It is genuinely a-fucking-mazing how advertising jingles and lines can stick in your head.

When did I last hear ‘see the face you love light up with Terry’s All Gold’?

Or this utter classic that broke the fourth wall of advertising creation with aplomb (check the John Peel VO):

Then there were no words but you could always hum dah dahhh da-da-dahh-dah (by the way, the Milk Tray man taught my wife stage fighting at RADA and his name was Terry King, which is a real 80s man’s name. You never really meet many Terrys these days, do you?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ya5kh4_ZM&feature=related

Then there’s this execution of a long running campaign that appears to have been made during the Yankophile, hyper-colourful, fucking-hard-to-watch-without-getting-a-headache early nineties:

Where did Banjos go?

What about this work of genius, bumming ‘Bobby’s Girl’ into oblivion without thought or mercy:

And this ad whose music appears to have been based on The Message by Grandmaster Flash (I recall very clearly a schoolfriend recreating this entire ad when I was about 10. I think Hofmeister was weak enough for him to drink):

I knew (and still know) all the words to this (why don’t they serve beer in ‘jars’ anymore? Bollocks to those branded glasses):

No song, but the unforgettable chocadooby-popsquabble:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOFRIWx5F9c&feature=related

And finally, by far the most oft-repeated ad of my schooldays. And university days. And at Watford. And in my office today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYP1d5nN2o&feature=related

A very senior creative at an agency I worked at once gave me a very useful piece of advice: when writing a script, don’t write the dialogue.

This makes sense for a few reasons:

First, if you don’t write the specifics, there much less to object to. If a client/CD/cleaning lady doesn’t have an exact turn of phrase to pick apart, he/she can just imagine the best dialogue for your scene and let the script go. For example, writing ‘She explains why she hasn’t got a car and they agree to meet later,’ will make your life a bit easier than:

Woman: I left my car keys in the anus of a forlorn giraffe.

Man: Literal bummer.  Shall we get together at the apex of the vernal equinox?

Woman: That sounds like a really, really, really, really, really, good idea.

The first method is also easier to read out without getting all choppy and losing the flow.

Another reason why this is a good thing to do is that it leaves room for later development. Someone might say something good in casting, or the director might have a good suggestion. If your dialogue isn’t buttoned down then changing it won’t be a problem. You can’t have a client saying ‘But I prefer the way you had it before’ if there is no before. Also, according to Jonathan Glazer, the wiggle room is where the magic happens. If you pin everything down then there’s no room for the happy accidents that make good things great.

A third reason is that writing good dialogue is not easy, so you don’t want to get all bogged down doing it while you’re trying to get your script structure right. Have a go at the dialogue by all means, but you might want to leave it until later when you’ve properly sorted out what goes where.

A fourth reason is that you might have more important things to do. If you spend ages nutting out every little detail and your client/CD/cleaning lady bins the script, you’ve wasted a lot of time that you could have spent playing Red Dead Redemption or searching the less salubrious parts of the Worldwide Web. Or doing some other work.

By the way, none of the above applies to radio ads which need to be buttoned the fuck down before you go in. You can still have wiggle room, but very few actors/VOs like to be told to make shit up on the spot. And the same with headlines. Writing ‘Witty headline goes here’ very rarely works, and I’ve got the P45s to prove it.

And I love the funny old human race.

I like movies. I like them a lot. Unfortunately, I look at them in the same way I do advertising: the products of an industry that has seen better days.

But I think I’ll leave that particular whinge alone for a while.

I just wanted to witter on about some of the ways in which movies have lost their magic that have nothing to do with their inherent quality.

In the 80s I was known at school for being the guy who saw all the movies. This was due in some part to the fact that I was the first person to get into a ’15’ on his own (and it was Rambo of all films – 1985, I was eleven) and the same with an ’18’ (Fatal Attraction – 1988, I was fourteen). Neither of these were down to me appearing to be incredibly mature or tall for my age; I was simply the cheekiest little bastard who thought it was worth a try, even against the most ridiculous of odds. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

So I saw pretty much everything that came out, sometimes seeing four different movies in the cinema on the same day. But the big issue in those days that no longer exists was the massive gap between a film’s American release and its appearance in this country. Four to six months was routine, and if you were waiting for a big American hit to arrive, that was sheer torture.

I would follow the box office grosses in Screen International and wonder about the nature and quality of such blockbusters as Three Men and a Baby and Beetlejuice. As there was no internet, and consequently no opportunity to watch the movie’s trailers at will, these films would be built up in my mind to legendary status, my imagination running wild, conjuring up the two hours of celluloid that lay behind these strange and mysterious titles.

If I was really lucky I might get a chance to have a holiday in America, whereupon I would inhale as many films as possible so that I would not have to experience so many excruciating waits when I got back home. On one New Year trip to Boston, I think I dragged my poor mum to a couple of films a day, including such ‘classics’ as Home Alone, The Russia House, Green Card and The Godfather Part Three.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, all the info you could possibly wish for is now within easy reach on the Worldwide Web, and that is also the reason why there is a much smaller gap between a UK and US release: downloading and the attendant piracy means that studios need to cash in ASAP before the hooky versions spread across the world.

On one side it makes everything that much more convenient and available, but on the other, the magic seems greatly diminished. If this was 1989 I think I’d have exploded during my six month wait to watch Inception, but in 2010 I saw it at the same time everyone in the US did. Cool, but somehow less cool.

There’s a scene in the Bernardo Bertolucci move The Dreamers, where Michael Pitt explains that he always watches movies in the front row so that he sees them before the rest of the people in the cinema.

Delightful bullshit that might explain why I was in the front row for Inception.

I have written the odd post decrying the current state of advertising. I have lamented what I considered to be slumps in its quality, financial offerings and ability to satisfy to the extent it used to.

But an article in this weekend’s Guardian Magazine has made me think that I could be aiming my blame in the wrong direction.

The above article explains that the demise of our industry is just one symptom of a bunch of wider problems that are fucking over the entire middle class:

The increasingly competitive nature of middle-class life and the decrease in job security; Margaret Thatcher’s opening up of the classic middle-class professions, such as university teaching, to market forces; the slow decline of the great state and corporate bureaucracies; the downgrading of middle managers by new business ideologies. These shifts, conclude Gunn and Bell, have left “few if any areas in which middle-class people work untouched”.

Stephen Overell, associate director of the Work Foundation, says that “In the middle-class workplace, employees’ autonomy and discretion have collapsed dramatically compared with 20 years ago. Software is standardising work. There are more procedures and guidelines, more surveillance. People at the top end are doing OK, but the rest feel that their working lives are getting worse.” Middle-class employment, you could say, is becoming more like that long endured by the working class.

Does that sound familiar? Added to that is an overall job insecurity, a requirement to work harder for less money and an inability to afford things that were readily available to people in similar jobs in the 90s.

I spoke to a freelancer recently whose day rate equated to the salary he received fifteen years ago. And of course, that salary would have bought far more in 1995.

So it’s not just advertising.

And although I was right, I was wrong to suggest it was our industry that was heading down the lav all on its own.

For those of you who agree that advertising is not what it once was, the alternatives are not much better.

Where is the real fun? Not in the same place as the real money.

Is this a long-term trend that is shunting the vast majority towards harder work and less pleasure/job satisfaction? Have too many industries with excess money been found out and made to tighten their belts in order to satisfy the principles of sequential capitalism?

Then again, what right do any of us have to a fun job with tons of cash?

Buddha says that life is dukkha (suffering, change and being dependent on other things).

I guess we’ve got to suck that one up too.

A single, solitary, not-even-very-good thing for the weekend:

This one is all about what makes a good CD.

(By the way, Peter Souter once told me that a good CD is the opposite of a good creative. The latter has to be really selfish while the former has to be really selfless. Perhaps you have a selfish CD. Perhaps he is therefore shit.)

And here’s another article by the same dude, Felix Unger (although that may not be his real name, unless maybe his parents were big fans of The Odd Couple):

How to sell creative work.

Regular readers may have noticed that I quite like ads that are somewhat mad.

And that’s why I like this: