I subscribe to Rolling Stone Magazine.

I used to read it about 20 years ago but gave it up when movies and music, and consequently the articles about them, started getting really terrible.

Anyway, it’s really darn good again and here are a few reasons why;

Matt Taibi’s analysis/expose of the working practices of Goldman Sachs should be required reading for every sentient being on planet earth.

Here is the opening, much quoted, paragraph:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Since then, Taibi’s follow ups and his work on other subjects have given us the most pungent, forthright, rock-and-roll current affairs writing of the day. And if it’s not him contributing, the other writers and the issues they raise and report on are uniformly brilliant.

Another reason would be the current issue. Not only does it give us articles about Dennis Hopper, BP’s possible drilling in the Arctic and (if you are so inclined) Lady Gaga, it also contains a report on Timothy McChrystal, the US General in charge of Afghanistan. Well, he was in charge of Afghanistan, but then this article appeared and was thought to be so incendiary, he was relieved of his duties. Has any magazine article you’ve read lately done that?

They also have great music, TV and film reviews as well as a little bit on US sport, if it happens to be interesting to a wider audience.

The downsides are a love of U2 and a tendency to put vapid teen idols (Taylor Lautner?) on the cover, but you can ignore these minor blips.

Check it out if you get a chance (or have a nose around on their website – it’s also full of great stuff).

Food around the world.

Cronenberg on Letterman:

Blu go further:

BIG BAG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Some wanky film project from Ridley Scott.

Follow Raoul Moat on the run.

(Thanks, W.)

Will the fucking vuvuzela blend?

Fine client presentation:

(Thanks, W.)

I read about this (when was it? A week or two ago?) and kept meaning to post on it.

Anyway, someone commented on it again, reminding me that it’s worth a mention.

I think it’s interesting for Alex to stand by his principles and disrupt what must be a fairly cushy life (no client contact for the last two years) to shoot his employment position in the foot.

On one side, he’s now easily rich enough to screw up his job, but on the other, he is kissing a salary of 2m a year goodbye.

So he slagged off, directly and indirectly, the shitty principles of some of his biggest clients (he doesn’t like selling to kids or promoting things that cause obesity, something BK and Kraft happily and regularly do) until MDC, CP&B’s holding company, thought it might be a good idea for him to fuck off and stop jeopardising their client relationships.

Well, good for him. And fuck those clients for the shitty things they do. Instead of changing their immoral behaviour they grumbled that Alex should shut up and leave. Twats.

I’m with Barney from Singapore, who comments in the above link:

Anyone in advertising that has a modicum of moral fibre lays awake at night wrestling with the consequences of selling a slow, painful death to the masses. Consciousness used to be that annoying time between sleeps. Then I woke up.

Whether Alex found it easier to voice his true concerns when he became fucking loaded, or his conscience finally got the better of him, or he got fed up with the job that he had conquered so completely, I think it’s great that he’s got his out (the article mentions other top creatives who are doing the same).

Yet another Bogusky lesson for us all: if the business is working for you and your principles, fine. If not, get the fuck out and don’t look back.

UPDATE: according to info in the comments this principled stand occurred just after he got $38m from his earnout. Kind of takes the shine off things somewhat. Great ads though. Maybe the Bogusky lesson is that a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money. Although that does sound kind of familiar…

I don’t normally reference stuff that’s been on The Escape Pod Blog because it feels like I’m just lazily thieving another blog’s good, good shit.

But in this instance, I thought I’d point out their new campaign, just in case any of you don’t pop over there regularly.

All the info is in this post, but to sum up, they’ve gone through all the Tweets that mention Wheaties (a much-loved US snack) and responded to them in funny/pranky ways:

It’s a fantastic new way of using social media to create a brilliant online campaign for a massive brand.

Sorry if you are already aware of it, but if you’re not, I’m sure you’re silently mouthing the words, ‘thank you Ben’ at your screen.

But your gratitude would be misplaced: it’s Vinny who deserves your thanks.

UPDATE: if you’re looking for something to do tonight, don’t miss Dive at 9pm on BBC2 (although I assume it’ll be on iPlayer for a while afterwards).

I saw a preview and it is absolutely brilliant. Great acting, direction, script etc. Another excellent piece of drama from Dominic Savage.

(Thanks, BB.)

It’s a long way out of date.
It’s industry navel gazing.
The Tango spoof, along similar lines, was years ago.
You can see the end coming a mile off.
The track is rubbish.
The direction is poor.
I find the senseless destruction for such a shit ad somewhat depressing.

Today (Monday) I gave a talk at my old school about advertising.

It was their careers advice day thingie and they were lacking people who worked in the meeja, so I kindly volunteered to spew forth the kind of poison you find on this blog right into the ears of the young.

The oddest part of doing it was wrapping my head around when they were born – 1993ish – and remembering that Cotton Eye Joe and the best work of Ice T happened long before they were sentient.

Anyhoo, I think it would have been remiss of me to do anything other than warn them about what’s happening to the industry and suggest that they might find more fulfilling lives elsewhere.

It was pretty hard explaining the giant pustulating boil that is the Myth of Digital and the way an entire industry has fallen for a bullshit sandwich big enough to choke the monster they hid the Millennium Falcon in at the start of the Empire Strikes Back. When I remembered all that guff people were regurgitating in 2007 about how if you didn’t have plenty of digital in your book by 2010 you’d be a dead, smelly brontosaurus, I sighed so hard I broke my clavicle.

I then tried to decipher shit-but-effective versus award-winning-but-ineffective and explain how the latter still gets you the promotions and raises, and that no one has yet managed to think of a better system than that. I felt embarrassed as I did so. Lots of supposedly intelligent people work in advertising, but we seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time suggesting the opposite is true.

They also asked about how we really know about the people to whom we are advertising. I said that, in general, we were a bunch of wankers whose idea of getting into the mind of people who work outside the Circle Line is to read The Sun.

I’m not sure they left keener on the industry than when they arrived, but you never know.

Like a snowflake that has drifted unwisely into the pucker of John Prescott’s anus, advertising is somewhat ephemeral.

People dismiss news as ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’. Well, if that’s the case, most advertising can only dream of such longevity.

Although I can’t recall anyone mentioning this, I think that state of affairs explains some of the appeal of awards: if successful, your ad will live, in advertising terms, forever. In particular, the ones that result in some kind of annual (D&AD, The One Show etc.) will last as long as the book, which will be kept for all time in the offices of all right-thinking creatives. Of added benefit is the fact that we are taught from a very early age to respect books, particularly those which are big and hard.

However, the ads that feature in such publications are the world’s best 0.000000000000000038445206%. That means that the other 99.etc% of the industry’s product might as well not have existed.

Yes, I am aware that there are many perfectly valid ads that do not get into award books, but the chances of them being remembered for longer than a couple of weeks are minuscule.

So almost all of what we do exists in what I am about to name The Grey Zone.

Whether 3/10 or 8.5/10 your work will resound through the ages like the whisper of an asthmatic newt, and that might make you wonder whether or not it matters which of those marks it achieves.

The answer, I’m afraid, is: not really.

There are many reasons why the arguments and late nights that gets your ad from 5/10 to 6/10 (a 20% improvement) could cause more harm than good: you could piss off the kind of people who might want to sack you; you might neglect your home life to the extent that it causes irreparable damage; your work might not improve the response level of the ad, so you might miss the award books and the chance to say ‘I know it’s shit but it increased sales by 8.6%’, and at the end of the day 6/10 is also shit anyway.

So there’s not a lot of difference between ads in the Grey Zone, not matter where in the Zone they reside. And where they reside, without the benefit of an award jury’s perfect, indisputable verdict, is an entirely subjective evaluation.

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t try to do the best ads one can, but it might be a good idea to choose your battles and wait for the ones that really matter, otherwise you might just annoy people and use up valuable favours for no good reason.

(Thanks, W.)

Amazing real-time live train map of the London Underground.

The 100 greatest movie insults of all time:

Patrick Collister asks: Does digital need art directors?

No ball dropped here:

(Thanks, I’m On A Horse.)