kleinman. You might then add a kind of arse-licky note to see if it might get you a little closer to the front of a very long queue. Sending ‘pretty please with a cherry on top’ decks to no-marks? Odd…

But that’s just one of the modern decks. The main ones are internal, where a lower team night be putting together a presentation for someone further up the chain. This is where we experience the real horror of deckitude: collaboration.

Because a deck is open to many people (the strategy people might do slides 8-12; the account team the opening and closing etc.) it is subject to ‘contributions’ from those people. So you get delightful ‘comments’ from people you’ve barely met (the comment is made, then a notification is emailed to you, then you address the comment with a further question, or you resolve it and move on to the next one) and everything is a lovely, friendly democracy, where no one’s opinion is more or less significant than anyone else’s. Some cheeky fuckers from other departments might even change your work without asking you, FFS.

And you might finish a deck, or think it’s finished, but then the person who’s been away for a few days finally comes back, has a read, and changes things based on zero awareness of the previous 342 comments and resolutions. And you don’t really want to spend a morning explaining why you can’t make the suggested changes, because then you won’t really look like a team player (COLLABORATION ÜBER ALLES!!!!!!) and it’s what used to be referred to as a ‘massive fucking waste of time’, time that could be better spent on weird, extraneous tasks like, I dunno… making the work better.

But then you have a deck. And you pore over every detail of that deck. But then the person you’re presenting to had an earlier meeting that ran over, so they’re going to skim it on their phone in the car to the airport, and you might as well not have bothered.

Then there’s the length.

My God, is there ever the length…

A deck isn’t really a deck until it’s over 25 slides, but I’ve seen some (I kid you not), that clocked in at the several hundred slide mark. Even at 30 seconds a slide (not a chance in hell), you’re talking four hours. And if you’re talking four hours you’re also talking boredom and toilet breaks and suicidal tendencies. People will often justify those extra slides by saying ‘We’ll whiz through these’, only to find that the person you’re presenting to would actually prefer to ‘whiz through’ your favourites and dwell deeply on those fascinating graphs about projected reach in Q4 of year three.

We’re supposed to be all about economy of expression, masters of communicating important shit in as few words as possible, but when it comes to decks there’s no upper limit. You need the kitchen sink, the belt and braces, and woe betide you if you leave out uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

Does that make us look good at what we do? Don’t answer that. Instead I’d like you to respond via a Keynote deck for a half-hour meeting that will take a minimum of 45 minutes to go through.

So could we please declare a moratorium on decks? There’s already enough work to do without literally multiplying our output by three, and concentrating harder on aligning the images to the template borders in slides 10, 11 and 12 than working out what those images should be and how the hell they relate to the concept. If we all jump off the coming-up-with-ads process two hours earlier to kern the fuck out of the intro slides we’re not helping the client or ourselves. We’re just wasting precious time on the twin Gods of 2019 advertising: quantity and ‘collaboration’ (always in inverted commas for reasons that are grimly obvious to everyone reading this).

Any time we could return to quality and specialisation (and decks for pitches only) would be fine by me.

Does my list have eight ads, or nine? To tell you the truth, in all this confusion I’ve forgotten myself. But being this is a 44-advertising blog, and could blow your head clean off… Hang on… Clean? Is this a Tide ad?

Ever since Lee Clow, Steve Jobs and Apple invented the ‘Superbowl Ad’ in 1983, there’s been intense interest in the commercials that run during America’s biggest TV occasion. It’s where the big clients pay the big budgets to look big in front of the biggest audience.

But in recent years it’s been a bit desperate. Apparently there always has to be a ‘winner’, but it feels a little like the Superbowl advertisers have been going through the motions, with nothing really taking the occasion by the scruff of the neck.

Until 2018.

Yes, only a massive advertiser like P&G could have the resources to pull it off, but look at the crazy shit they bought: an ad that mercilessly skewers the clichés of advertising genres and tropes (many of them used by P&G); an ad that bleeds into ads for other brands; and an ad that pulls the rug out from under you again and again and again.

And the spots are funny. Properly, funniest-ad-of-the-year funny. The team, client and agency didn’t just rest on the cushion of a great, expensive idea; the rammed home excellence in execution, in one spot after another.

So, for dropping a grenade of pure, culture-shifting brilliance into the biggest advertising occasion of the year, it’s one of my favourite ads of the decade, and it’s a Tide ad

Way back in 2015 I was briefing a few teams on iPad. Some of the work was due to run on preroll, so I brought up the fact that we all hate that media space with a passion, smashing the ‘Skip Ad’ button like an epileptic woodpecker until the offending crap leaves our screens.

I had no idea what the solution might look like, but to me it seemed essential that the first few seconds should grab the viewer’s attention with enough power to divert them from the ‘Skip’ button.

During the development process the perfect answer arrived, but it wasn’t from one of my teams; it was from The Martin Agency on behalf of their insurance client, Geico. (To be honest, the whole Geico campaign is probably worth a ‘best of the decade’ mention. It’s consistently some of the best stuff that runs properly on TV over here.):

I concede that they didn’t manage to maintain the level of humour through all three executions (funny how hard it is to do that. From the outside it looks like it would be easy to come up with another 10/10 hilarious one of these, but like Economist lines, further classics are much harder to come by than it might appear. In fact, kudos to the team for coming up with a campaign idea that seems like it would be easy to continue) but the reason I love these so much is partly the ads themselves, but to a greater extent it’s the genius of turning something so hated into something so loved.

99.9999% of preroll is both dreadful and loathed. If I gave you the brief to make it so loved and memorable that you would look forward to it, laugh out loud at it and share it, I think you might consider that to be a tall order. But that’s what Team Unskippable did. And not only was it all those good things, the spots were fully branded and actually worked really well:

Geico Senior Marketing Director Amy Furman said the ads have clocked more than 14 million views, and clearly got people to check out Geico. “The campaign ran during some record-level mobile and online quote time frames, and I think that can be attributed back to the campaign,” she said. Moreover, “there was a huge amount of sharing, not the kind we always get when repurposing our TV ads.”

So that’s why they earn their spot on this list: they’re clever, funny, effective and original, but they were also able to turn a blast of diarrhea into vintage Krug, a feat I have yet to see emulated.

I know the chorus to the Dumb Ways To Die song.

So do my kids.

So do millions of people who are never going to be hit by a train in Melbourne.

How many ads have their own Wikipedia entry?

How many ads feature sick deaths, yet still appeal to kids?

How many ads feature a song written by the copywriter, that charted in three countries?

How many ads have won the most Lions at Cannes? One, obviously.

How many ads have been banned in Russia for inciting suicide AND spawned three video games?

How many ads have inspired 85 parodies?

How many ads have reduced ‘near-miss’ train accidents by 30%?

How many ads have given us a range of toys and pajamas?

How many ads gave us a song that was used in the 45th episode of the seventh season of the Chinese dating show ‘If You Are The One’ during a contestant’s introduction video?

How many ads have shaped culture like Dumb Ways To Die?

The best thing I can say about W&K’s relaunch of KFC is that I simply cannot believe any of it actually happened. And by ‘any of it’, I mean one insane new twist to the campaign after another.

It makes the ideas of ‘brand consistency’ and ‘matching luggage’ look utterly ridiculous. Of course, it has brand consistency in spades, but not the kind of execution-to-execution similarity most mealy-mouthed marketers mean. It doesn’t give a fuck about the typeface or whether there’s a piece of punctuation in the same place each time. Instead it insists that each execution brings the crazy, the cool, the likeable, the conversation-worthy, the original, the distinctive, the noticeable, the envy-inducing and the sheer fucking brilliant.

If you’re not jealous of this work, a) you don’t have a pulse, and b) you have no idea what makes advertising great and how hard it is to do. This is integrated work taken to another level, by an agency on top form. And it wasn’t just indulgent wankery: a decade of declining sales turned into four years of growth.

Congrats to all involved.

Some of the greatness can be viewed here, but these images should give you an idea of the breadth and depth of the work:

As we approach the 2020s it must surely be time to take an arbitrary look at my favourite ads of the last decade.

Just to clarify: these are not the ‘best’ ads, or the work that ‘moved the industry forward’. They are simply my faves: subjective, personal, based on nothing more than admiration and affection. Did they work? I think so, but I’m not digging around for the stats. Life’s just a touch too short.

I’ll be counting down from 8 to 1 because they are in order of ITIABTWC Merit. Number 8 is my 8th favourite; number 1 is my number 1. I could have said that they’re in no particular order, but fuck that noise. If I’m going to stick my neck out and say that these are the winners, then I’m going to jump right in and give the real countdown.

Why only eight? Well, I just went through the crackers of the decade and could only find eight that still leave me in awe. Of course, there were many other excellent ideas and some of them might have been worth some kind of inclusion, but here’s the problem: advertising awards have become so corrupted over the last couple of decades that I no longer trust case studies. A ‘50% increase in sales’ can mean going from 4 sales to 6. ’20 million media impressions’ is unverifiable and usually some wanked-off addition of the number of followers of the Tweeters and Instagrammers who said anything about the ad. But as we all know, a lot of followers are bots or bought, so I’m just not going to play that game. Was the campaign big simply because it showed up in lots of social media spaces? No idea. You can now buy that kind of exposure (in fact, you have to), so how do I know how many people actually cared about renaming hurricanes after climate change-denying senators? And beyond that, people might have talked about it an awful lot, but does that mean behaviour changed? Again, we can only take the words of the case study makers for that, and – psssst – they’re kind of biased.

So I went for the biggies. Sorry if you did a really good radio ad in New Zealand. I have no idea if your ‘thing’ was a thing, so I’m not going to include it on this list. My chosen ones are big work for big brands, and unless I’m very much mistaken, they all ran properly at large scale. None was the ‘award’ version (again, I’m open to corrections there).

I’ve also left out an entire genre that regular readers will know I hate: the ‘for good’ stunt. You won’t see any Fearless Girls or Like A Girls here. I’ve spent far too long writing about why I think they’re bad for the industry and bad for the public. Really, they can just fuck off. I plan to do a ‘Worst Ads of the Decade’ post at some point. It’ll be full of dreadful crap of that ilk.

Another category that won’t be appearing on this list is ‘work done for questionable companies’. Yes, I understand that the general definition of ‘questionable’ can be expanded to most corporations, so I’ll be using my own somewhat subjective thumbs up/down on that front. The most glaring absentee will be Nike. I appreciate Nothing Beats A Londoner, Write The Future and Colin Kaepernick, but I hate what Nike does, so I don’t want to champion anything that promotes it. Great ads for shitty things are not great ads.

So (contentious company alert!), let’s have a look at my eighth favourite:

These ran just before the 2016 US Presidential Election, positioning Twitter, quite rightly, as the place where the important issues were being discussed.

But look what the client bought: a simple hashtag, art directed skillfully into excellent images that captured in one powerful swoop the way in which Twitter and current affairs intersect. No line. Just a little logo to sign off the work

It has the kind of confidence that can only exist as a product of authenticity. This is no stretch: the brand and the platform always connect perfectly to push each other to greater heights of significance.

You might not agree with the way in which Twitter stokes division or bends its rules to allow certain people to incite hatred, and that’s OK. I find its thumb lies far more lightly on the scale than certain other media.

So here we have a campaign of strength, simplicity, originality, authenticity and thought-provoking depth.

A worthy number 8.

What could possibly have beaten it?

Has life improved since the arrival of the internet? Yes, no and maybe.

At first glance it appears that instantaneous access to most of the world’s information, art, music, film etc. has surely been a boon to our lives. As has the ability to instantly connect with anyone in the world at little or no financial cost. Then there’s the freedom we now have to set up businesses, and wider groups devoted to our hobbies and interests. We can crowdsource petitions, money and other kinds of support at a moment’s notice. And we can spread and update important news literally every second of every day.

And yet…

The above means people have their work stolen or used without permission all the time. It’s been well documented that the superficial connections of social media have actually driven many of us further away from each other, and entrenched us more firmly in the opinions we already hold. Businesses have been crushed by massive behemoths such as Amazon, and there are far fewer new companies and much less innovation than there used to be (name a world-changing invention from the last 5-10 years…). The news is clearly much easier to fake, and therefore harder to trust, leaving us unsure of what’s really happening and why.

Of course there’s far more to it than those two short films and paragraphs, but what about whether the internet has been good for advertising?

Let’s first consider the creative process and how it’s changed. (Pardon the generalisations I’m about to make; I’m going to take a broad midpoint for the purposes of illustration.)

In 1995 a creative team would work like this: a brief comes in and they chat about it, or chat about something else before getting back round to the job in hand. Or they go for a walk, or a drink, or a game of pool. Then they might flick through one of a few dozen books in their office, or see a film, or play a few directors’ reels. At some point during this process an idea would hopefully appear in one of their minds, and it would then be expressed to be assessed, rejected or improved by the other one. Then they would draw it up using pens and paper, or write a script, and present it to their boss, sometimes with reference material, but usually not. If successful, the sketches would then be presented to the account team so that they could get the gist of the concept and present it on to the client, who would then commission it to be made, or reject it for amendments/death. The team would then find a photographer/illustrator/director/typographer or other creative person to help them realise the idea, perhaps with a bit of reference, but not much. Then the ad would get made, usually without much scrutiny from the client, who would eventually see the final thing they paid for and, hopefully, like it enough to run it somewhere.

Now things are different: the brief arrives, and the team may well still do the ‘chat, drink, pool’ thing, but there’s a good chance that they’ll soon turn to the internet and its endless resource of ‘inspiration’. Everyone has their favourites, from the infinite rabbit holes of YouTube to the design-leaning sites such as It’s Nice That, or Creative Review, so the headphones go on, the fingers slide across the trackpad, and the silence and personal disconnection begins.

Eventually one of the team will tap the other on the shoulder. After the startled reaction, off come the headphones and the discussion of ideas begins. This culminates in one member of the team (the 2019 version of ‘art director’) putting together a layout that looks almost finished, using images from some favourite photo sites and a quick bit of typography, or the addition of a typed script. There might also be a ripomatic, or at least a link to some Vimeo reference. This will then be shown to the ACD/CD/GCD/ECD or CCO, who can judge it as something close to a finished piece, with far less space for interpretation or imagination. The client will then see it and take it literally as an ad intended to run, and ask why the lady has to have a green sweater. If approved it will then be given to the photographer/director/designer, who will then make a more polished version of something kind of like the layout.

Which is better? The 1995 people using only a small frame of external reference and a marker pen, or the 2019 people with every image ever created and the computing power of 1000 space shuttles?

Clearly the former. Forcing yourself to think, and make connections from the furthest reaches of your memory, will lead to places other people haven’t yet visited. I know this will also happen when you spend an afternoon on YouTube, but feeding your brain with that much ready made stuff makes it lazy. Showing people a thing like the thing you want limits the contribution they will believe they are allowed to make. Showing a client something that looks 90% like an ad reduces their expectations, and if the finished article isn’t a lot like that almost-perfect layout they’re more likely to be disappointed than when it doesn’t look a 1995 marker pen sketch.

But that’s just one aspect of how the internet has worsened advertising. Far bigger, and far more detrimental, has been the arrival, rise and current domination of digital advertising.

I remember back in the early/mid 2000s, when it seemed as if the digital landscape was going to become an endless vista of new ways in which to deliver messages. Agencies flocked to set up ‘offices’ in Second Life; BMW Films and Subservient Chicken showed us how free, expansive and goddamned creative the online world could be; and for a minute or two many of us thought that this was going to be the bravest and newest of worlds; a universe-sized toy box where our greatest dreams would be realised on a daily basis.

Then something else happened. It would take me far too long to explain in detail, but can I simply point you in the direction of Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian, who has spent a good decade puncturing the bullshit, and pointing out the many pitfalls, of online advertising? From data scraping and microtargeting to colossal fraud and huge amounts of waste, the interaction of advertising and the internet has led to some dreadful consequences. Our industry has fueled much of anything you hate about being online, and it hasn’t even resulted in better, more effective advertising.

But this is a somewhat creative blog, so I’m going to concentrate on that part of the process.

Digital advertising prioritises data, information and precision targeting over engagement, entertainment and memorability. Have a read of this excellent post by Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at W&K Amsterdam, and you’ll be led through a forensic explanation of why and how ads have become more boring, annoying and unlikeable. They are entirely made for the left side of your brain, ignoring the right side because the only priority is hitting endless measurements of reach without a thought for memorability or enjoyment.

And this is where advertising is continuing to head. Search and social are gobbling up increasing proportions of adspend, along with every other ad-funded website, from the New York Times to Pornhub. So this is what our foreseeable future looks like, and if you work in an agency, trying to add something positive to people’s lives with your creativity, your briefs and budgets are steadily dwindling to the kind of levels that make success far more the exception than the rule.

There are millions of ads all over the internet, with the number increasing at an increasing rate every single day. But when did you last see a good one? When did you last see a ‘not bad’ one? What percentage of internet-based advertising is anything other than dreary, simplistic, ugly and/or annoying? Even the targeting, for which we have given up so much, is poor. I receive ads for all sorts of things I’m not interested in, from ladies’ shoes to gigs for bands I’ve never listened to. Maybe there’s some algorithm somewhere that says I’ll respond to that kind of thing, but if so, it’s shite.

And you might have noticed that the BMW Films and Subservient Chickens seem to have dried up. The former appeared nearly twenty years ago, and the latter in 2005. The last fifteen years have been an arid desert of creativity, even when it comes to the kind of show-pony creativity Cannes encourages us to laud. There’s nothing making you happy, inspired, entertained, joyful or enthralled. And as a percentage of ‘millions’, ‘fuck-all’ is a pretty dismal strike rate.

If you’re an advertising creative you’ve almost certainly worked on a brief for an ad destined to appear somewhere on the internet. Have you shown that work to your mum? Have you explained it to a cab driver? Have you smiled in satisfaction as a talk show host repeated your online endline? I’m willing to be a pound or two that the answer is overwhelmingly ‘no’.

So the creative process has been compromised, the opportunities for excellence are decreasing every day, and the ads that do appear are crap, and enable lots of awful consequences.

In the words of AOL, as far as creative advertising goes, the internet is a bad thing.