The other day this guy started appearing on my TikTok feed. He was explaining how to make great advertising, and the things he was saying made a lot of sense. So I looked him up and it turns out he’s called Jason Bagley and he’s made some amazing ads and has now started some kind of ad school. Here’s his introductory video:

Jason explains the format in this article: The first class, Creative Megamachine, will run for eight weeks. There will be two hour-long Zooms with Bagley each week—one being a lecture of sorts, and the other being a group discussion and Q&A.”So it’ll be between about 20 hours with me in a pretty small group over Zoom,” he says. “I’m hoping to be the Obi-Wan Kenobi to their Luke Skywalker.” Sounds great, but I can’t find how much it costs and don’t want to sign up for his emails, but let’s assume it’s not free.

The other other day this article (£/$) appeared in my daily Creative Review email. For those of you without a CR subscription, it is a profile of The Barn, a kind of Watford 2.0 based inside BBH London where aspiring creatives actually get paid to learn. The article then goes into why that is a better solution to creative advertising education than the current, relatively expensive options: “I think the ad school model is now being questioned and challenged, particularly if it costs a lot for those students to attend,” he (Tony Cullingham) says, “because, hey, it’s a big surprise – you get rich, privileged students on courses that charge 15 grand a year.”

True.

So those are two of the current options for aspiring creatives, neither of which existed when I was starting out. A third option would be somewhere like SCA in London, or Miami Ad School, which run for various lengths of time, but cost a fair bit of money. I’m not exactly sure where places like Bucks or St Martins fit in these days, but I assume they’re similar to SCA, but perhaps for a smaller fee.

If you want to be a copywriter or art director, I think those are your ‘formal’ education choices, but I wonder what I’d do if I were starting out today, and by extension, what would I suggest to someone who wanted to go down that path. 

I’ve written about advertising education before, but more for the benefit of people who are already in the industry but want to improve (something that might apply to the School of Astonishing Pursuits). However, call me deluded, but I still think you could go from a standing start to a job in good agency within a year, and for an outlay of £0, and in such a way that you could manage it around your current annoying job (the one you want to leave so you can work in advertising).

So, welcome to your first day at Ben’s Free In Your Spare Time Get A Great Job Within A Year Ad School.

Here’s the schedule:

1. Listen to the podcasts. Fucking hell! They’re free! There are loads of them and they cost nothing. Nothing! Start with Dave Dye’s because they really get into the whole story of how people got into the business and he writes a post to go with each interview that is insanely detailed. Then have a look around at others such as Tagline, or even mine (I occasionally wrote a post to go with my chats, AND I spent five hours interviewing Dave Dye, so you won’t find that on his feed). There are probably others, but I assume you’re resourceful enough to find them. If you aren’t, give up now.
2. Have a look at the Archive section of D&AD’s website. If a half-decent ad happened over the last thirty years, it’s there for you to look at and learn from FOR FREE. They’ve recently added the ‘shortlisted’ stuff, so the amount is large and the scope is wide. You could start with the Black Pencils and work your way down.
3. Once you’ve done a month of that (or a day of it if you’re feeling inspired) have a go at coming up with some ads. It’s fun. No one can stop you writing whatever you want for whatever client you want. Now, I know I said the whole thing was free, but I assumed, like almost everyone on planet earth, you own a smartphone and can afford a pad of paper. That will allow you to do everything I’ve suggested so far. You can even take a pen from your local betting shop and write ads on receipts, or bits of newspaper that you’ve fished out of a bin. Or unused loo roll from the local swimming pool. What I’m saying is, there’s lots of free stuff around to write on.
4. As an addendum to stage 3, find a partner as quickly as possible. If you like writing or are good at it (or both), find an art director, and vice versa. This will increase your chances of getting that great job by a factor of 10000000. Where do you find this partner? OK, I’m not going to do everything for you, but ask around. Advertising is a small business. Explain your predicament to headhunters, go for crits (see below) and ask people you meet there, go to advertising talks… It might take a while, but you’ll find someone eventually, and anyway, the longer it takes, the better you’ll be when you find someone, and the more inclined they’ll be to work with you.
5. As another addendum to 3, set yourself a daily quota. Say… one campaign a day. That might mean you produce something shit, but a) The very process of forcing yourself to meet this quota will make you do creative things and b) If you come up with 300 campaigns in 300 days, ten of them will be good enough to put in your portfolio. And don’t stop there. The people who will do best on this course will set themselves a quota of two campaigns a day, or three. Or four (you get the idea).
6. Crits. Start calling up/emailing creative teams in ad agencies. Start with the ones whose work you admire most. Tell them why you like their stuff. Do not fake it and do not lie. People love to know that people give a shit about the fact that they exist. Exploit that for your own ends. Find teams in agencies you like and admire. Nowadays you could even try an email crit with a team in another part of the world, then get a job there. This is about gaining knowledge, honing your craft via expert advice and (CRUCIALLY) making friends in the industry who can help you get that job. Aim high. There was a team whose work I loved. I saw them when I was shit, saw them again when I was a bit better, then saw them a third time when they loved my book and recommended it to the ECD of their agency, which happened to be AMV BBDO. Next week I was there on placement. Six months later I had a job at the best agency in the world. That’s why you do you crits. Did I mention they’re not only free, nice creative will give you pens and pads and other contacts in other agencies, which might be the ones that give you that brilliant job.
7. Repeat the above until you have a job. The harder you work, the sooner it’ll happen. The less of an arsehole you are, the sooner it’ll happen, so be nice and grateful and humble because people like to have nice, grateful, humble people around. 

The course starts in exactly fifty-three seconds and can last anywhere between a few months and the rest of your life, depending on how closely you follow the above, and how much of an arsehole you are. But it’s basically foolproof, so get on with it.

Finally, if you have any problems with how the course is run, you can have a full refund at any time. Good luck!

Last week’s LinkedIn was dominated by two things: a CEO who cried because he had to get someone on his staff to fire some other people on his staff, and that Timex billboard.

The reaction to the CEO thing was kind of fun, but it was the Timex billboard that inspired me to write this post. Actually, to be more accurate, it was the reaction to the Timex billboard that inspired me to write this post. 

I’m confused, but in a good way. It caught fire, but I’m not sure why, so exploring that might help educate me in some way.

(By the way, I’m very aware that writing hundreds of words about the fact that hundreds of words have been written about that billboard is also kind of weird, but here we are.)

Let’s start by talking about the ad itself. Fascinating thing number one is that lots of people were praising it to the heavens. Positive comments on LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit and even in articles included, ‘Love this – very clever!’, ‘This is brilliant’, ‘Excellent billboard’, ‘I have serious respect for brands that commit to who they are rather than jumping on the latest trend’…

Fascinating thing number two is that lots of people were not praising it to the heavens: ‘Too wordy. Everybody knows what the brand is and what it does’, ‘Clever ad poor execution’, ‘The line feels like the prop the planner wrote’.

Many people went so far as to rewrite the line: ‘Love the sentiment but a bit long. Some quickfire alts: “Nothing but Time”, “Disconnect In Style”, “Sync With Simplicity”. ‘The line could have been something as simple as “Tells Time, looks timeless”.’ How about “It’s time’?

Many others actually re-art directed it:

(I have no idea who did the above, or the rewrites. I kind of like the last one, but I don’t think i’d understand it without the additional context of the original line.)

I actually wrote my own little post on LinkedIn expressing amazement at the time people spent discussing this ad because it’s actually (drumroll please…) fine. That’s it. Not great, not bad. Fine.

Look, I get it: it went viral. It touched a nerve. It captured a zeitgeist. It inspired 5000 comments on Reddit and hundreds more on LinkedIn. People engaged with it far more than they do with 99.9% of ads. And that means it’s good, right? And any criticism I’m about to offer is surely born of bitterness or jealousy or being out of touch, or having no taste.

Sorry. No. 

I don’t know if it was a slow news week (we are in August, after all. The newspapers call it ‘Silly Season’ because there’s so little to write about, silly stories end up running. Then again, in America it has been an insanely unslow news week, but we all have tiny attention spans these days, so…) but it rose to the top for reasons other than the quality of its strategy, concept, copywriting and art direction, which (see above) are not ‘excellent’.

Here’s a fundamental reason why: if you read any of Dave Trott’s wisdom you’ll know that one of his unarguable maxims is around binary briefing. In short, you’re either the market leader, in which case growing the market is a good idea, or you’re not, in which case growing market share is what you need to do. So if you’re not the biggest-selling watch brand, you need to say something about your watch that makes it different to the others. If you’re not doing that, you’re simply helping the top brand sell more. This billboard reminds you of a fact that applies to literally every non-smart watch on the planet (it only tells the time), so unless Timex is the market leader, this is not the right kind of advertising to create.

Here, for your illumination, are the top selling watch brands with over an estimated $1 Billion in US wholesale sales:

1. Rolex $4.5 Bn USD
2. Omega $3 Bn
3. Apple $2.5 Bn
4. Fossil $2.3 Bn
5. Cartier $1.8 Bn
6. Citizen $1.6 Bn
7. Seiko $1.4 Bn
8. Patek Philippe $1.2 Bn
9. Longines $1.2 Bn
10. Swatch $1.1 Bn

Quora also tells me that the top selling watch at a group level is Swatch Group, with annual revenues of around $10 billion, but that is split between several brands, including Blancpain, Omega, Longines, Tissot, Mido, Hamilton and Rado. The top seller in terms of number of watches is Citizen.

See? Education! I bet none of you knew all that.

However, I also bet all of you noticed the absence of Timex. It was harder to find comparable figures, but it seems to have annual revenue of $1.2bn wordwide, which explains why it’s not in that US-only top 10.

And that explains why it should grow its brand with something specific and not the category with something generic. You might argue that staking out this anti-smartphone territory will give it some specific brand attribution, but that would be very charitable. That billboard is not well branded (tiny, indistinct logo; a watch that looks like lots of other watches; a small line that’s positioned in a place that makes it hard to read; sharing the space with a co-brand called Adsum), and you might again be very charitable and say that it’s anti-branding, or more in keeping with the lo-fi vibe of Adsum, but this is also $1bn+ Timex, not some obscure little underdog. We’ve all heard of Timex, so why try to hide it when you’re trying to sell it?

So it’s technically not ‘excellent’ in positioning terms, and that positioning is not even original. Sekonda, a very reliable but inexpensive watch, has been using this strategy for years:

Also, the Timex typography is hard to read and the line is long for a billboard, and it indeed feels like it’s taken directly from the brief (although I kind of like the way it’s not ‘addy’, or trying too hard). I’d also argue that it’s not much of an insight: you can find out the time without being bothered by all the other stuff that’s on your smartwatch. But people like the other stuff on their smartwatches; that’s why that other stuff is there – you chose to put it there and pay a lot for the watch. Most people don’t have 1000+ unanswered emails, but if they didn’t like that situation, they’d answer some of them. It makes no sense.

So the strategy is generic, the copywriting is OK (funnily enough, all the people who had a go at improving it actually wrote worse lines), the art direction is either deliberately trying to look as if it’s not trying or it’s just not good. 

And no offence to whoever is responsible. It’s just another billboard. I could throw a stone in LA and hit ten others of the same kind of quality…

…but again, the billboard went viral and the watch has apparently sold out, but I’m not in the watch world enough to know if this is a big deal, or anything to do with the billboard. Limited edition watch collabs now have people queuing around the block, and you have to get on a waiting list to buy even the lowest-level Rolex, so did the ad help to create the hype, or was it unnecessary? Like all advertising ‘successes’ it’s hard to say. Advertising (promotion) is just one of the four P’s of marketing, so this might have been the sales driver, or it might have been the website, or the price, or something else entirely. People who love this billboard will say it was the billboard, but unless you work for Timex/Adsum you literally have no idea if that is the case.

Part of me wonders if we’ve just realigned our standards so much that this is seen as revolutionary/original/excellent. But it’s none of those things. It’s fine. It’s better than average, but so are millions of other ads. 

So here I am at the end, but I don’t feel I found the answer. In fact, I feel exactly how I did when I first saw the post: like I’ve just seen another decent ad that I’m going to forget as soon as I stop looking at it. But now that I’ve added 1200 words to the conversation I may not forget it for a while.

I was in Cannes in 2008. That year’s winner of the Outdoor Grand Prix was the game-changing, category-bending, convention-smashing HBO Voyeur. It was far too multi-layered to be self-explanatory, so it needed a case study, and here it is: 

https://vimeo.com/182920917

TL/DR: HBO is all about telling stories so they did that as a live event projected onto the back of a New York building, then added another layer online.

Pretty much every entry for every award now has a case study (side note: judging these things is exhausting. I know you get two minutes to use, but a juror will be delighted if they’re asked to evaluate a concise 1:20 instead), but this was one of the earlier ones.

The reason I remember it is because I was standing around at some party, discussing it with a friend, and he said, ‘Have you watched any of the actual stories?’. I said that I hadn’t and he laughed. ‘They’re rubbish! Watch one. They’re complete crap’. 

I have no idea if they are good or bad or somewhere in between because even though he told me to have a look I simply couldn’t be bothered. Life was/is too short. But even now, fourteen years later, I remember that this event won awards all over the world, and yet there was a good chance the jurors didn’t even know what they were judging. If they just watched the case study, they experienced about 5% of the actual ‘ad’.

And what is a case study but an ad for an ad? It’s aimed squarely at a small audience of senior advertising creatives who are probably less than enthused at having to watch yet another little film about something they can never fully understand. Does it have that stat about ‘media impressions’? Tick. Does it have a (probably local) news anchor covering the story? Tick. Does it have a graphic of lots of Tweets? Tick. Does it have impressed passers-by taking a good look at the giant thingy hanging off the side of the building? Tick.

Of course there’s a good reason for all this: ads these days need to demonstrate their 360-ness in order to look good to a jury. Then they need to express the nice thing they did for the planet. Then they need to convey some stats to show how effective it was. And all of this because the juror almost certainly never saw it in the real world, because a) It probably ran in a country they don’t live in, and b) It probably ran in a relatively obscure digital/experiential media space. 

So the jurors have to rely on what the creatives decide to tell them through the medium of the video. But let’s not forget that those creatives work in – oh yes! – advertising, where they are paid and trained to present the best-case scenario of a product/service/situation all day, every day. Here’s their chance to make an ad about an ad, and that will inevitably mean spin upon spin.

I think jurors are starting to become more cynical and jaded about this, so the canny ones probably learn to screen out the more obvious bullshit, but they can never know for sure, so they probably let a lot of things slide.

Then again, I was prompted to write about this by a comment on my recent post about purpose-based Cannes Grand Prix winners:

Here’s that case study:

Jonas has kindly done the work that the jurors clearly decided not to, and discovered that this best of the best of the best initiative was actually a bit crap. But now and forever it is a CGP winner, so the bullshitting creatives achieved their goal.

Do I expect every juror to forensically examine everything they award? Of course not; it’s an arduous-enough task without making it ten times harder. But until people delve properly into case study claims, creatives will fluff up the excellence of their work as much as they think they can get away with. 

I’m also aware that the alternative would be kind of weird: ‘Shall we say all the best things we can about our campaign, adding the most positive interpretations of its effectiveness wherever possible?’ ‘Nah. Let’s be scrupulously honest, humble and self-deprecating and hope that wins the day’. This is now where we are, so you have to play the game like everyone else does, otherwise you’ll look poor by comparison.

That said, perhaps when the final Lions/Pencils are being decided, award organisers should check out the reality of certain claims, including the UX, the UI and the actual viewership of that TV news station in an obscure corner of the Balinese archipelago. 

Until that happens, it might be worth taking a look at that HBO case study to see where things might or might not be as they seem (I will emphasise here that I have no idea if these were on the level or not. This is just an exercise to show where unscrupulous case study makers might spin things. This is not any kind of suggestion that the HBO Voyeur team was anything less than 100% honest):

00:25: ‘Street teams passing out curious invitations’. We have no idea to what extent this really happened. You can assume that many people who feature in this kind of footage are agency/production company staff. Even if the ‘passing out’ is genuine you might get better takes with more appropriate (cool-looking) ‘passers-by’ when you use agency staff.

00:35: How long was that projection up for? You tend to need permission for these things, so an agency might get some quick footage (again with ‘members of the public’ who might not be members of the public) to suggest this went on for hours. And ‘two high-def projectors’? Weird flex, but OK.

00:45: ‘Viewers could hold up their invitations to discover clues’. Were those clues clever and interesting, or just a nice addition to the film that no one can check on? Impossible to say.

1:10: You can see trailer footage of the stories that makes them look as interesting as possible. Were they actually interesting? Who knows? And anything that ‘airs on TV’ (yeah, HBO is a TV channel) ‘and in cinemas’ (how many times?) is not a big deal.

1:20: The promo drove viewers to the website. How many viewers? 

1:25: Then we see the UI working perfectly. We have no idea if it really did that, or if the site crashed, or if this all just happened in the Mac room at the agency.

1:36: ‘We got the coolest musicians to compose original tracks’. No juror would have listened to those tracks. ‘Coolest’ is very subjective, but it sounds great, and nobody is going to check up because ‘cool’ and ‘obscure’ are often synonymous when it comes to music. Would it ‘fit the exact choreography’ of what you were watching? Again, who would be bothered enough to check that?

02:00: ‘Viewers are invited to…’ Did they do it? Did they care? Was the story engaging? Who knows?

02:22: There’s a link from the website to a blog called ‘The Story Gets Deeper’. Again, this all sounds so wonderfully multi-dimensional, particularly in 2008, but no juror would ever have checked that blog to see if it was well written etc.

02:35: More clues and cell phone footage that no one would check, and no one would know if any viewers were interested enough to follow them.

02:45: New York Magazine covered it. We all know how PR works, especially when it isn’t a real article. This is just a mention on their ‘approval matrix’ that might have been placed for a fee or favour (or maybe New York Magazine liked it for real!).

02:50: HBO fans shared their passion for it… in ways that are impossible to verify. How many times was it shared by real people? No idea.

03:00: Over a million unique viewers ‘sought it out’ in the first three weeks. ‘Sought it out’ could of course mean that they just Googled ‘HBO Voyeur’, but that does sound good. Not sure how many people constitue ‘half of all HBO On Demand viewers’. Why not use the stat of all HBO watchers? Were there many HBO On Demand subscribers? And how much HBO Voyeur did they have to watch for it to count as part of the stat?

As I said, all those elements could be as real as they were presented, but as they came from an ad agency, you can be fairly certain that they were at the absolute top end of that reality. Why wouldn’t they be? As I also said, it would be weird not to frame everything as positively as possible.

How have things changed in the ensuing fourteen years? Not much, but let’s have a quick look at this year’s big winner, ‘The Lost Class’: 

It is more sophisticated, with great shots and emotional music. They have some genuine big hitters on the news front (MSNBC and CNN, along with pull quotes from Fast Company, The Guardian and Rolling Stone), and that can’t be faked or exaggerated. The only part where it breaks down a little is 1.4 billion impression with zero dollars spent. What exactly is a ‘media impression’? And they clearly spent a bunch of dollars making this and, I would suggest, getting it out on social media. ’66% increase in background checks conversations’? What does that mean and how was it measured? 

The big claim is that it started another big gun control conversation without needing another tragedy. That is quite vague. The gun control situation in America is very complicated. Did the NRA double down as revenge for the humiliation of its leader? Did gun fans take offense? Gun tragedies always lead to people buying more guns because they fear theirs will soon be taken away; did this inspire more of that? Post Uvalde we’ve just had a piece of gun legislation finally pass the Senate. Was that aided or impeded by this? 

It is undeniable that they made a big, famous splash with a sneaky idea that liberal gun control fans would love (MSNBC, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian and Rolling Stone could be said to be preaching to the choir. What did The Daily Wire and Fox News think?). Did it move the needle in the right direction? Hard to say, but the case study video did all the right things to bring home many big awards.

So now we have to be case study-vigilant, especially as portfolios are now full of case studies, and the people who hire creatives want to see evidence of big-ass case study-worthy campaigns. 

Perhaps we should just accept that the creation of the case study video is a skill in itself, one that every agency now needs to master to have any chance of a a big award. We can all take the claims and stats with a pinch of salt, then marvel at the editing and the use of music, but we should also know that bigger agencies have entire departments that have optimised case study video creation, and have more resources and favours to call in to make them even better. Unfair? Sure, but life isn’t fair.

As someone once said about democracy, case studies are the worst system we have, except for all the others. They are the best medium to explain campaigns that people have never seen, and give societal context for people who may not live in the country where the work ran. But let’s not pretend they are anything other than the sugar dusting on the cherry on the icing on the cake.

We should use our critical thinking to make sure the right questions are being asked about anything dubious, otherwise it’s going to be on us when a piece of work that wasn’t actually very good is held up as an example of the best we can do.

(By the way, 1.65 billion media impressions agree with this post, and it’s going to start at least one conversation between two people standing next to each other in the toilet of an ad agency in Turkmenistan.)