In December I was working at 180 in Amsterdam. On my way to the loo someone looked at me queerly, so I stopped.

‘What the fuck are those?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I replied.
‘Those shoes.’

Reader, I was wearing a rather fetching pair of the reissued Jordan 4s (I couldn’t afford them when they first came out), made by Nike. I learned that day that it is strictly verboten to wear Nikes in 180. Adidas is their founding client, the company without which the agency would not have been able to exist, and the people of 180 feel they owe them the courtesy of not wearing the products of their greatest competitor.

Now, I’m not a sneaker brand loyalist, so I went back to London for Christmas and came back in January with a rather fetching pair of Adidas Nizzas with a comic book design.

They were met with delighted approval by at least some of my 180 colleagues.

Fast forward to earlier this month and I am freelancing at Wieden and Kennedy in London. Without thinking I wore my Nizzas, which were thankfully obscured by my long jeans. I told a W&K colleague the 180 story and showed her my shoes. Like the 180 fellow of December, she was shocked. It is equally verboten to wear Adidas at W&K for the same reason. There you may wear Nike, Umbro, Converse and (I’d guess) anything without obvious branding. It’s even in the welcome handbook (I wasn’t given this) and is kindly enforced with a healthy discount for W&K employees at Niketown.

Reader, I did not wear Adidas to W&K again.

This is, I suppose, living the brand, and it makes perfect sense, especially when the clients come round.

But there are more extreme examples. I heard tell of a USA BBDO employee who insisted his hotel minibar was emptied of Coca-Cola and filled with Pepsi, one of their biggest accounts. And then there was the Ballantines whisky client who would not be seen drinking anything else in public – even water (I bet she was fun to be around).

If you can convince a client that you believe in their brand, the next logical step must be your everyday use of it.

I just pity the poor bastard with the Coloplast colostomy bag account.

When giving a book crit I would often finish with the above question.

I wasn’t trying to catch anyone out or check the extent of their sad devotion to this ancient religion. I was genuinely interested, and I still am.

I sometimes try to remember why I wanted to work in this industry and how the coupling eventually came about.

Well, like someone who has blacked out the initial moments of a car crash, I really don’t know how this came about, but one day I found myself in the office of John Banks, the Banks of now-defunct Banks Hoggins O’Shea, ex-MD of Y&R. His offices were on Brook Street, almost opposite the old Commes Des Garcons shop and I was duly impressed by this Mayfair address.

Like I said, I have no idea how I got there, but I do remember Mr. Banks asking me which job in advertising I was seeking. I aslo remember having little idea of what he was talking about. He gently explained the basics of the account management and creative departments and suggested I head off to the IPA to find out more. I went there immediately and found out that I did not want to work in account management.

Around Christmas I sent out a spoof Absolut ad (Absolut Despair. It had a picture of me drowning my sorrows above a series of dismal puns about being ‘neat’ and ‘a good mixer’) that asked for work experience the following Easter. The agency that took me on was the now-defunct Reay Keating Hamer, who got me to catalogue Yellow Fats in their account management, where I found out that I did not want to work in account management.

While I was there I hung around in the creative department as much as possible. There a nice chap called Mark pointed me in the direction of Watford and the rest was a very minor footnote in advertising history.

So, although I’m not clear about what set me off in the direction of advertising, even when I learned about the industry from the inside it still took me quite a while to work out what a creative was and indeed that I wanted to be one.

If any of you can be bothered to explain it, I’d love to hear how and why you got into advertising.

This won the Cannes Grand Prix for film:

I’ve written about it a few times this year, but I think it’s interesting how it’s actually got better with age.

Now with eleven million YouTube views and a fascinating ‘Making of‘, this is a properly big, no-scam event commercial.

And what’s truly astounding in this day and age is that no one has unearthed the YouTube clip from which it was stolen.

Other great things about it:

It’s revitalised a brand we all thought was a joke. I had a haircut a few months ago in a very old-fashioned Turkish barber. Without asking, the guy splashed some Old Spice on and I was quite happy for him to do so. I think a year ago I might have been a bit put out.

It’s by far the best execution in a campaign that was very good, but never reached this level. Executions such as Hungry Like The Wolf were enjoyable, but a little too self-conscious and retro cheesy to be properly good.

It sells. The bloke hold the bottle up and wangs on about it and yet the ad is amazing. Now none of us can complain when we have to do a producty-demo-ey ad.

It’s for PROCTOR AND FUCKING GAMBLE. Supposedly the worst client with the most annoying set of rules has commissioned the best ad of the year. Again, we can have no excuses (This follows a couple of Grands Prix for Dove a few years back).

It’s a new screen: Helmut Krone used to speak of good art direction as creating a ‘new page’ – a layout nobody had ever seen before to make sure it was fresh and therefore intriguing enough to stop you. This is like nothing I have ever seen. It treads a precarious line between irony and bang-on, straightforward sell, but pulls it off brilliantly.

In short, it attempts a triple pike with double-quadruple half twist into a glass of water and succeeds with excellence to spare.

Hats all the way off to everyone involved.

UPDATE: Sorry, while you’re here, is it just me or is the winner of the Titanium Lion pretty woeful?

I love bookshelves. I think they are art in themselves, so imagine my delight when I found this website.

Scorsese vs Kubrick:

Kubrick vs Scorsese from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo.

And someone has done a brilliant mashup of the pulled Flake ad and Surfer.

Enjoy the weekend.

I shall be supporting Brazil, North Korea, Chile, Switzerland, England, Mexico and, of course, the Old Spice ad.

(Thanks, Damo.)

I have to say this is a really interesting story.

An agency wanted to make an amazing ad, so they got Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer to come up with this giant, balls-out grenade of a spot – for a chocolate bar – and it lost them the account.

I think it’s insane, incendiary and incredible.

Have you ever seen an ad like that?

Hats off to Saatchis for getting it made.

Hats on to Cadbury’s for replacing it with this load of shit:

What a load of fanny.

As Damon Collins Tweeted: ‘Something that probably never ran got entered twice.’

Ads for Scrabble, I ask you…

Every last one of them is complete and utter bullshit.

Who the fuck has to advertise Scrabble?

Who would see such an ad and say, ‘Fuck me, look at all those words which contain the letter A. I really need to go and buy a Scrabble set’?

It’s the epitome of wankheap tossbucket shitebubble crapola.

“This is a complete shock, it took my breath away as the campaign [for Scrabble] was just so beautiful it took my breath away,” said one juror, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk. “Someone needs to look beyond the decision to strip it and realise that for whatever reason it failed in 2008 it shows the true longevity of the idea that it managed to win in 2010.”

Juror, whoever you are, you need to get out a fuck of a lot more.

A while back I wrote about the fact that most of us are clients.

When you hire the next person along in the production line (director, photographer, illustrator etc.) you do all the things that you despair of in your own client (I’m talking to/about creatives here).

You might second-guess the person above you, you might impose strictures that may not result in the very best work and you could well get them to go back and do it again.

In return, they behave like you do: going off and making the thing they want to make instead of listening to you, having frustrated arguments with you through a third party and generally using someone else’s money to create something they like even if it doesn’t coincide absolutely with the agreed brief.

Then you see a client behaving in the same way as you and you simply cannot believe how immovable/ungrateful/implacable they are.

Of course, this happens to greater or lesser degrees, but show me a creative who says he has never behaved in the annoying way that his client does and I’ll show you a fibbing cunt.

Anyway, rather than just repeat an old post, I did have a new point to add which struck me this morning: the chain of production stops with the client. That may sound obvious, but it’s actually a bit odd. Although some of them might have to suffer for a real dog’s dinner of a campaign that results in their company’s factory being firebombed, most of them can just chuck something out there without having to point to an actual upswing in sales. There are so many other factors involved (distribution, pricing, retail space etc.) that advertising cannot being expected fully to succeed (or fail). You can always blame crap results on something else, which is why clients like to make the safe MOR campaign: there is barely any risk of the 1/100 chance of making a true stinker. Tick the boxes and cross the Ts and no one will fire you; spunk a million on a Facebook page celebrating dog poo that gets 14 fans and someone might well hand you your P45.

So whatever decision a client makes, unless it’s pretty darn crazy, it’s going to be right. They even get to research what they put out so that if something does go wrong they can point to what that roomful of mouthbreathing plebs said and plead due diligence.

So they never really have to answer to anyone, which is why we are their bitches, all day long and twice on Thursdays.

Enjoy!

Hang on, don’t switch to Redtube just yet. This is going to be immensely fucking interesting.

I just read in Private Eye (and other places) that BP have bought certain search words and phrases on Google so that when you type them in you get BP’s version of how well the clean up operation in the Gulf of Mexico is going.

You’ve got ‘oil spill’.

‘Gulf of Mexico’.

And ‘BP are cunts’.

Oh. They haven’t bought that one. How odd.

This is (as you know) called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO. I guess it’s another way rich people/corporations can control the flow of information. Thank god they can have more power. I was getting worried there for a moment.

But it kind of makes the whole thing bullshit (by ‘kind of’ I mean ‘completely and utterly). If you are the number one search result, great; if you are an ad, fine. But why put the two together? It would be like sticking a massive ad that looked like a news article above the headline in your daily paper and hoping people would think it was the actual story.

This has now extended to the trending topics on Twitter, which yesterday had the ‘sponsored trending’ topic of Toy Story 3. To me that translates as: nobody’s really talking about TS3 so we bought our way onto this list hoping that you are so thick you’ll think an ad is a ‘real thing’.

Well, why not? It works for product placement, advertorials and all the mentions of Sky TV in The Sun.

Funny how no one really seems to mind being treated like a complete effing idiot.

Or do we?

I was reading this post by ‘Hey Whipple’ author, Luke Sullivan, when it occurred to me that my first creative department was also quite good (not as good as 90s Fallon, but good in its own way).

When I started at Y&R in 1996 my boss was Mike Cozens. He was a very good CD, turning boring old Y&R into the agency that produced this (by Ewan Patterson and Graeme Norways):

He had two D&AD golds from his time at CDP and TBWA, then did a lot of BBH’s best ads of the 80s. He also had a great phrase: ‘Stick it on the wall and see if you can beat it.’ The nicest way of saying ‘that’s shit’ I’ve ever heard.

Also in the department was Paul Catmur. He did the wonderful Dime Bar ads with Harry Enfield, but has since moved down under to CD Pencil-winning work in a variety of agencies:

Another team who got together there was Richard Denney and Dave Henderson, who went on to make the odd decent ad at Saatchi and Saatchi:

And then there was Lee Goulding and Leighton Ballet, who did this ad which was big and awarded and well-loved (I have since reconnected with Lee during a stint at Lowe last year. A thoroughly good bloke):

And Ben Carey, who went on to become half of the huge-selling, D&AD-nominated Benrik team.

Also, Richard and Andy who have been doing some of the better work at BBH in recent years:

That wasn’t all, but that’s all I have clips and links for, so sorry, Anita, Rob, Majella, Sam, Martin, Andy and others.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I wasn’t as good as them, so I deserved the sack for playing ping pong on my desk (among other things).