Here’s Juan Cabral’s new ad for Eurostar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMiRJq_v1WU

In case you’re wondering, it’s shit.

But this blog does not deal in such besmirchificationary assertions without a bit of justification to back them up.

My biggest problem with it is: what the fuck has an idiot girl running around looking for talking animals got to do with taking a train from London to some city in Europe? Seriously, I like a slightly indulgent/nebulous ad as much as the next wanker but this is just crazy. It’s like advertising a bar of chocolate with a drumming…oh, wait….

Anyway, this is not Gorilla because it’s not interesting or memorable. It’s like watching someone smearing vanilla blancmange and skimmed milk over the screen while beaming Amanda Seyfried romance movies into your eyeballs, then getting a labrador puppy, covering it in Cecilia Aherne novels and getting it to lick you softly and non-committally until you weep with boredom. THEN putting a Norah Jones album on a loop and painting the planet a particularly neutral shade of beige while dressing you in Next clothes and shoving a rolled-up copy of the Mail on Sunday up your starfish.

Really, is anyone going to watch this (billed, incidentally, as ‘Eurostar’s first TV ad in three years’, like anyone gives a fuck) and think of taking a train to Europe? ‘Exploring is beautiful’ ought to be a line for selling LSD, not a boring journey to a boring place on a boring vehicle (although at least the ad accurately reflects the experience).

I fully believe that no one has led the creativity of advertising further in the last ten years, but compared to the rampant spanking that was ‘Gorilla’ and the lush, heartfelt snog that was ‘Balls’, this is like getting to a party and discovering that someone you don’t really fancy had to go home early with a mild cold.

Or something.

So I’ve just seen Inception and it is really bastardly good. Beyond that there’s not a lot of point in going into it. The plot is actually quite difficult to spoil, but if you like movies, just go and enjoy the ride. There’s also little point in me trying to review it because others will do it much better.

I guess, as someone who blogs about advertising, it might be worth making a point that occurred to me that surprisingly linked one of the best films of this century with our much maligned (by me) industry:

As I was watching scenes that, quite frankly, blew my fucking tits off, I did think that it was a shame, with reduced budgets and fearful clients, we tend, as an industry, to have left the jaw-dropping and the dark behind. The kind of amazement that Surfer and Twister used to generate had been replaced by a more everyday excellence (Old Spice guy, Dove Evolution girl, Gorilla) that pleases in a less impactful way.

Then I remembered this and realised that was complete and utter bullshit:

Honestly, Carousel could have been a scene in Inception and would not have looked out of place. Those opportunities to be dark, adult, intelligent and ground-breaking may be few and far between, but at least they exist.

Perhaps that’s something worth clinging to.

Alternatively, you might think that the chances of you getting to make something like that are so small, you might as well not bother trying and will instead choose to resign and go and work in the movies. You might also acknowledge that for all its brilliance, Carousel will have roughly one trillionth the longevity and cultural impact of Inception.

Be a hero in a tiny industry or create deep, resonant art that will make people thank God that you’re alive?

Just measure your ambition and act accordingly.

From Chris and Fran at DHM:

This really is The Year Of The Old Spice Man. Now you can get him to record your voicemail.

He-Man is a bit effeminate:

(Thanks, D.)

And here’s a splendid piece of animation and sound design.

(Thanks, H.)

I’ll post some other stuff later. Probably.

And here’s some other Louis stuff:

The Old Spice guy is now making personalised videos for fans via social media.

Check this one out:

Old Spice Perez

The other day I was discussing portfolios with another creative.

We are both old enough to recall owning very large, very heavy cases in which your best print work could be stored alongside a Umatic (completely obsolete system now about as useful as an 8-track) for perusal by a discerning CD. That was how you touted your work around town, and the bigger/swankier the case, the more brilliant you were. Even though it was only protecting a bunch of old ads, several locks and a titanium casing were de rigueur.

This did of course lead to difficulties: smuggling the fuckers in and out of your own agency was nearly impossible, so you had to be cunning. Disguising it as a photographer’s portfolio killed two birds with one stone because you could pretend it wasn’t yours and you could get despatch to bike all six tonnes of it halfway across London. The other difficulty was that carrying it inevitably led to a hernia.

Then there was the fun of laminating your proofs. In those days you would get traffic to laminate the ads of your choice, then get them backed with some kind of felt. I have no idea how much this cost because I was too scared to ask, but I’d get it done to all sorts of slices of unworthy crap, just in case I might need them later (I never did).

As I’m sure you are aware, the above requirements are pretty much non-existent these days. The Worldwide Web has meant that we can all send our online portfolios all over the world at the touch of a button. Hooray (much subtler, too).

But that doesn’t mean everyone has one of these digi-book thingies. I still get calls from people wanting to emulate the somewhat basic site you can check out by clicking the link on the top right of this blog (visit Wix.com and follow the instructions). But as I dip my toe in the water of having a new blog at a new address, I will also be representing myself in other interesting digital ways. However, I will be doing this with a great deal of help because I am a bit crap at stuff like that (Thanks in advance, This Is Real Art).

That leads me to an unpaid plug: my friend Shaheed has started an online portfolio site called The Creative Floor that will make your life piss-easy. He’s even offering free unlimited portfolios to the first  20 people who email him via this blog, so get in touch prontissimo.

Happy hunting for a new job (when you need one). And don’t forget to keep a digital file of everything.

I often harp on here about the relative wages of creatives and their incessant slide towards those of a deformed rent boy or indolent corpse.

In the early 80s there was a copywriter called Geoff Seymour whose raise to £100k was so famous, that amount of money was then termed a ‘Seymour’.

Now, I might shock a few of you here, but £100k is what many senior creatives are on now. Hell, some are on less than that. Fuck, many are on much less than that.

But just to put that in perspective, in 1982 £100k could buy you a house that would be worth almost £1m today (house prices have gone up 824.24% since then).

That means, by one spurious measurement, senior creative wages have declined by 824% in real terms (obviously there are millions of other factors involved, but I think we can all agree that £100k today will not buy you as much as it did in 1982).

Now, I’m not going to go into whether creatives deserve to get paid anything like that, especially when nurses and firemen are on blah blah blah… that’s for another post. But, as a species, we are getting paid much less than we used to (imagine if senior creatives were generally on £1m today, with ECDs on closer to £4m. Fucking hell.)

The reasons for this are manifold, so I’m going to have an unfounded guess at a few:

1. Creatives were overpaid back in the day. Clients and agencies worked this out and tightened the screws accordingly. This makes some sense and no sense, both at the same time: a great idea could transform a client’s business, putting it on the map and increasing sales by millions, but what’s that worth? Good question. Leading us to…

2. Great creative work is unaccountable. If a product flies of the shelves after its launch, you could thank the ad, the distribution, the pricing structure, a heatwave, the retail positioning etc. The ad is very much detached from the actual process of money through the door, and if enough people think that then why pay more for a good one?

3. There’s less money sloshing around in general. Clients wised up to the profligacy of the industry that took place in the 60s-80s (and beyond), so they got procurement motherfuckers in and turned the tap off. I can’t really blame them for that. I mean, if I were paying for a helicopter shot that hit the cutting room floor I might be a little miffed. Also, I can’t speak for wages in other departments. Have they stayed high across the board or are planners and suits as fucked as we are?

4. Clients and people in charge of agencies generally care less about the brilliance of creative work these days. They don’t think it’s worth stumping up hundreds of thousands for 9/10 (not guaranteed) when they can 7.5/10 from the juniors down the corridor for a quarter of the price.

5. Massive oversupply. Creative jobs have always been tough to get because so many people want one, that’s why the exploitation system known as ‘placements’ still exists. And though there are fewer people the higher up the ladder you go, there are still far more than the industry needs, hence the relentless ageism and the need for an ‘out’. As anyone with even the slightest grasp of economics knows, increased supply pushes the price down, so until half the industry simultaneously agrees to go and do something else, the wages will continue to be fucked. The oversupply also extends to agencies themselves: with so many battling it out for any client worth a fiver or more, the margins get reduced and there is less money to pay staff, leading to even more 7/10 ads.

6. Holding companies. They, as with any publicly-listed company, have to meet certain targets to please shareholders (which could be you or me through our pension schemes). This means that money is the bottom line imperative and the chances of Omnicom/WPP etc spunking loads of cash to get better ads is tiny.

7. Much of what we do is cannon fodder bullshit. In order to sell work quickly and avoid losing money on an account, a client is often given eight routes and asked to pick a favourite. This means that around 85% of work done by you and your department is utterly pointless and ultimately worthless. It creates nothing but opportunities for people to have their arses licked a little more tenderly, and who would pay for such a thing (don’t answer that)?

8. This one is the real shitter: we don’t do ourselves any favours. Every time you do a chip shop ad you devalue what we do for a living. You give away your best shit for a pittance just for the chance to win a shiny bauble. This makes us, as a department, look pretty pathetic because none of that is related to the real money or business of advertising. Yes, I know that because of the way the system currently works, we are rewarded for meaningless awards over ads that might solve an actual business problem for a big client, but that has been fucking us over the years. Would you pay a footballer for their ability to do supercool keepy-uppy tricks on the training ground? Or a musician to play to his mates in his bedroom? Of course not, but that’s what our promotion system is mainly based on. Yes, you can win awards on proper accounts, but these are the same awards that are won for the bullshit ads: a Gold Lion is a Gold Lion, so the currency gets devalued and the proper ones start to become meaningless. Then, when they’re all meaningless, what are we supposed to do?

Suck up our shitty wages, that’s what.

Your patience is appreciated.